Revolución is Painful But We Persevere XD
Far Cry 6, a reliance on formula, and a missed opportunity
Some spoilers within, clearly labeled.
The moment I thought Far Cry 6 could be something different was when Diego showed up in the first trailer.
Diego, the 13-year old son of primo fascisto dictator Anton Castillo, came on-screen and immediately stood out amongst the panache of the scene behind him. His father, played expertly by the underutilized Giancarlo Esposito, gently pushed him to drop a grenade on the protesting people of Yara, coaxing the leonine fangs out, urging the youth to shed his inhibitions and become the dictator his country needed to keep the people in line.
I love redemption arcs and class/blood traitors. I was immediately hooked. Like a sucker.
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The Far Cry series, and Ubisoft as a whole, have let me down before, which is a shame given how the publisher once held a special place in my heart. The Assassin’s Creed series is what made me a single-player console gamer - Assassin’s Creed 2 still sits as one of my favorite video games of all time. (I remember using the glyph puzzles as proof to my parents that video games could be educational - I was learning about the history of Tesla and Edison!) Far Cry 3 is not far behind - the spinechilling tale of Jason Brody’s descent from pampered brat to vengeful fighter is concisely told and ends perfectly (if you made the correct choice) with just enough melancholia as to make one consider the ramifications of their actions.
Ubisoft has since foraged down the path of free-to-play and open-world sandbox titles, to mixed results. Certain Assassin’s Creed titles have managed to still deliver compelling stories; Black Flag comes to mind, its tale epic and winding over a whole swath of locations and generations. However, Odyssey and its ilk feel aimless, beautiful locations with objectives dotted on the map without rhyme nor reason, meager stories rarely bringing anything interesting to the table.
The Watch Dogs and Far Cry series were supposed to buck this trend - these were the franchises Ubisoft would deign to give a bit of gravitas toward and look to surprise the player with novel storytelling mechanics and great characters. Both have fallen short. I don’t think I can name a single character from any Far Cry game other than 3 outside of Pagan Min, the villain of 4 who, at the very least, chewed the scenery any time he was on screen. Watch Dogs 1…yikes. I generally enjoyed Watch Dogs 2 other than the hacker who only spoke in l33tsp33k - but, at the very least, the level design was good and the way it took on Silicon Valley was something that, at the time, felt novel and interesting. Watch Dogs Legion was a pass - the premise was not gripping enough.
Far Cry 5 was a missed opportunity; a game that looked to tackle the politics of religious zealotry and middle America without actually saying anything. Other than the bear and canine Guns for Hire, this game holds no place in my heart. It was average, and disappointing given its potential in my eyes.
Far Cry 6, though, felt different from the jump. In some ways, it was. At the end, though, its open-world mission layout and goofy, “revolution is kind of fun” aesthetic prevented it from nailing the story I think it was trying to tell.
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I’m trying to find the positives in more elements of my life, so first I’ll start with the good - and there’s a lot of it! This is my personal favorite Ubisoft game since Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag (disclaimer; I haven’t played Valhalla yet because I was scared I’d ditch it similar to Odyssey, maybe this is the game that changes my mind). It edges out Watch Dogs 2 in my mind.
Yara is gorgeous, rendered beautifully on the PS5. Every different area of the small island country feels distinct, and the three main areas all have their own nooks and crannies to explore. The biggest reason I’ve dropped open-world games in the past is because of arbitrary leveling gates and the inability to access certain areas without meeting experience thresholds. I’m happy to report this wasn’t a problem here, although I do believe Far Cry 6 would have benefitted from more structured missions.
I tend to shy away from FPS games but Far Cry 6 still never felt inaccessible to play. The Supremo weapons were fun and the Amigos, animal companions like the crocodile Guapo and the dog Chorizo, made for fun mission additions. Far Cry 6 is really hard to play stealthily, which is how I prefer most titles, but there are enough inventive ways to cover your tracks when you mess up that I never felt overwhelmed.
The characters of Yara, by and large, are well-written, although some definitely shine above others. My personal favorite arc of Paolo and Talia, two young DJs/rabblerousers trying to find their voices and courage to stay on Yara and fight against Anton, is written and polished to an incredible sheen. Every line of dialogue, every actor reaction, and every piece of exposition here is pristine. Some of the spoilery moments were a “bit” on-the-nose from a political standpoint (anyone who has played or watched the game knows what I’m talking about)…but hey - it felt good when it happened! La Espada, another key player, is a favorite, too. I much preferred those more grounded heroes to some of the cast in the Legends of 67 portion of the game, a lot of whom felt like caricatures and leaned a bit too heavily into the “destruction is awesome, I’m a manic pixie dream murderer and/or a badass old person” aesthetic Ubisoft have co-opted for their modern titles. Tonally, I just don’t get it, and I never will with those characters. Give me 10x more Espadas or Paolo/Talias than El Tigres/Bennys/Jonrons any day of the week.
Anton as a villain and Dani Rojas, the protagonist who shares a name with a character from a mediocre show on Apple TV, contrast each other well. Every time Castillo is on screen, he is commanding, albeit not quite as eccentric or over the top as some of his Far Cry 3 and 4 contemporaries. The dictator’s delivery is vintage Esposito - I honestly wish he was in more scenes interspersed throughout the game, especially contrasting his role here to Keanu Reeves’ role in Cyberpunk 2077. It feels like a missed opportunity.
Meanwhile, Rojas has to earn respect over the course of her story - and she does so expertly. She is courageous and determined and, through it all, never quite loses herself to the madness of battle like Jason Brody. Her arc is distinct and her growth is tangible as she ascends from normal young adult to experienced killer. Her humanity, though, is her saving grace.
This makes it a shame given how her, and Diego’s, story end. And now we delve into spoiler territory — for both Far Cry 6 and The Last of Us 2.
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The Last of Us 2 is an interesting point of comparison for Far Cry 6 because both have some interesting story elements in common. In TLOU2, the dichotomy between Abby and the Scar she rescues, Lev, is the heart of the game and what ends up eventually saving Abby’s life. Lev convinces Abby to spare Ellie in the Seattle theater, which leads to Ellie letting the pair leave after she tracks them down in California.
The Last of Us 2, similar to Far Cry 6, is a story about revenge - the scale is different but the parallels are the same. Ellie wants to kill Abby who killed Joel who killed Abby’s father. Dani wants to take back her country from a dictator who is openly murdering dissenters in the streets and poisoning workers in the fields. These stories have similar beats and, to be frank, similar amounts of collateral damage. Allies of both Abby and Dani (and Ellie, for that matter) are killed off without a second thought.
In The Last of Us 2, though, the story ends on a hopeful note. Lev and Abby, beaten and battered, run away to break the cycle of the violence that had subsumed theme and figure out how they could, potentially, find a better path for themselves. Ellie, having already lost Dina due to her stubbornness and multiple fingers preventing her from playing deceased father figure Joel’s guitar, is also forced to reckon with her behavior as she continues on her life’s journey. The message is poignant, of course, but it’s clear - kind acts beget kind acts, and small deeds can change the world.
In Far Cry 6, however…(and now we get to the spoiler part so please stop if you don’t want to be spoiled)
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…Diego doesn’t get the chance to actually do much of anything. He’s simply stabbed by his father, provides some final words to Dani, and then passes away. He’s not even buried by Dani, someone who throughout the game has seen that Diego is more than just a puppet for his father. Dani saved his life when Juan tried to snipe him, resulting in Clara’s demise. It felt like that might be a turning point in their relationship. Nothing comes from this, though. Diego was never really a fully fleshed-out character; he was just a plot convenience meant to give Anton a magic mirror to soliloquize toward and a physical outlet for him to harm.
The underutilization of Diego, honestly, really pissed me off, because here’s an incredible situation where a character, cosseted by his past and groomed for leadership as a dictator, had an opportunity to totally write his own story. From the first moments of the game, we were promised that there was more to Diego than meets the eye. This storyline, for Diego, is constantly teased and progressed in every cutscene. He saves Dani’s life multiple times. And yet, this is his ending - someone who never even stands up to his father at the end of the game. He simply dies.
All that being said, I understand that this was the decision Ubisoft writers made, and they have a right to make that choice. Art is subjective, and this was the direction they decided to push toward. However, I also think this was not fully their choice. They were handcuffed by the structure of the game.
Open-world sandboxes are fantastic for exploration, and the wide array of elements can make for some great gameplay mechanics. However, they are not always conducive to coherent storytelling or character design. For instance, let’s say a player can take three paths in any order to complete a section of a game. In one path, an antagonist character serves as a foil, an overeager enemy that serves as a point of contention. In another path, that character has reformed, becoming an ally to the main character, their ways changed. Linear storytelling would make this an easy tale to tell. However, with open-ended storytelling, coherence is lost should the player play the two routes in the “incorrect” order. Therefore, it complicates the job for the writing staff and may prevent them from telling the story they really want to tell.
Additionally, I believe that Diego’s more sober portrayal prevented him from getting well-deserved screentime. Diego is not an over the top character like Jonron or El Tigre or Benny or Juan. Actor Anthony Gonzalez plays him with a subtlety that is antithetical to Far Cry’s ethos. Diego doesn’t have pink hair or a larger than life persona. He was a fairly normal, albeit damaged, kid with a lot of issues to work through. My belief is that powers that be looked to shift him out of the story in order to focus on some of the more visually striking and over-the-top side characters, to the detriment of the holistic cohesion of the game.
If I was the head writer of Far Cry 6 (sigh….maybe someday), I’d have aligned Diego’s arc a bit differently and turned him into a more overt cultural traitor, perhaps even letting him physically join Libertad on missions as a more direct double agent. Diego’s arc actually mirrors Clara’s in many ways - they could have learned a lot from each other. There’s still an aura of unpredictability that could surround Diego - after all, a decade-plus of cultural conditioning from a fascist does not break so easily, and he could always defect to his father with the secrets and identities of Libertad in hand. However, the evolution of a privileged hypothetical revolutionary to someone who actually believed in the cause and actioned it effectively — this was a story I was excited for Far Cry 6 to tell. I’m disappointed it didn’t happen.
Instead, it told a revolutionary story with a very….Far Cry sensibility and an underwhelming ending. Which is fine. I just wish it was better.
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The biggest problem with Far Cry 6 is that it was shackled with expectations and preconceived notions that dictated how the game was to be designed. Due to Ubisoft’s marriage to open world gameplay and Far Cry’s notoriety as a wacky waving inflatable tube man’s perspective of war, it prevented them from nailing the story at the core of the game. Esposito’s Castillo is a Breaking Bad villain thrown into Mad Max: Fury Road. Somewhere, the puzzle pieces just aren’t matching up.
Far Cry 6 isn’t a bad game - although I don’t think it’s worth purchasing until the inevitable Ubisoft discount in like six months. I don’t think I’ll be replaying it though. And I wish they had committed to the story of Yara rather than trying to shoehorn it into their already built story and world-building structures.