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?
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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
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 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.
that is a problem in general with western (or westernized) works, taking out the political core of revolutionary movements so they don’t accidentally boost the morale of said groups in real life, be it they anarchists, communists or any kind of left nationalism, or at least instigate a little critical thinking on their consumers, so they focus mostly on aesthetics or just portraying then as bandits.
on FC6 u have a revolutionary group clearly aesthetically inspired by caribbean revolutionary groups like the sandinists and m-26-7, and that is it… during the game it is not discussed what kind of society they are trying to build next, for whom and how, just some liberal democracy lango throw around of free elections as if that is what democracy is all about and shooting big bad totalitarian government, not to mention that spanglish language that is fucking plain racism imo
i’ve been watching The Expanse recently, in the show there is a group that based on the symbol i assume they are from anarchist orientation, but the whole revolutionary core is taken out, and it is reduced to a shadowy organization that turns to piracy and sort of a death cult after following the charismatic yet megalomaniac leader
another example i can think rn is the Scoiatel from The Witcher, they are supposed to be a anti-racism organization with elfs, dwarfs and halflings as militants, but they are portrayed as common bandits or elf supremacists
edit: another paragraph
of said groups mentioned earlier, the number one threat in real life that no work of fiction even dares to portray even in the gray area, only as absolute evil, is the communists. i respect the anarchist comrades but truth be told, they aren’t much a threat to status quo on real life, so they pop up here and there (like OPA from the expanse, and the anarchist spider man), the communists are mostly not mentioned at all, and when to so, as the absolute evil, like the game Homefront Revolution, where the one and only DRPK takes over the world or something like that
Play Spec Ops: The Line, it’s the best shooter video game you can find that questions itself and is very critical of the US foreign policy.
Any idea about the Sniper Elite games? I like sniping a lot. Even in Far Cry 6 I am using sniper most of the time.
Extremely steeped in western propaganda. I’m saying this as someone who had sunk quite a few hours into it. The gameplay is fine, fun even. But the story… Hoo boy! IIRC in the first one you actually spend more time shooting Soviets than Nazis (because they’re after the same Nazi scientist or something). The rest are just whitewashing Britain and USA hard.
Because it was done by US liberals with zero understanding of anything they tried to portray.
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.
I’d say it is pro-US anyway by the way of omission and revisionism.
