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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 hekilled 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.
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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.
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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 seenCitra'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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