I find alot of the moral messages it tries to send across extremely conflicting at best, too. The game definitely has a strong anti-WMD message, and the character who tries to activate the in-game's analogue for WMD's true power is treated as a really bad person for doing it. Despite the fact that him doing so is literally the only thing that stopped them from suffering a crushing defeat that probably would've lead to them losing the war. And those powers are later the only thing that is capable of tearing a hole in the enemy's Ratte-equivalent super-tank.
Also, apparently racism is bad, but classism is ok (seeing as every member of the aristocracy save the Queen is treated as an apathetic asshole), and if you've been born into an inherently evil race then you've just got to forget you've ever been apart of them and just act like everyone else.
Really, it's kind of easy to tell that the game was made by the Japanese, even without taking the art-style into account.
Well, you know, he almost just murdered a person in cold blood and all that. People were understandably upset even without the whole legal angle. In the mass battle he resorted to it you should remember that just about everyone agrees that Damon is a total idiot for using such an approach in the war. And keep in mind that at the end of the game Welkin and co DO beat someone with those same powers without extra help. In case of the Marmota, the weakened structural part was only used as part of Welkin's latest on-the-spot strategy to climb aboard the Marmota where good old-fashioned explosives were applied to actually disable the Valkof lance and Marmota.
Furthermore, that kind of depiction of aristos is only what aristos did an entire history to deserve. The Queen being the sole exception is how these things go, the few Mannerheims are vastly outnumbered by the Yusupofs and De Raises in history. Not to mention the corrupt vizier, incompetent noble in command, and power-hungry bastard prince are archetypes that go way, way back. As for inherently evil race, neither of two we meet are inherently evil or evil in any fashion, and the key difference between the fates of the two is that one allowed herself to be defined by what she was born as, while the other was reminded that everyone is more than just that. It has to do with living without more-than-human powers than anything like that, which in the story only resulted in self-destructive distortion of events around their users. The culture of their ancestors may very well have been evil, as is evident with the natural consequence of overwhelming power being readily available for no reason. Basically, living with cheat modes on leads to ruin both for the individual and at large.
Rather you should notice some of the other things going on instead of looking for "Japanisms". Ie, the scene I alluded to earlier where one of the NPCs who has acted like a racist so far gets to be face-to-face with the aftermath of such racially motivated concentration camp, but instead of leaving it at "oh teh Jewmanities" when she tries to be indignant at soon-to-be team Jew Zaka for not dropping everything and mourning about all the horrors going about, Zaka just calmly remarks that his time is much more productively spent trying to find out if there's any survivors trapped under the debris rather than Oy Veying, and gets back to shifting through the debris.
Also Deus Ex is a mediocre game so
Curious_Tongue isn't missing out.
While Deus Ex might be composed of at-best-mediocre elements in terms of gameplay, the fact is that as a whole it's more than the sum of its parts. This is due to the superb level design of the game where those various elements work together seamlessly. That's why it's one of the best games ever.