Title. Need some examples of games that had lefty politics and leanings and weren't too ashamed to hide it. Platform/country of origin is irrelevant. I know about FF7's support for ecoterrorism, and even the nuance about the people caught up in the middle, and there's plenty of games that take an anti-corporate stance, but that can be easily brushed aside.
I'm specifically interested in this era as it's when games first acquired the ability to become fully immersive in their narratives with the adoption of multimedia melding into the core gameplay loop via the use of full motion video, voice acting, detailed images and so on.
Reminder: all games are political; even abstract puzzle games.
I've heard the oddworld games have decent politics but I'm not that familiar with them tbh. Xenogears' politics are pretty verbose, but they explore religion as political power in a very unique way. People have already mentioned MGS and FF Tactics so I just wanna +1 both of those.
This is a weird pick but indulging the notion that all games are political, the N64/PS1/GBA Harvest Moon games had decent politics for their time. It's a farming sim where the goal isn't to make a shitload of money, it's about using your labor to restore and care for a community. If you spend every day maximizing your profits you get lots of cool upgrades but you don't get a very good ending. It's about strengthening bonds with your neighbors, preserving nature in the forest (esp HM64 iirc), and restoring a farm to produce food. You befriend the harvest sprites and they help on your farm, you don't hire them but rather form a loose co-op.
That said, the older games do have a really traditional view of family, they're not very LGBT friendly, and there's no overt themes of overthrowing capital in any of them. But they filter the idea of a worker through a lens of saccharine nostalgia wherein the protagonist shoulders the burdens of their community and has their burdens shouldered in kind. I'm probably projecting my politics onto them if I'm being honest, though I firmly Stardew Valley's anti-capitalist (or at least anti-corporate) tone would be non-existent without the old harvest moon games laying the ground work
Also, I can't believe no one is talking about dance dance revolution. It's politics are dance and revolution, what more could you want?
Oddworld is basically Tim Burton's Avatar except the humans won.
Xenogears... fuck yeah!