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?
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.
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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.
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
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I just felt like everything that I’d done to that point- the liberating the outposts, shooting the face of every one of these crackers shoving their religious cult bullshit philosophy down my throat every chance they could get, being able to have a damn bear as a pet- was completely and utterly pointless, and for everyone to go “omg JoE waS rIgHt”…like okay what was the point smh???
At least in Fallout 4 I can mod the game so I can be a Chinese anime girl spreading communism to the Commonwealth and turn the Brotherhood of Steel into the US military so it’s on sight 👀
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Lol yeah true I been thought they were opps before I even played when I heard about their positions, it just makes it that much more satisfying
Lol maybe its weird of me but I usually make BoS the communists
Lol really? Man I always got fascistic vibes from them 😬 I thought the Railroad was more communist to me, but then again I made the Minutemen (read: Vanguard) communists so idk.
I mean as long as you don’t choose Institute then I think you’re all good.
I’ve not played the game, what’s wrong with the institute?
It was made when Trump was in office by liberals and maybe a few “Lincoln Party Republicans”
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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.
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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.)