As the opening sequence of Far Cry 4 plays out, it already feels familiar. I arrive in a foreign nation. I'm on a bus.
Things get violent, people get shot in front of me, a stranger who was
kind to me, the only survivor, seems to be concerned about me for some reason,
so much so that he risks his life to save me and, in turn, is tortured for
it. As I fly through the tutorial
portion of the game, learning to run, shoot, jump, and stealth-kill my way to
better living, it starts to click into place: I've been here before. This isn't new. This is Far
Cry 3, repackaged and repurposed, with new enemy skins, new wildlife, and
new terrain. And yet it is, in many
ways, a wholly different game so far.
Part of it has to do with what happened in those opening bars.
Last year Far Cry 3's
lead writer, Jeffery Yohalem, launched a loud long form defense of his oeuvre
when critics panned its problematic engagement with race and racial
constructs. It's understandable: the
game features a white male of privilege and little training or experience landing
ass-first in an island conflict. He
proceeds to carry the weight of the native people's campaign against the
vicious warlord ruling over the island, implicitly imposing the aforementioned
white privilege in order to do so. With
a wink or a nod, it might've been easier to buy, as a satiric criticism of
imperialism, which Yohalem claims to have intended, but it constructs itself
without any such trappings: there's never any reference to how absurd it is
that a random, adventure seeking teen murders thousands of people in rapid
succession, or that he is promptly accepted as a sort of messiah by the island's
people. Each over the top character
plays their role with forthright, witless abandon and overblown emotionality,
attempting to bring a sense of emotional verisimilitude to the abuses and deaths
suffered by characters who, in any other framework, would serve as disposable
comic relief, scooped off to the side after their punchline landed, inching out
of the story to either die on a laugh beat or merge into the sort of obscurity
that side players in ensemble casts usually end up in. Yohalem's satire was, in large part, a
failure because of its tone deaf inability to frame what was absurd and what
wasn't: in a game where the plot effectively serves as a manifesto for
imperialism as a positive force, you need some sort of touchstone if you want
to claim to be mounting "satire" or even meager "commentary"
on that deeply problematic aspect of western history. Far Cry
3 never provided that requisite nod.
There's no character who isn't a profound exaggeration, and only one or
two of those profound exaggerations are treated as profound exaggerations. The rest all play their roles close to the
vest.
Far Cry 4 opens
with a crazy person in an impeccable suit stabbing a man in the neck, then
taking a picture with me. Sounds very
similar to the problematic situation I just described, but hold on. In that moment, it's exposed that I'm not a
white person. I am, at least visibly,
Indian. I look like most of the people
in the world around me. I then learn
that I've apparently got a backstory that places me firmly at the center of the
events I'm drudging through. Even though
I have some level of agency in the game, I actually spend most of my time
working for other people, actualizing their goals. The blithe actualization of western
imperialism is thusly alloyed in this narrative, even though I'm a dude from
America shooting lots of people, the vast majority of whom are people of
color. A few simple movements have
annihilated the puerile and infuriating white-male-gaze bullshit that made me
want to find a way to shoot myself in the fucking face in Far Cry 3.
The conscientiousness doesn't stop there. The drug references in Far Cry 4 are real: these are references about how drugs get grown,
processed, moved, and sold told by people to whom their trade is deeply
relevant, who understand the way that that trade impacts the people of a region
where drug production is a prevalent economic force. I'm not rolling into a field with a
flamethrower and torching the whole place, at least not yet. I'm listening to truck drivers tell me about
how they lost their families when they refused to switch over to exclusively
growing opium, or how the sex trade needs to stay in place for the rebellion to
continue, even though it's disgusting and exploitative.
Even the crazy or absurd characters that I run into seem
like real, fully fleshed out characters that I can believe, and the ones that
feel exaggerated seem to be aware of just how exaggerated they are. So far I've met a number of memorable people,
and while many of them feel like archetypes (the DJ, the fashionista, Hurk, and
so on...) there's enough humanity underneath each of these people to make me
feel some kind of connection, and enough self-serious, well developed
characters in the mix for me to be able to look at this cast and think
"well, these people feel like actual members of a community who have
acquired a following because they're actually trying to do so
something." The choices I've been
asked to make between Sabal and Amita feel like actual choices, voiced by
people who have different, viable viewpoints: Sabal's idealism and Amita's
pragmatism are both reasoned approaches to the world, neither one wholly
absurd, not without some middle ground between them. There's a sense of self-awareness that Far Cry 4 brings to the table, a sense
of self-awareness that makes it easier to digest its frequent absurdities (one
scene involving honey badgers comes to mind, wherein the dialogue is oriented
almost entirely around how vociferously various parties don't give a fuck) and
still take the point it's trying to make about revolution, rebellion, and
legacy more seriously.
And the game, while mostly unchanged, adds a few new twists
that take advantage of some previously ignored mechanics. Ever since Far Cry 2 had me bunny-hop up mountains to grab diamonds,
verticality has been a big part of the series, but it's been haphazard in its
execution. Far Cry 4's primary contribution is making scaling mountains and
flying little helicopters a major part of ordinary play. It makes sense, given how mountainous the new
setting of Kyrat is, but these new little twists make me realize just how
asinine some of the things that previous Far
Cry games made me do were. Even
though these objects are limited in their utility by various tricks (scaling
mountains can only happen at preset points, and the one-man helicopter has a
flight ceiling that keeps you from skipping over massive portions of the game
entirely) they make me understand just how destructive the long-form path
seeking sessions I'd engage in during Far
Cry 2 were. A multitude of
approaches present themselves here. It
feels like the game is more fully realized, more wholly embracing its heritage
of exploration and engagement.
And these changes, slight as they are, have made me
genuinely excited to sit down and play the game. Towards the end Far Cry 3 was something that felt like it was hanging over me, a
chore I needed to finish so I could move on to other games. Hell, it felt that way a bit from the get-go,
despite having some pretty compelling gameplay elements behind it. Right now I wake up and sort out just how
much Far Cry 4 I can play before I
need to quit and get work done. I've
already fallen behind on a few projects because of its tender ministrations,
and other games, even the hook-rife Darkest
Dungeon, have moved to my back-burner.
I'll come back to them, certainly, and I'll set more time aside for my
manuscript soon enough, as soon as I dig a little deeper into Kryat.
I say all of this with the distinct impression that Far Cry 4 will burn up my good will ere
long. It has many of the same problems
that Far Cry 3 had: the progression
feels truncated in certain ways, and exhaustive in others (three days of play
have netted me most of the craftable items, and have allowed me to complete a
number of skill-tree threads, but I know I'll spend hours yet unlocking areas
of the map and playing through the story), and I get the impression that the narrative
will jump the rails at some point and make a fun, burgeoning story into
something hackneyed and overwrought. But
for now I'm taken with how much of a difference minor changes make. Just by adding a few new elements to the
game, and backing away from a problematic construction of protagonist, agency,
and authority, Ubisoft has created a game that feels simultaneously familiar
and original. I can provide them with no
higher compliment to say that I find their protagonist, flat and quiet as he
may be, far more palatable than I've found anyone since Far Cry 2, and that that makes playing their game an absolute
pleasure.
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