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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24283 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 4, 2026

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First, I absolutely agree with the 3 is best Far Cry; I feel like it has the cleanest gameplay and tries to tell its story as well as it can, and even though I disagreed with a lot of what I felt the devs were doing, I could recognize that they were including X bit to evoke Y theme and so on.

But I do have some plot quibbles. First, there are some significant clues that Jason Brody has a bit more to him than his first impression implies. You've got the voice hallucination of his brother telling him that he's a natural with a gun, and there is a club flashback sequence where you knock someone the fuck out.

I also think that for games like Far Cry 3, there are really only two valid readings. First, everything the game shows happened. Yes, you killed literally hundreds of people. Yes, you got shot hundreds or thousands of times and walked it off with some very grim healing animations. Yes, the tatau representing your skill tree glows and redraws itself when you master a skill. Yes, the wildlife is absurdly hostile and yes, it does include extremely rare or outright-thought-to-be-extinct species. Yes, Buck is actually teleporting around. Yes, you did have crazy QTE murder-battles. And yes, if you do the Bad End, you don't just respawn to let you 100% the game, that actually happened, you just pop back up exactly like every other time you've died (both in gameplay and with Vaas), that is also entirely diagetic, and Citra is about very, very briefly have the Full Jason Brody Experience this time.

The other is to accept that there is enough weird drug and hallucination crap that you can't actually say what happened to anything, so it doesn't matter!

But the game is fun, and Blood Dragon by itself is worth the price of admission, so I also heartily endorse checking it out for yourselves.

While I enjoyed the Stone Age spinoff the most and I think 4 is the highest point of the franchise altogether, I agree that 3 was the game that codified and immortalized the series.

I still remember two moments from it. One is more player-centric, when you learn that Willis is not just a crazy guy pretending he's a CIA agent, he's a crazy CIA agent.

The other one is a moment of perfect ludonarrative unity, when you rescue one of the girls, force her to be the getaway driver and start mowing down the waves of pirates chasing you. It's an awesome action scene, Jason enthusiastically agrees with you, and the girl's completely horrified you find blowing up cars and killing people by the dozen elating.

Tend to agree that 4 was the one where everything they'd learned came together and had the fewest annoyances overall.

And it achieved strong variety of gameplay and challenges, and the open world and fetch quests didn't feel too tedious 90% of the time.

Indeed, can't think of any part of it I genuinely dislike, other than the radio host guy, and mostly because of how repetitive he was.

I see 4 as the Empire Strikes Back to 3's Star Wars, it is in many respects the superior Film/Game but much of its impact comes from having the core ideas and themes established beforehand.

The crab rangoon really is fantastic.

I still prefer Farcry 4, though. Even if the DLCs did kind of ruin Pagan Min. A little.

But, yes, Farcry 3 is definitely in it's own category for what can only be termed as unreliable narrator. There's a big, open question as to whether or not the game is one drug-fuled hallucination or there is actually some mystical bullshit going on. You can argue in both directions, and the game never really gives you a definite answer.

Count me among those that feels like the Bad Ending is severely lack-luster, though. A part of me can't help but wonder if the writers couldn't quite seal the deal on the type of story they wanted to show and just had to wuss out in demonstrating how much of a monster Jason had become, only to get backstabbed by Vaas' sister because... what, Jason was sniffing for a crumb of pussy? Come on. On top of this is the game literally screaming at you that Vaas' sister has done this shit before, and you'd think Jason would pick up on that. A better ending, albeit cliched, would have had Jason slowly devolving into Vaas himself, only to have a snap-cut-to-black to finish the game off when that realization hits home.

Yes a sane, rational, moral person should see the "bad end" coming from a mile away but niether Jason nor the player are sane, rational, or moral.

That's the point that I think people who complain about the ending are missing.

Well, that's the problem. See, Jason is acting very sane, rational, and moral for the circumstance he's currently enmeshed in. IMO.

People like to play up the entire 'Rambo in a sandbox' aspect of Farcry 3 while ignoring the big driving part of Jason's actions is to save his friends from horrible things. Now, it's been a while since I've played Farcry 3, and maybe you could argue that this shifts when Jason gets to the second island and they could have skedaddled after he killed Vaas, but there's the flipside of Jason being atleast a little bit grateful for all the help that the Islander's did for him to save his friends and he doesn't mind paying them back, just a little...?

There's this trend in video games as of recent that started with Bioshock. Writers have become far, far too enamoured with being clever and leaning heavily on video game mechanics and tropes in order to tell a story. It worked in Bioshock, but after that it always just kind of falls flat. People seem to really want to play up the idea that the 'charachter' or 'player' is just doing things because the pretty/cute/appealing/charismatic NPC is telling them to do it without any thought or reason beyond 'video game'. I even see this in relatively recent games; while playing Cyberpunk 2077 and dealing with the entire Songbird/President Meyer bullshit, I get an earful of Silverhand going on about how 'They're just using you!', and just once I'd love to have your charachter turn around and go 'No shit, sherlock, did you just now figure this out? Cause, guess what, I'm using them to get what I want! This is a mutally abusive relationship, if you haven't noticed, and thanks for fucking reminding me!'

Ahem.

The 'bad end' just feels like a scolding from the Game Devs with no real meat on it. If you want to paint the player character as a monster, go all the way, don't just pussy-foot around the matter and then have him get stabbed in the back by the group he's been helping all this time. That's not effective story-telling, that's just a bland cop-out.

Yeah, it seems like some game devs like to treat the player as a sucker for... playing the game that they bought. When the player is railroaded (as he basically always in video games, with varying degrees of success in hiding the rails), and you shove the player's face in "haha look how awful it is when you did the things we forced you to", the player is going to resent that.

go all the way, don't just pussy-foot around the matter

This is part of why I can't start playing FC4. I know that the correct way to play the game is the ending where you don't play the game, and I also know that there's no "well fuck you, I guess I'll just kill everyone and become Pagan Twin" ending like there should have been.

Counter point: as you yourself said... the game is literally screaming at you that Vaas' sister has done this shit before, and you'd think Jason would pick up on that.

A sane rational and moral person would have picked up on that and seen Citra's sudden but inevitable betrayal coming a mile away. But the person who chooses to abandon thier friends and stay on the island to "keep playing the game" is niether sane rational nor moral. That's the point.

The path of violence and self-destruction leading to violence and self-destruction? Who could've imagined?

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