#sadler

I'm mostly gonna leave it to John Szczepaniak at Hardcore Gaming 101 to explain what's going on with XZR/Exile, which could perhaps be described as "a lot". For this blog's purposes, the relevant question here is whether or not the guy above is actually Mikhail Gorbachev. He's apparently only known as "General Secretary", which was Gorbachev's title at the time of the game's release in 1988.

It's a bit tough with PC-88 graphics, but it mostly seems to line up with Gorbachev's physical appearance, and while the shadows cover up his otherwise very distinctive birthmark, you can arguably kinda see bits of it on the left? Combined with the context of encountering him in the then-modern day Soviet Union, it's probably good enough.

At any rate, it's a better resemblance than the implied Ronald Reagan, in my opinion.