Absolution Was Never The Black Sheep After All

Classic Hitman Games Hitman Absolution
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While it’s true that the coarse language and over-the-top violence can feel excessive, that is precisely what makes Absolution a fascinating time capsule. It reflects an era before widespread political correctness and corporate sanitization took over the gaming industry. Back then, developers enjoyed the artistic freedom to depict the raw, gritty, and deeply unpleasant nature of their antagonists without filtering themselves.

In stark contrast, the recent World of Assassination trilogy feels so toned down and sterile that you could almost let an 8 year old play it; it completely lacks any real, visceral edge. Absolution, on the other hand, embraces its mature themes head-on. Through its unapologetic depiction of violence and adult sexuality, it proves it is absolutely not a game for children, but rather a unique product of its time.

Exactly. The new trilogy often feels like a recycled, watered-down version of superior past titles, and nothing proves this more than that incredibly cringe scene where Diana nudges 47 with her foot after poisoning him. As a longtime Blood Money player, it felt cheap, like a desperate attempt to impress newcomers who don’t know any better.

For veteran fans, watching that was like ordering the legendary Blood Money finale off Temu. In the 2006 masterpiece, that entire sequence is a work of art: the masterful buildup, Jesper Kyd’s haunting music, and a brilliant, misterious Diana (who pulled the entire plot’s strings without ever showing her face) whose true motives remain completely hidden until the very last second. Seeing her reduced to a resentful, angsty orphan kicking 47’s body completely ruined the mystique and exposed how shallow the new writing actually is.

Agreed. Sanitizing the game’s original dark irony forced them to fill the void with goofy, cartoon-like elements. It completely kills the serious tone, transforming a ruthless anti-hero into pure anti-climax.

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I don’t agree with your take on the WoA but I can understand how someone could feel like that.

Re: the bolded sentence though, tonally Absolution is certainly not a game for young children, but equally it’s not a game for adults. It’s a game very specifically for horny virgin teenage boys in an edgelord phase that they’ll look back on with mild embarrassment in later years.

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To be fair past games were also full of goofy, cartoon-like elements. The overall story and setup is campy, A super solider made from DNA of the five most dangerous men, created by an evil German scientist with dreams of world domination. Is extremely silly onto itself.

Then there a lot of silly characters, hidden silly easter eggs that only makes sense if you can read and understand danish. The series in my eyes have never taken itself to serious, it’s campy. However 47 was always a serious character, he’ still written that way. Yet there are actions and in game story missions that put his character into the cartoony and silly situations.

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I could agree with your take on Absolution, likely because I played Blood Money during my childhood and Absolution during my early adolescence. Looking back, I might still be attached to that heavily sexualized aesthetic simply because, at the time, it felt like a more liberating and provocative form of expression, even though I definitely wouldn’t categorize myself as a ‘horny virgin edgelord’ back then.

However, even behind that curtain of edgelord vulgarity, I still find that the game maintains a strong focus on 47’s core identity: a man of few words, subtly conflicted, elegant, and lethal.

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You make a fair point about the campy origins, but I look at it a bit differently.

The cloning and genetic hybridization aspects, while scientifically impossible for creating a functional human, are perfectly acceptable narrative devices for a creative work. We are, after all, talking about an engineered assassin with a literal barcode on his head and a nearly monastic black suit. It requires suspension of disbelief.

I could agree with the ‘silly’ critique if we only look at the very first game, where the voice acting was sometimes robotic, and the music still had that unrefined, almost 8-bit feel. However, the series evolved rapidly. By Hitman: Contracts, the atmosphere reached a dark, intense level reminiscent of French neo-noir cinema.

As for Blood Money, it’s far from a collection of clichés. It is a genuine artistic achievement that has rightfully earned its status as an original cult classic. The franchise has always balanced its dark, structured world with dark humor, but the core identity remains deeply atmospheric rather than just cartoonish.

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You’ve totally found the root of our differing experiences with Absolution back in the day - I was in my 30s when it released, and I had [and continue to have] no time at all for its very juvenile tone. Our individual circumstances explain a lot!

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I wouldn’t agree with this. For one, it is shown that he does still have some limits, such as relying on Diana and Olivia for hacking tasks. For all his enhanced intelligence, that’s at least one area that 47 can’t just pick it up through observation or faking it until he makes it. His brain wasn’t designed to be superior in a category of that sort. He’s also never been able to feign emotion, other than putting a somewhat upbeat tone in his voice to show interest, such as when he’s talking to the teller in the bank as the guy goes on about their profits.

For another, it not only fits with 47’s background as being designed as a superior human, and that he was meant to be able to both fit in with and outperform regular people, but on a meta level it also fits with what 47 used to be all about until Absolution and H3 decided to be cliche with his character. 47 was always a blank slate where you didn’t have to imbue him with any personality or motivations if you didn’t want to.

Absolution did away with that by making him and Diana explicitly friends and by having him go through all that to protect Victoria. I can forgive that, it was an isolated story that hit close to whatever humanity he had, and went right back to business as usual once it was over. Then H3 went and did the whole thing of him “being his own person” by taking down ICA, despite that not being the reason he did it and that, as you pointed out and I have lamented endlessly, he just ended up right back where he was anyway… again.

In doing this, they took 47 down the same path that every other anti-hero assassin has gone through, from James Bond to Jason Bourne to John Wick to Robert McCall to Black Mamba to Leon the Professional and on and on. The did the same thing, made him the same as everyone else, and now with Freelancer, as fun as the set-up is and despite having a built-in justification, it’s just vigilante work protecting the helpless citizens, with a paycheck thrown in just to not get too far afield.

But before all that, 47 didn’t need to have a reason or motivations, that was left up to the client and the agency, and he only demanded his money as a means of cementing an explicit transaction sanctioning a person’s death, as a means of order that he preferred, not just killing just to kill. We the players could project our own thoughts, feelings, and motivations onto him if we wished to, it was left open-ended, subject to our decisions. That also includes his skills outside of killing. 47 can do any little task we imagine, and for whatever reasons we imagine. Is it because he’s just that good? Does he practice in his spare time in case any such situation should actually come up, as the training room in the safehouse seems to imply? We don’t know. But it fit with the theme of the character, until H3 boxed him into a killer-gone-rogue-seeking-redemption-through-defending-the-innocent trope. Now it seems ridiculous that the guy who is focused on proving to the bad guys that they’re not untouchable could, for example, learn how to make a modern art sculpture through welding while impersonating someone.

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phonto
phonto1711×1580 294 KB

Dropping this here.

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Exactly, like I said earlier, the over the top sex and violence doesn’t make it more mature, it makes it more childish and pretentious. It’s trying to pretend it means something, when it really mean nothing.

WOA’s writter Michael Voght described 47 as someone who “isn’t really anyone himself, which makes it easier for him to become anyone else”, and I think that phrase perfectly encapsulates the character and justifies the sillier moments of the trilogy. Some have said that 47 playing the drums is a silly out a character moment, but that same mission also has a moment where he shoots an unarmed begging man in his knees in cold blood. I don’t think the sillier moments take away from the seriousness of the character.

I never found pre WOA 47 to be that interesting because he was mostly just a thug who only did things for money. His character arc in WOA was much more interesting imo because it was about him actually becoming someone and thinking for himself.

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I think context matters. In Blood Money 47 is all business, and his handler suddenly “betrays” him, so it makes sense he cusses her out before getting knocked out.

In Woa, 47 took the serum that returned his memories, witnessed Lucas’ death, and thinks Diana is betraying him for real this time, because him and Lucas did a contract on her parents when younger, so him apologizing here also makes sense.

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Eh, I’d push back on that and counter that it’s the opposite. 47 was more interesting when he wasn’t like every other character that exists. Without being either hero or villain, doing his deeds with no personal stake, no real opinion on it other than a detached understanding of what’s considered right and wrong, and just going along with what the contract stipulates because that’s good enough for him. It was far more pure being such a character than having yet another who had to think for himself… only to go right back to killing who he’s told/paid to kill anyway. No false pretenses in the pre-WoA era.

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This is the worst part about it for me, its sooo fucking stupid. The original 47 was afraid of needles to the point he harmed a Doctor and WoA 47 just let a shady Guy he was hunting down inject him some unknown substance?

I honestly think the writers for the WoA didnt play the original games or just dont give a shit about the established lore and just wrote their own fanfiction.

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This, this and this.

My biggest gripe with WoA is Lucas Grey. Introducing a “long-lost childhood friend” (whose death felt completely tone-deaf) felt like a cheap, lazy retcon just to stretch the plot over three games and milk the fanbase, completely breaking the established Ort-Meyer lore. Plus, the fragmented storytelling and those static, slideshow-like cutscenes ruined any narrative pacing.

Absolution is just way more refined, even with its flaws. It respects the lore: Victoria isn’t a random retcon, but a natural continuation of the cloning mythos, acting as a perfect mirror to 47. The cinematography and pacing are on another level, from shooting Diana in the prologue to the final masterclass reveal of her being alive through the sniper scope.

I insist on this critique because if we keep settling for or pretending to enjoy mediocre, corporate writing even across modern cinema apart from gaming, we will never see impactful cult classics again. We need fierce criticism to demand works that we’ll actually remember for decades. The WoA trilogy might have better sandbox gameplay, but its story and cinematic experience feels cold, commercial, and structurally hollow by comparison.

If anything, the game deserves a 10/10 solely for composing the song “Ritorna a me”. The plot armor might have felt like crap, but that song is the only piece of authentic, moving Italian representation that actually hit the mark. Thank you for failing the emotional payoff but completely nailing my homeland’s vibe.

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It didn’t really break the established lore so much as add to it and recontextualize what was already known. I did prefer Grey when he was a mysterious villain. My theory after the Colorado cutscene was that he was the long-lost son of Ort-Meyer looking for revenge against 47 for killing him and Providence for allowing it, which would have been a more interesting story to me.

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Well, by the time 47 injects himself, he already knows who Lucas actually is, so he’s no longer some shady guy to him. They needed to find the first Constant, so 47 tolerating an injection isn’t unreasonable, even though he hates needles.

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Completely insane take, IMO. An absolute “you do not share the same reality as the rest of the world”-level of insanity, as opinions go.

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I sorta agree, in the sense that you’re right, but probably for the wrong reasons.

In any event:

He hated needles as a kid. It’s ridiculous to assume he’s still afraid of them. Never mind that The Wipe took away most of his memories of them other than fragments, to the point that he knows they were used on him but nothing else until he saw Kovacs face to face, but it also took away his emotions, meaning his fears, and he’s an adult now and dealt with far greater pain than any needles could ever give him. He might have bad memories of needles, but I guarantee you he’s no longer afraid of them and hasn’t been since well before he escaped the asylum. He wouldn’t be so keen on carrying them around with him otherwise.

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Tbh, I don’t understand why you think I’m probably right for the wrong reasons? I think my answer is pretty reasonable.

Also, just to clarify, I also don’t think 47 is afraid of needles, as MrOchoa wrote in his reply. I simply wanted to say, that while 47 might not be a big fan of them, he would still allow himself to be injected no problem, if it means gaining some very important information.

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That part was directed at @scat1620 for the comment previous to mine, not to you. My address to you only started after quoting you.

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I see. Tbh, either making a separate reply to both of us, or quoting both of us and not just me, in order to clearly distinguish which answer is meant for who would be helpful in the future.