< Mirror's Edge

Mirror's Edge/WMG

"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 Mirror's Edge police. (I forgot their name, CPK or something?)

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
  • I like the theory, but it would have to be much earlier in the Games' storyline. Possibly right after the initial rebellion. The technology in Mirror's Edge isn't even close to The Hunger Games.

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.

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- I mean, 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 ninju- I mean "Running", or other ninj- I mean Runners. And to top it all off? You wear tabi boots.

  • I thought this was ridiculously obviously canon.
    • Nah. The game's presented as a parkour/dystopian-future type thing in all the advertising (and the general tone of the story). It's obvious when you stop and think about it, sure, but you have to actually stop and think about it. Now, if they can just make a sequel, direct or spiritual, that integrates shuriken, stealth and smoke bombs...
    • I say they should lock the developers of Mirrors Edge, Ninja Gaiden, Assassin's Creed and Splinter Cell, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Mass Effect, Halo, Left 4 Dead, Fallout 3, Prototype, Half-Life, and Portal in a room and not let them out until they've completed the best game ever conceived.
      • So we have a game where the easiest way to dispose of your "mark" is to use your Portal Storage Device to send the poor bugger falling from a rooftop and then go and romance option your way with your precious shoes?
      • Well, you're mark is a Tank, so good luck with that.
  • "Ninja" have absolutely nothing to do with this... Parkour has French origins, and the right Jika-Tabi are perfect for Traceurs and Freerunners. This feels like an invocation of Japan Is The Center Of The Universe...
    • Actually, there is more to that. Yes, 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.

Merc ain't dead yet

He's Just Hiding after faking his death. If this troper recalls correctly, Faith never saw his wounds, only blood, so it might have all been just a ruse.

  • Yes, please. I need to believe this.

Kate will be the lead in the sequel

Faith will train Kate as a runner, since it's probably In the Blood. And Miller is gonna be Kate's operator -- they foreshadowed it rather obviously in the last mission.

  • Quite frankly, I believe the game will keep playing with Faith wiht Kate as the new operator.
    • Suddenly, Faith discovers that the voices in her head....

The runners really 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?

  • Whether the Runners and their clients are labeled "rebels", "revolutionaries", or "terrorists" will be Written by the Winners post factum, since it's a pretty cynical world.
  • 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.
  • I was under the impression that the Runners were pretty mercenary. Jacknife and Celeste are both pretty easily swayed.

In fact before I got the whole Mercury-Icarus-Greek mythology thing (What? Nobody named Pandora?) I thought Merc was Merc, becuase he was a merc. 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 Faith. 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

I know that 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,

etc., etc. The Runners get this information to the people so they can know just what's going on. Without them, the government would have complete control over everything.

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 that 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 main problem with this is that the canonical personality of Faith is one that prefers to avoid killing. Mostly.
    • 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 CPF - and PK to a lesser extent - 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.

  • Technically, all of the enemies you fight in the game are PK, not CPF. The only ones with ties to CPF are potentially the pursuit cops (the ones with tasers), but even if the letters PK don't appear on their uniform, they're first encountered inside PK's facilities, and have definitely been trained by PK, so regardless of whether or not they were originally just CPF, they can now be considered PK employees. As far as the ammo goes, maybe Faith has magical powers that cause any stray bullets that hit her to simply graze and cause minor flesh wounds?
    • 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.

You're not killing the Blues.

Assuming the non-lethal ammo thing is true, you shouldn' be able to kill anyone with bullets, much less armoured targets with rubber handgun rounds. "Dead" enemies are either knocked out or seriously injured.

  • Unless you drop them off a building.
  • 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.

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..

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