"The City" is the future of Tokyo-To from Jet Set Radio Future
The Rudies just became Runners that we never see, or they just went off doing something else. The Rokkaku Police just disbanded after Gouji's death and were replaced by the CPF.Mirror's Edge takes place after the Dark Days but before the second Quarter Quell
Faith and Kate are Capitol children - or District 2 possibly, whose parents are part of the revolution. They'll never be entered into the games but Faith, at least, sees injustice.- See the meaningful names in both series (Snow/Faith/Merc/Celeste/Glimmer/Prim/Katniss)
- Also November and Mockingbird.
- Strong sisterly bonds drive both stories
- The technology in Mirror's Edge isn't even close to The Hunger Games so it should be earlier like right after the initial rebellion.
Both Faith's ability to shake off damage and her brief Bullet Time-level reactions are the result of futuristic, experimental drugs/medicines
- The healing drug promotes super-rapid cell division in damaged tissues, allowing for amazingly quick recovery from punches, bullets, etc. It can't, however, cope with broken bones or other extreme damage. The reaction drug briefly allows the user to experience Bullet Time, the better for superb reflexes. However, the doses have to be administered some time apart in order to avoid a (potentially lethal) overdose. The users of the reaction drug probably make use of some sort of small mechanism that releases the doses directly into their bloodstream when required. Both drugs, naturally, are highly controlled substances, restricted to government usage.
- Assuming this hypothetical healing drug is part of Project Icarus' intel on the runners, it would explain why pursuit cops use tasers rather than guns. If they know that even a well-placed bullet may not do lasting damage, it makes sense for them to try to slow down runners with a weapon that causes muscle spasms instead. If they don't know that bullets can eventually be shrugged off by runners, it doesn't make much sense why they wouldn't just use guns since they're not interested in taking the runners alive.
Mirror's Edge is a Ninja game in disguise.
Think about it. You're playing as a lithe, athletic asian girl. Your job is to run rooftop to rooftop using gravity-defying acrobatics that would astound most people. You do this in order to courier top secret information, destabilizing the current government. You are also an elite martial artist capable of beating the crap out of the city guards- er, police and SWAT, but you favor speed, evasion and hit-and-run over direct confrontation. The only real thing that's a danger to you are the Pursuit Cops who have been trained in ninj er "Running", or other ninj- I mean Runners. To top it all off? You wear tabi boots.- Parkour has French origins so that means Faith is a Asian-French ninja. Jika-Tabi are perfect for Traceurs and Freerunners. No, wait..... Parkour is of French origins, but it wasn't until Georges Herbert went to Africa and saw how limber the natives were. So Parkour was inspired by the indigenous Tribes of Africa while Herbert simply gave it a name. So Faith is a Asian-French-African Ninja.
Merc ain't dead yet
He's Just Hiding after faking his death. Faith never saw his wounds, only blood, so it might have all been just a ruse. He needs to go underground since his hideout's location was leaked.Kate will be the lead in the sequel
Faith will train Kate as a runner, since it's probably In the Blood. Miller is gonna be Kate's operator — they foreshadowed it rather obviously in the last mission. Furthermore, Kate was apparently able to elude the police with Merc's help. She had the same raw skills as Faith, but her police training didn't cover parkour techniques and her general distaste for the runners lifestyle kept her from learning on the streets like Faith.The runners really are terrorists
- Version:1 They are terrorists. Ben Croshaw (Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation ) was right. Think about it. You don't send armed attack helicopters and specially trained taser-equipped anti-parkour ninjas after someone if all they're doing is keeping perfectly harmless documents from passing through government hands. Faith blindly follows Merc's orders, always assuming that all government is automatically evil, because her parents died in a protest. Who's to say what those yellow bags contain? High explosives? Viral agents? What if the runners actually provide such a credible threat that the government is actually justified in using such ridiculously extreme measures to take down unarmed civilians?
- Version 2: They are "terrorists". The Runners seems to be concious that almost everything they are transporting is information, and this helps groups that oppose the goverments' rule and may have the power to stop the oppression. The Runners being their main source of information, which plays as power, is why the Goverment is so hell bent in stopping the runners. Their actions could easily be classified as Terrorism from their point of view, but if they succed, they'll be known not as terrorist, but as revolutionary heroes to society.
- Version 3: It's a case-by-case basis. Jacknife and Celeste are both pretty easily swayed. Faith is just unique in that she has a grudge against the Mayor. Most of the time the Runners aren't targetted nearly as badly as her. She even comments in the beginning that most of the time the cops turn blind eye to their activity, as long as they do it discreetly. It's only after Faith becomes a major target due to the plot reasons that the government puts some serious firepower after her.
- Combined with Faith and Merc's exclamations of surprise at the end of the Prologue about how they started shooting at her unprovoked, this is probably the best indication that Runners are not terrorists. If they were responsible for more than passing information, Faith would not have been the least bit surprised that they started shooting (the reason they shot was of course because they were actually working for Pirandello-Kruger and were private security implementing a plan to eliminate Runners). The CPF are heavily implied to have generally left Runners alone before the PK takeover and project Icarus.
"The City" is Dubai
There is Asian calligraphy all over the place, but the fact that everything in the City was built after the turn of the century and the fact that all of the adds avoid more than just the most basic representations of humans, since iconography is forbidden by the Q'uran, suggest that it is a city not found in the West, or part of any of the Asian super cities. However there is a way to discover the exact location, using the time challenge mode we can measure speed, and from that, distance. With that figured out, we can use the time given in story mode and the position of the sun to figure out the exact location. Most likely won't give any realistic results, but worth a shot. Mirror's Edge takes place in the lead-up to The Oil Wars
In Frontlines, it's explicitly stated that all major countries basically turned into police states before the war. This is just what's seen on the homefront in one city. Without information, the people get restless, reckless and uncontrolled, forcing the government to step in. With the aid of the runners, people have knowledge the government doesn't want them to have, including, but not restricted to:- Information about progress on alternative fuel supplies,
- Military spending,
- Troop buildups,
- Covert operations,
The Mirror's Edge universe is set in an alternate near-future USA which lost to Japan in World War II
The setting seems to be primarily American, but there's the obvious Japanese influence in writing on everything, which could simply be the usual 80s trope of Japanese corporate dominance - but more importantly, the apparent disrespect for the Constitution and similar violations of civil rights could be indications of an America forced to accept unfavourable surrender conditions. The newness and lack of old buildings in the city could also point to something similar: say, for example, that Japan developed the A-bomb first and used it on Los Angeles, necessitating the construction of a major new city in California which Japanese corporate interests have major stakes in. Of course, this raises certain Fridge Horror questions of what's going on in Europe. Soviet hegemony? Nazi dominion? Either way, it might indicate why democracy is on the wane. "November" is a person, who is now missing/in hiding
The graffiti asking "Where is November?" is not making a poetic reference to the riots that happened in November. It is making a literal reference to the whereabouts of a specific person, who was "disappeared" by the current administration.- Alternatively, the riots happened in protest of the cancellation of Starcraft: Ghost. Does this mean the city is in Korea?
- Adding onto this, the November riots were, in addition to taking place in the month of November, were started because of the dissapearence of a person named November. Perhaps November was an important person to the people, and his/her dissapearence incited rage amongst the people.
Faith is an Assassin and the government is made up of Templars
- Mad crazy parkour skills? Check. Inherent ability/sixth sense to realize when shit's about the hit the fan? Check. Eagle Vision that allows her to mentally color-code which path is the fastest from Point A to Point B? Check. Doesn't do well with guns and prefers hand-to-hand combat? Check. The game simply takes place after 2012 and Desmond Miles' success in saving the world from the solar flare. Except, ironically, the Templars are still powerful and the Assassins are still forced to hide in the shadows. Hence the courier system.
- The reason Faith canonically doesn't like killing is that her local cell place special emphasis on the always act with discretion part of the Creed. That's why cops didn't bother them before the game; "just look the other way and the Runner-Assassins will be gone without trouble" sort of thing. Her mentor (the mentor for The City of Glass) Merc could be the reason. Not all Assassins are exactly kill-happy, either, despite of their title. Since Faith is in courier duty, killing people would be mostly detrimental to her work outside situations where she has no other choice.
Alternatively, Faith is a Templar, and the City is run by Assassins
There's not as much evidence for this, but it is WMG, so what the hey? Anyway, Mirror's Edge takes place after Assassin's Creed III, with the Templars completely on the ropes against the more powerful Assassins. For a start, you may have noticed the Shard uses plenty of white and "/\" shapes in it's architecture. It's also possible Faith's mother was a high ranking Templar discretely offed during the November riots (A Piece of Eden fueled ploy to retake power). Faith's free-running and combat skills might come from a version of Abstergo's Animus program, whether she knows it or not.Less-lethal ammo abounds in the City
What? It explains so much! Like, for instance, why everyone is so willing to fire on you - it's not (likely) going to kill you, so it's not lethal force, so the rules are much more relaxed. Plus, it also explains Faith's Made of Iron resistance to light machine guns and her impressive ability to Walk It Off. The upshot of this WMG is that it transforms the PK to from dangerously trigger-happy to merely unnecessarily violent. Consider mixing this with the Runners-might-be-terrorists theorem proposed by Yahtzee and the entire thing becomes considerably more coherent.- Even regular unarmoured police officers can take multiple pistol rounds to the face. That seems to be a bit of proof at least.
- Given this game takes place in near-future, best bet is that Faith's shirt is super thin and light armor.
- On the balance, the George Floyd protests circa 2020 have demonstrated that less-lethal weapons like rubber bullets are, though strictly speaking better than the alternative, still very dangerous and easy to misuse in more-lethal ways, especially in a totalitarian police state like the City that probably cares more about the PR optics of less-lethal weapons than about actual casualty reduction. Rubber bullets, for example, are usually meant to be skipped off the ground, rather than fired directly at the target which can lead to severe injury or death. The City's police forces using rubber bullets would definitely explain how Faith is able to survive multiple gunshots, but still dies (or loses consciousness, it's hard to tell) after too many hits. And since rubber bullets work through traumatic force rather than penetration, flexible body armor wouldn't really help.
Faith is not killing the Blues.
Assuming the non-lethal ammo thing is true, you shouldn't be able to kill anyone with bullets, much less armoured targets with rubber handgun rounds. "Dead" enemies are either knocked out or seriously injured.A Punch-Clock Villain police officer who just took two rubber bullets to the face wouldn't be in any hurry to get up. Maybe some enemies just take the hint and lie still until you've left......Unless you drop them off a building. Jacknife and Faith used to be in a relationship
Or, at least, they had some kind of friendship. They obviously know each other in the game, and Jacknife tends to call her by a pet name. In one of the cutscenes, this exchange happens:- Jacknife: You need to be careful who you hang around with.
Faith: Oh, I learned that a long time ago.
Jacknife: And yet, here we are again.- Jacknife used to be a Runner. He and Faith knew each other when they both worked for Mercury.
Should it ever be released, Mirror's Edge 2 will end with a song called "Want You Gone"
It could be a protest song, being sung by a crowd of angry people who have been formed into a resistance movement by Faith over the course of the game. The City isn't really white.
The way it appears is just an extension of Faith's "Runner vision" — she's trained herself to notice only potential pathways, to the point where she blanks out the rest. Mayor Callaghan really is Transgender
She doesn't want to appear in public because she's not done transitioning yet.. She was picked on and assaulted constantly while growing up and now wants to create the perfect privately-controlled nanny state and rule it with an iron fist to make sure that sort of thing never happens again. No doctor would perform a sex change because the stress form her job made her blood pressure way too high; between games, she gathered enough influence to have her operation and hormone treatments despite her doctors' prohibitions. Faith's tattoo on her arm is actually a complicated map of the City
This is why she never gets lost. Star Wars Spiritual Successor to Mirror's Edge
As pitched by Jeff Gerstmann the game will be a highly acrobatic female jedi to justify the lack of gun usage, mad jumps, and a bit of force powers for fun. Faith is a Dominatrix.
One of the achievements is "Scream For Me." Rather...suggestive. New voice actor for Faith in the prequel!
As is the fashion now they're going to want a VA who can do full motion mo-cap for the cutscenes. Now who in the VA business is also an expert traceuse? The City is just called 'The City' because...
- The developers wanted to avoid possible real-life backlash.
- The city is either a City Planet (probably not considering the technology level) or the only habitable place on the planet.
- It doesn't actually matter.
The City is actually Chicago in the distant future set in the same universe as Watch_Dogs
- Hyper connected society
- Under heavy surveillance 24/7
- Oppressive government/corporations (which might stem from the corruption of officials)
- Project Bellwether is in full effect
- ctOS is in total control
