The game is set in an island nation called Yara. Yara is very clearly meant to be a stand-in for Cuba. The reserve history of Yara goes something like this. Yara underwent a war of liberation. I don’t remember if they explicitly say that it was to overthrow Yanqui colonialism but it seems to be implied. This is similar to what happened in Cuba. But from here, the world veers into the realm of alternate timelines.
This war of liberation results in someone called Anton Castillo becoming the sole dictator of Yara. Yara is under American blockade (like Cuba). Yara has developed a drug that stops cancer cells from metastasising. Cuba has also made some progress against cancer coincidentally. Thia drug is Yara’s chief export. The problem is that it is produced by using a poisonous fertiliser on tobacco plantations. (Cuba is also heavily reliant on its tobacco export.) So Anton Castillo’s regime forces the poor to work on the fields despite the deleterious effects of this poisonous fertilizer. They also perform brutal human experimentation on the underpriviliged. Yara sells this drug to everyone except the US because the US has embargoed them.
So you play as a guerilla who is a member of a liberation movement trying to overthrow Castillo. You are supposed to form a coalition with other guerilla groups to achieve this end. There isn’t much ideology to these movements. Sometimes they talk about the important of free elections but that’s it.
My question is… why? Why do all this? Why not just let me liberate Yara from Yanquis and their stooges which would be far less confusing?
Ubisoft would never bite the hand that feeds
Because it was done by US liberals with zero understanding of anything they tried to portray.
I see the US part… the liberal thing feels like an enemy you just constructed so you could look cool hitting it
Edit: I’m a goober with little understanding of lemmy or world politics, please read comment below for more insight
I assume you didn’t see what instance you are commenting on. With liberal I don’t mean democrat in US electoralism slang, I basically meant to say capitalist, which is not that different from republicans.
I feel they knew exactly what they were doing. Because the steps taken to take America mostly out of the game’s equation are fairly elaborate. The part about ideology being weak is probably just related to AAA games having terrible writing in general.
Well, not really, the game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal, with support from various European branches, not that theres any real difference ideologically, but in this case its not the US for once. Which I’d hazard a guess and say is the reason the game is so muddled, if it was by a US studio then it would be much more likely to take a more obvious pro-US stance. What we got just seems to be a jumbled mishmash with no ideological grounding whatsoever.
Because every Far Cry game, either directly or subtly, has a major pro-America bent to it. In the early games, basically every protagonist was a white American who was ready to kick some local ass for varying personal reasons. Then, we moved into culturally appropriate protagonists, but they all still heavily represent an American view of positive values, often surrounding democracy, equality, and/or self determination.
This isn’t necessarily a negative, it’s just the genre. Like 80’s action movies, it’s about making a western audience feel badass rather than representing any sort of reality. I’d hazard a guess that Far Cry isn’t a bestseller in Cuba.
Literally the only Far Cry i’m willing to fuck with is 5, solely to put my boot sideways into fundamentalist Amerika
I played it and it wasn’t even that good tbh…still amerikan-centric and the ending was one of the worst I’ve ever played in my entire life. It had promise at first but with all the Amerikan flag waving “I sTiLL lOvE aMeRikA” nonsense and Ubisoft being a shit company it left me feeling completely unsatisfied
I dunno, watching Hope County disappear under the wrath of nuclear fire definitely gave me some warm fuzzies, especially after three acts of putting down the manifold faces of organized grift-religion what Amerika really is. The “still love murika”, “the murika I remember”, and all that nonsense was literally just noise to me.
It was made when Trump was in office by liberals and maybe a few “Lincoln Party Republicans”
FC2 is a masterpiece of making the average chud feel like a piece of shit while playing it. Guns jam, malaria wrecks your ass, clearing outposts are quickly repopulated, and the game ends via suicide while rescuing some refugees and killing all of the other mercenaries you met along the way. It’s definitely not a perfect game, but it succeeds in making the player feel like a horrible person for playing mercenary tourist, and I can appreciate that.
The problem isn’t that they are as bad as say, Call of Duty with the western chauvinism, but that they still present problematic ideas. They are much more subtle about it, which means their predominately white, western audience doesn’t pick up on these ideas and doesn’t question them, things like the idea of the “white savior” or even just non white countries always having problems with warlords and drug kingpins, “just cause” (oh wait, wrong franchise. Uhh…it’s a far cry from a comprehensive understanding of social issues in these nations.)
The moral of FC2 is literally that you, the western meddler, is a cancer on the African nation you are allegedly trying to save, and that the only moral recourse is to kill yourself so you won’t fuck over more people with your violence and lust for power and wealth.
I mean the currency of the game is actual blood diamonds. It that isn’t a dig at the player for continuing to find pleasure in buying weapons, I don’t know what is.
I think this goes into a larger discussion of video games in general. Far Cry 2 is still fun to play, even if you “shouldn’t” and your character just makes everything worse. A lot of people in the west have not just 0 media literacy, but like, negative media literacy, and take offense at the idea that they should examine the morals of fiction, especially video games. So they just see a shooty bang bang game where they attack Africans and don’t think at all about whether it is a bad thing to do, because it fun, no thought required.
All the far cry games have these stories where when you think about it, the true winning move was to not even play going back to FC2.
Honestly for how shit the game is and your character being a Fed, you’re damned if you do damned if you don’t in 5 and you can’t really blame the MC for attempting to stop the Neo-Nazi Manson Family Drug and Doomsday cult.
Plus the MC is shit out of luck in 3 since there’s no way off the island without being blown to bits by the Coast Guard due to the embargo on the island due to the pirates. The white savior complex is disgusting though.
The villain in 4 is also really shitty tech bro capitalist, so his downfall isn’t to bad.
5 was such a piece of crap i couldn’t even make it a quarter of the way through the game. i can’t stand being bombarded by hillbillies every single time you turn around everywhere you go. it just never ends, you can’t stop for even a second to look around with another horde descending on you
Ironically enough, Cuba exists in the game as a separate entity and Yara is essentially where Jamaica is on the map.