Road Tripping Dubai: Too Late The Hero - The Road Back
The last decision you have to make in the game is, for me, the best moment of the Spec Ops: The Line. Of course, the game had several excellent moments, but while this one was not the pinnacle of morality, it was very coherent.
[Spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line!]
This is the final point, right after Adams' death (excellent scene, by the way), when you are about to get your "prize".
After I finished the game, I decided to listen to a couple of podcasts about it and noticed that many people understood Adam's sacrifice as his last act to "save his friend" when, for me, it was exactly the opposite. In that moment, Adams was absolutely pissed off with Walker because, for him, Walker was the main cause of Lugo's death, the White Phosphorus and several other deaths that did not really have to happen if you think about them. In my point of view, the reason Adams eventually ended up saving Walker was not so much because he wanted his captain to reach his goals, otherwise he would have surrendered with him. Instead, it felt like he pushed him out of the bombing way because he did not want to die with a "coward" like him and sully his own reputation. Something in the lines of "I'm not subjecting myself to humiliation just to follow a goal that has never been mine to begin with". Adams was not a martyr. He was angry! I'm actually impressed he was not the one to kill Walker and stuck with him until the very end.
Back to the last decision.
As you walk, Konrad kinda teases you saying "when you're ready to meet me, I'm upstairs" and when you finally get up there, you see him painting. In a way, it was in this exact moment that I started to consider seriously the possibility of all this being a lie, specially because he was painting a scene that only the Delta Team saw (I'm obviously talking about the White Phosphorous scene). From here on, we have some of the most fantastic dialogues I've ever seen in a shooting game, and one of the few that successfully breaks the boundaries of the 4th barrier. Konrad is talking to Martin about all the things that went wrong within the mission, but it also looks like he is also scolding the player for everything that has happened so far. The game was doing that for a while already with the messages that showed up in the loading screens ("Do you feel like a hero already?" and "It's all your fault." and "Walker and his team will never leave Dubai."), but this is the moment when you feel that more strongly.
At the end of the dialogue and after being shown that you were in fact imagining several events of the game, you are looking at the mirror and facing both Konrad and... yourself. Konrad is pointing his gun at you and you have a gun in your hand.
If you point the gun at yourself, you'll see Walker's reflection pointing his gun at his own head. Pull the trigger and you will commit suicide, which gets you the A Farewell to Arms trophy.
If you don't take any action before Konrad finishes his countdown, he will shoot you... which will also result in Walker committing a suicide, which also renders you the A Farewell to Arms trophy.
If you point the gun and shoot Konrad, you deny everything that you have done as the product of your own insanity and can keep going on living, which will give you the trophy Too Late The Hero and unlock the epilogue and a couple more choices.
I heard that several people who watched the Fight Club movie ended up shooting Walker because they thought that by shooting Konrad, they would end up killing themselves instead. At this point of my thoughts, I was glad I was free from the influence of the movie and decided to shoot Konrad. Back then, I wasn't thinking about "denying all the wrongs that I did so far". I think it was more along the lines of "it doesn't matter, I need to stay alive until the bitter end, even if it means assuming the guilt for all the wrongs I did until now". I'm glad with the fact that, with Spec Ops: The Line being a game, I can take this kind of decision without actually having to deal with everything the matter involves.
And since we're already talking about the ending, I'll just shove the three very last decisions in this post.
After using the radio signal to get some help from the US, Walker is shown dressed up as Konrad, waiting for the backup soldiers. He has a gun in his hands and you can see that he has been through hell and back during the wait. He is tired and about to cross the line that separates sanity from insanity. The backup soldiers who responded to the distress signal show up and are quite careful about you. One of them approaches you, telling you to drop your weapon.
If you drop your weapon, you're free to go home, which gives you the The Road Back trophy.
If you shoot the soldiers, you start a conflict against them. Either beat them or be defeated and you get the A Road to Glory trophy.
I chose to surrender, drop my weapons and go home because in most of the games I play, I always set "going home" as my main goal. For me, the best reward of a long, tough journey is going home. And, weirdly enough, this objective didn't feel so good in this game. Martin got to go home in the end, but at what cost? He lost both men who were under his command and were, to some extended, his friends and companions through rough times. He survived and went back home, knowing that he was going to dream about those days in Dubai for every single day and night for the rest of his life. In the end, this was the price to pay for being a hero. Was it really worth all the trouble?
The worst part of it all is that I didn't think that "Walker did a lot of shit in Dubai, he deserved to pay for everything he has done". He did a lot of bad things, yes, but he wasn't the only one to blame for the things that happened. As most people said, no one is really innocent in the story. It's hard to accept the fact that the "happy" ending for the game is, psychologically, the worst one. And what made me feel bad about it is the final dialogue in the car, when the support soldier mentions that they had seen awful things in their way to the tower and he asked Martin how the hell he survived to all that, to which he responds "who said I did?". And, in a way, but to lesser extend, this is how I felt when I finished the game and watched this ending: dead on the inside. I just can't imagine how people who have actually been in the war must have felt when they eventually made it back home.
As for the other endings, I think that the ending that would be less awful to the character would be the one where you react to the support troops, either shooting them all down and making Walker the next one in the line of John Konrad... or just letting them shoot you and die as a hero, just like Lugo and Adams did before you. Surviving would turn Walker into the dictator he never wanted to become, yet it looks like the ending that would be less denigrating to his own good. To decide whether someone should live carrying their own guilt or a responsibility that should have never belonged to him is not an easy choice.
Aaaaaand... that's not the end of my Road Tripping Dubai series! Recently I found that I left out of the posts the very first choice you make in the game and that, although it doesn't exactly look like a choice you can make, it does have its share of importance. I hope I don't take too long to write about it!