Far Cry 5 - Fun and Failure

17 Apr 2018

The best boy.

I’ve finished the main storyline of Far Cry 5, and I Now Have Opinions about it.

WARNING

Spoilers about the plot INCLUDING THE ENDING of Far Cry 5 below. (and the previous Far Cry games as well)

You’ve been warned. Despite the following, I still recommend playing Far Cry 5, and you would be better off playing it spoiler free. The gun play is fast and fun, the flexibility of the sandbox is unparallelled, and it’s some of the most fun I’ve had this year yet. The fact that I’ve written this much about the issues I have with it should say something about the game and what it does.

However…

So the main story of the game is about you, the Deputy Sheriff that was part of a group that came to arrest the leader of a cult called ‘Eden’s Gate’. In the attempt to arrest the leader Joseph Seed, his fanatical followers cause your helicopter to crash, capture the rest of your crew, and you get rescued by an old man in a bunker on an island that is a) conveniently in the middle of the map and b) right next to the evil guy’s island.

The cult, called “Peggies” because they’re part of Project Eden’s Gate (PEG), have taken over the three parts of Hope County, and have begun actively killing, kidnapping, looting and generally causing hell for the residents of the area.

So your objective throughout the rest of the game is to liberate the three sections of the map by systematically pissing off Joseph’s Lieutenants (John, Jacob and Faith Seed) and causing confrontations between you and them ultimately ending in you killing them, blowing up their bunker, and liberating the area, trying to rescue your co-workers on the way.

While you’re doing this, you’re subjected to three different forms of attempting to control you. John tries to get you to submit with torture and intimidation. Faith tries to use Bliss, a mind control drug. Jacob uses classical conditioning, where he implants a trigger in the form of the song “Only You” by the Platters to cause you to go into a fugue state to kill targets that Jacob points you at.

Once you’ve killed all three, which you can tackle in any order, you can finally directly attack Joseph himself, bringing the entire confrontation to a head. During this confrontation, he’s managed to capture all the friends you’ve made along the way, and he presents you with two choices - either you resist him, or you walk away.

If you walk away, you take your sheriff friends and leave Joseph to his own devices. However, on the drive out, the radio in the car is turned on and plays “Only You”, your vision starts to turn red and then the game fades to black.

This ending, however, is not the canonical ending. If you pick this ending you can go back and choose the other ending - it is worth noting if you choose to resist, you cannot go back and pick “walk away”.

If you pick resist, a boss fight starts between you, Joseph, and the blissed-out friends you’ve made along the way. You can turn your friends back to your side by downing and reviving them - once you’ve revived them they’re free of Joseph’s influence and will fight on your side. Once you’ve freed all of your friends, you take out Joseph and proceed to arrest him.

That’s when the bomb drops.

A literal bomb. A nuclear bomb goes off in the distance. You and your friends make a madcap scramble for the nearest bunker, only to hit a falling tree on the way. Joseph drags your body to the bunker with him, and it ends with you handcuffed to a chair and him monologuing at you being his new family, you having killed all of his previous family.

Narratively, you don’t get much of a hint that this will happen. Joseph and his minions keep telling you that he’s right, their ‘collapse’ is coming. However, they being the usual sort of generic nutjob cult you ignore them. A lot of the county are ‘preppers’, and there’s a tonne of gun and gear stashes across the place for you to loot. You can basically chalk this up to the usual rural paranoia though, and keep going.

The only actual hint that this is going to happen is if you do two specific actions - a side quest to remove radio jammers that the cult have set up and if you listen to a specific radio station in the car. If you do this you can hear news reports that things are going south globally - Russia has been bombed, the President has been ushered away into a bunker, and the major cities have been put on alert.

Otherwise, nothing. A literal gut punch out of nowhere. The bomb isn’t even really Joseph’s doing - while his family’s bunkers are all nuclear missile bunkers, they’re likely all old decommissioned bunkers that they’ve purchased off the government. They don’t want to cause the ‘collapse’ to happen, they’re just going to be damned sure they’re ready when it happens.

Far Cry is no stranger to pyrrhic victories. Pretty much all of the games in the series have you pay some great cost for the victory - two has you winning but in the terminal stages of malaria, three has either dying or escaping inexorably altered by the experience, and four has you ceding control of the country to either drug lords or religious zealots. However in all of these, you actually win.

In Far Cry 5 you literally can’t win. Even the secret ending has you walk away leaving Joseph alone to his crazy shit. That sucks, given everything you’ve done up to that point.

So basically, no matter what you do, you lose. You’ve spent the last 30 hours claiming back the county bit by bit, paying a large price along the way, and in the end you still lose to a monologuing jackass. Everyone is (probably) dead or dying, your war with the Peggies having a severe toll on the resources of the county, and once you’re about to win, you lose. Your reward is that the title screen changes from an idyllic shot of the main town to a blasted landscape, and you can go back into Hope County, pretend the ending didn’t happen, and finish off side-quests.

The plot of Far Cry 5 ruins Far Cry 5. The game doesn’t know what it wants to be; a stupid sandbox, or serious critique of the American condition? It has tonal shifts throughout; one mission has you collecting bull testicles for a festival, and next you can be trying to rescue residents from one of the Seed’s attempts at kidnapping, brainwashing, and torture. It’s biggest sin is a lack of a commitment to character.

The quest giver and support characters have a handful of missions each to establish them, and then the game dumps them for the next set with very little interplay between them. The majority of the character investment sits with villians, giving them big lengthy monologues, and your silent protagonist sits there, saying nothing. I had to start my own commentary back at them, and there were so many moments in the game where all I wanted was for my character to tell them to shut the fuck up.

When I finally killed John Seed, it unsatisfyingly happened in a cutscene and I was left standing in a random intersection in front of his body. It’s a testament to the writing of his character that the next thing I did was pile every explosive device I had on his body and set the whole damn thing ablaze. I was severely pissed off when the game robbed me of the chance to do the same thing to Faith, and by the time I got to Jacob I was pretty much worn out of the game doing that to me that I just wanted the whole thing to be over.

I should have seen it coming.

Maybe it’s the psychopath in me, maybe I’m just too conditioned to games, and maybe I sound like a giant neckbeard, but I say this to the writer of Far Cry 5:

You stole my catharsis from me when I couldn’t ever kill Joseph Seed, and I can’t forgive you for it. You ruined an otherwise excellent game, and I hate you.

I can’t help but wonder if that was the point.