What the hell is up with Far Cry 6?
What the hell is up with Far Cry 6?
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.
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.
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™️
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
All good points for the most part, so do yourself a huge favor and read the books that The Expanse is based on. I'm a diehard fan of both the series and the books, even with their differences, and the questions you seem to have about the OPA (among other things) will be answered in reading them, for sure.
Oh, and the "anarchist" Spider-Man is an amalgam of Brit-punk, to be clear. 🤓🤘🏼
They aren't very different in the books. Some are ok, most are very tribal, some are just deranged cultists who srtike the Earth and kill the poor when the rich escape anyways. Their only decent sounding organization which might be socialist is barely mentioned and handwaved as extremists (apparently more extremist that the guys kiling billions with asteroids). Ultimately they all become the Spacing Guild and most just lick Duarte boot.
one day i will read it, can't deny that the show portray then that way
Ironically enough, Cuba exists in the game as a separate entity and Yara is essentially where Jamaica is on the map.
Anton Castillo wasn't the guy in charge after the revolution, he was elected later under the promise of modernizing and changing the country for the better and ended up being Batista essentially. I spent a lot of time looking into the life of this game to figure out if it was a cool story or not, it's like the most liberal revolutionary game I've ever played lol I do enjoy the cool gear and explosions lol
Thanks for the correction
Ni problem lol feels silly knowing so much about this game lol
Does Yanqui == Yankee?
Yes.
variant spelling of Yankee, typically used in Latin American contexts.
Ubisoft would never bite the hand that feeds
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
Far cry 3 was cool but I barely remember it, Far cry 4 kinda sucked bc I think it was just the same map as 3 but changed textures and stuff to look Nepalese. Far cry 5 is amazing and a beautiful game to play, really cool environment to interact with, crazy amounts of animals that are trying to kill you. It always felt a lil weird having animals as enemies in a 1st person shooter tho, I can’t say that they started that trend or that animals in video games as enemies is even uncommon, some of the earliest games had animal enemies but it sorta rubs me the wrong way, idk maybe its a bad take
Far Cry 3 still had the "white saviour" problem all these games have. At their core they are just "White guy goes into one of those
shitholecountries and fixes their problems for them, because they can't do it themselves." Fun games, very problematic messaging.And yeah, the animal enemies rub me the wrong way too. Mainly with their behaviour. Animals aren't hyper aggressive and don't just attack people in droves without any fear of death. It's easiest to program an enemy to just run straight at the player, but real animals don't do that. One of my pet peeves with a lot of game animal enemies.