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?

  • WeirdGoesPro@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Comr8@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      Literally the only Far Cry i’m willing to fuck with is 5, solely to put my boot sideways into fundamentalist Amerika

      • renownedballoonthief@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.

      • Nocturne Dragonite@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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

        • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • Nocturne Dragonite@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            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 👀

  • Munrock@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    They want the aesthetics of Che and Castro fighting oppressors but they don’t want the USA to be the oppressors, and they want the ideology to be compatible Western Liberal values, which aligns on the most superficial levels but can’t be allowed to be examined at the foundations.

    Exactly the same shit with Black Panther™️ and Wakanda™️

  • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    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 it’s the yanquis who made this game; they can’t be opposed without their spinning a ‘good reason’ to oppose the regime, too. tl;dr Ubisoft eating from the same propaganda trough that Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer, and Treyarch do

    • PooPooTheClown@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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

    • from software paypig@lemmygrad.mlOPM
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • WhatWouldKarlDo@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        It’s for sales. Telling the truth would anger the Americans. It’s the same reason that after Sands of Time, the prince became that godawful angsty American. It wasn’t fashionable to have a Persian protagonist after the world trade centre came down.

    • ☭CommieWolf☆@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • Soviet Snake@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        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.