#FF00AA

Far Cry 3 was my game of the year 2012 (Spec Ops was more interesting, but it wasn’t as fun). So you’ll understand that I went into Far Cry 4 with some trepidation, after reading several interviews in which Far Cry 4’s narrative director openly shat on his predecessor’s work. Turns out my expectations were a bit off: I thought I’d find the writing much more objectionable than it was, when in fact the main issue was that there was so little of it. Hindsight being 20/20, of course that’s what you get when you promote the previous game’s level designer as lead writer.

Let’s start with the villain: charismatic, well acted, well written, and present on screen for the first ten minutes and the last five of the game — literally. The main quest givers: oscillating between obnoxious (by design) and merely annoying over the course of the game. The side quest givers: always insufferable. The story: simply absent. Finally, the world: not that much prettier than Far Cry 3’s (just higher-resolution, with a nicer skybox) and so single-mindedly hostile that I resented every minute I had to spend there. The Rook Islands had their fair share of enemies and predators, but the place still felt like a holiday destination gone wrong; there were times when you could kick off your shoes for a walk on the beach — simply enjoy being there. Kyrat is so intent on killing you that death even comes from the skies now. “EAGLE!” So much for escapism.

But let’s get back to the writing. Unfortunately for me, I happen to be one of those people who have trouble finishing a game if it doesn’t make an effort to provide the most rudimentary story to propel me forward. Far Cry 4 doesn’t just lack a compelling story, it’s also adamant about making the protagonist as much of a cipher as humanly possible. And, as if that weren’t enough, it jumps squarely into the pitfalls the previous game had managed to avoid.

Far Cry 3 was criticized a lot — wrongly — for exploiting the “white savior” trope. American bro-dude Jason Brody arrives in the wrong place at the wrong time, and turns out to have such a knack at killing people that he is noticed by the leader of the oppressed indigenous tribe, who decides to use her charms to manipulate Brody into getting rid of the invaders. Sure, I can see how you could come out of it thinking it was a white savior story, but that’s just not what it is — the game’s main fault, really, was that it didn’t hit you over the head with its cleverness, that it was content to let you believe in the empowerment fantasy it ostensibly presented, if you didn’t care to look beyond appearances.

On the other hand, Far Cry 4’s young American protagonist, Ajay Ghale, isn’t just instrumentalized by the local resistance / terrorist group: they insist at every turn on making him choose the future of the country. Let’s all defer to the young kid who just landed here a week ago, who can miraculously settle the quarrels we were helpless to resolve ourselves! He’s spent his whole life in the USA, he doesn’t know the first thing about Kyrat, but it’s okay because his parents were Kyrati and he was born there. I suppose that makes sense to an American audience obsessed with ethnic origins — for whom it makes sense to call people “African American,” “Mexican American,” “Italian American.” To me, it’s just a hundred times worse than Far Cry 3.

That’s all moot, though, since the character is such a cipher. You can’t simultaneously claim that he’s not a white savior because he has the right genes (as idiotic as that is in the first place), and make a point of giving your character as little background, personality, and dialogue as possible, so that the white dudes you market your game to can fully identify with him. If he’s just an empty vessel for the player to project into, then he’s definitely not Kyrati in any practical sense.

And then, there’s the elephant in the room: it’s somewhat unclear whether Pagan Min is gay or not (Ubisoft’s PR will assure you that he isn’t, yet he says himself “I am indeed batting for the other team,” which doesn’t have too many possible interpretations, in a voiceover line that they probably forgot to cut), but either way his character design, from his pink suit to his bleached hair and eyeliner (seriously?!), harkens back to the most despicable storytelling tradition of using “effeminate” as shorthand for “obviously evil” — a classic trope that’s been thankfully subsiding in cinema over the last thirty years but is still, apparently, viable for videogames. And the less said about Mumu Chiffon, the better. Credit where credit is due for Amita being a strong female character, but outside of role-playing games we’re evidently facing another decade or two of homosexuals being, at best, comic relief.

So how did I survive a couple dozen hours of the most unpleasant, uninviting, semi-homophobic videogame I’ve played since… well, GTA V? (Ouch, I didn’t expect to end that sentence on such a recent reference.) Well, there’s an advantage to the game being just a reskin of Far Cry 3: the mechanics are well proven, and almost entirely beyond reproach. It’s a shame that elephants handle like Halo’s Banshees (I understand it makes the shooting easier, but I never felt I was riding a living creature, which I was looking forward to), and I still dislike the sudden difficulty spike when you unlock the second half of the world map, but the shooting and killing and hunting is fun, and the newly added grappling hook is great.

And I can’t adequately express how thankful I am for the Shangri-La missions. (Of which I’ve only played the first two, because I want to forget everything I hated about the game before I savour the last four.) There’s such a sense of awe and wonder in those short diversions that I was truly depressed coming back to sad old Kyrat. When the main studio in charge of Far Cry 4 had to design its own “drug trip” missions, they added an ugly color-cycling fog to Kyrat, played shitty sitar music on top, and called it done. Meanwhile, Ubisoft Toronto managed, with mostly a palette swap and a bunch of copy-pasted buddhist ruins, to create a unique, vibrant world — most importantly, a world that I actually wanted to clean up of its demons, to restore to its original beauty. And that glorious tiger brings all the life that’s missing from both both the human and animal populations of the main campaign.

I just want more of that.