Insomniac's Spider-Man series does not know what to do with Mary Jane Watson. The first game updated her from the actress in peril to a plucky reporter who was able to help Peter Parker by investigating the various villains he was facing. This worked well when she served as a radio presence driving the plot and less well when you controlled her in slow, boring, stealth actually doing the investigations. Miles Morales sent her off to Symkaria to research a book. In Spider-Man 2 she is back in New York and working for Jonah Jameson as a reporter again. As a character in the game she's fine, serving as a support and balance to Peter and helping hold their households together as he proves unable to manage being Spider-Man and a productive employee. It's 2023 and she's a partner, not an object to be saved.

The problem really comes when the game feels compelled to insert her into the gameplay again. This time we get a series of different gameplay styles with her and they're all bad. The stealth is back only this time Mary Jane has a stun gun from Silver Sable. This makes the stealth moderately easier but also much more ridiculous. She can take down Kraven's hunters with ease, making them seem much less like a fierce mercenary force that could threaten a superhero and more like a bunch of bumbling idiots who can't handle a reporter with 2 weeks of self-defense training and a stun gun. At one point the hunters frantically talk about how she took out all their comrades in Aunt May's house and it does the "the predator has become prey" thing and it definitely made them seem like Spider-Man should be able to crush them all with minimal effort.

Later Mary Jane has to flee from symbiote Peter, which is effective in showing the threat of the symbiote but really goes against the grain of even their re-imagined relationship. In these games Mary Jane is the person who tethers Peter Parker to his humanity, and while having him threaten her serves to show how the symbiote can rob that humanity it, in my opinion, goes too far. The extreme violence of symbiote Peter against others does enough to show this and this sequence left me wondering how their relationship could recover from that kind of trauma.

But the game isn't done with Mary Jane. She then transforms briefly into symbiote enemy Scream, a multi-colored femme-Venom who fights Peter claw and nail as he tries to rescue her. She looks fantastic in symbiote form and this could be a cool sequence except...it's only barely mentioned again. Spider-Man pummels his domestic partner mercilessly throwing things at her head and kicking her in the face and it's uncomfortable. I would have preferred they never actually had to fight (a sequence where he had to flee in order to find a bell to disrupt and save her or something would have been better) but the fact that they do and the game never reckons with it makes it feel like a throw away attempt to, again, present her as a threat for...some reason. It's a cool sequence in its own but bad in the context of the game and its story.

But again Mary Jane isn't done. She surfaces later now in a third person shooter, gunning down symbiotes with her weapon modified into a sonic gun. This, again, serves to radically reduce the game's stakes, turning the symbiotes from a threat to the city to a force that can't stand up to a totally untrained civilian with a jerry-rigged weapon. There's also the glaring plot hole that Miles and Peter find this incredible weapon that can stop the symbiotes without harming the humans inside and then NEVER TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT! THEY MAKE ONE OF THEM AND KEEP IT TO THEMSELVES! You'd think that you'd want to share this scientific discovery with the police and army, who could make short work of the threat (the fact that neither S.H.I.E.L.D. nor the army show up after New York is overrun would be another plot hole if New York didn't have a single reporter with a makeshift gun to keep it safe.)

Finally Mary Jane is recast as a podcaster at the end of the game, a role that at least isn't ridiculous but only serves to drive home that they keep trying to fit her into new roles. I understand that they want to make her more than just Peter's girlfriend, and that's great, but bad stealth, an incongruous boss fight, and a ludicrous shooting sequence are not the way to do this. The gameplay isn't fun, the narrative elements don't work, and who are they really serving? If they had just had her flee from Venom that might not have had quite the feminist message of empowerment (which I support if it's done well) but it would have fit in better. Or if they had gone all in and given her powers of some kind that could have fit as well. I'd be fine with a superpowered Mary Jane that really mixed things up as long as her gameplay sequences were...fun. Or at least not bad. Or at least not MORE mandatory stealth gosh darn it!

I like Insomniac's rendition of Mary Jane as a character and her place in Peter's life, but they're just floundering in trying to shoehorn her into the gameplay. Miles' love interest's sequence isn't particularly fun but at least it doesn't undermine the main villains of the story. If they're going to keep forcing us to play as her they need to figure out how she fits in and maybe focus on one gameplay style (please not stealth) and actually make it work. If Peter's going to do random stupid puzzles then Mary Jane could have hacking sequences or something. I don't know, there are limitless possibilities. A third person shooter shouldn't be one of them.