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So Here's The Thing: Far Cry 5

I have never really been a big player of the Far Cry series. First-person shooters aren't really my bag, unless they're the wrapper for a really cool story or RPG-alike game that I really want to play. The closest I came to really getting into FPS are games like the new Fallout series, or some parts of Mass Effect, but given that those are mostly over-the-shoulder games, I was never really the audience for the FC franchise.

This was especially true given the troublesome politics of the FC series games: the protagonist was some rando silent white dude avatar with a gun fetish and a remit to kill as many brown people as possible. This is also, btw, why I don't play games like Call of Duty or SpecOps or those other sorts of FPS games. So when Far Cry 5 was first announced and it was going to be set in rural Montana and the big bad was going to be a religious cult figure, and more than that the player would have the option to play as a woman of colour, suddenly they had my interest. The bad guys were going to be Christianized White Supremacist Separatists, in the mold of Koresh and the Aryan Nation. I was ON BOARD for this. The bad guys were going to be white folks who weren't just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or fighting back against colonizer fetish dolls, but rather a deep and resounding political movement with definitively bad motivations and a clearly bad ethos. It was a real political step, a real challenge to the status quo. I pre-ordered it immediately.

I don't know why I thought a AAA game with a nine-figure budget would actually take that sort of stand. Probably because I really, really wanted it to be true.

Instead, we got a horribly, miserably watered-down confusing mess of a game which, spoiler alert, proves the main villain right in the canonically "good" ending. So not only does the game not actually commit to the political stance it's trying to get credit for, it then explicitly says "turns out this whacko was entirely correct in his beliefs and you should never have resisted him".

So here's the thing: Far Cry 5 was a waste of my time and money. I suppose if you like the FC series, you'll probably like what they've done here. But they've failed to turn me into a new fan. Which is a damn shame.

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