I hate Far Cry games. Far Cry 1 seems to be more of a demo for the CryEngine than a game and is much harder to get back to if one has played Crysis, Far Cry 3 is several trends in a trenchcoat where you play as a white tourist who ends up being a saviour of the islands, Far Cry 4 tries to fix the set up by making the protagonist to be native to the new set dressing but such surface level solution does not get rid of the horseshoe theory that plagues the series, Far Cry 5 is about nothing and turns more gross the more you play it, Far Cry 6 is faux-Cuba that is implied to have set the blocade upon itself while killing all the faux-Cubans and has the protagonist trying to evacuate to Miami, FL just like criminals and rich people did when the real Cuba had their revolt going on. But what about Far Cry 2?
Far Cry 2 is one of the most coherently incoherent games I have played: on one side it wants to tell how the state of war is continuously perpetuated by the outsiders for the sake of greed while people who live in “3rd world countries” suffer for the mercs’ profits while on the other side you play as a merc who keeps destroying everything that could have helped civilians just so no one else gets it for the diamonds but all of a sudden you can decide to be a decent person at the end of the game. Despite coming out of the left field the ending where the player character can bury the greed with themself works best with the thesis statement that comes despite the game’s nihilism: you are one of many but you can try to make yourself last.
Every Far Cry game after Far Cry 2 has been obsessed with the idea of capturing the essense of nihilism for nihilism’s sake. Nothing mattered before your character came in, nothing matters after they leave. No hope, no better future, only you as a player entertaining yourself in digital “3rd world countries” until the game ends. There is no point to a Far Cry game other than make unfunny jokes and pull one on the player with a twist that you don’t see coming solely because you would have to care about the story in the first place. At least when you are a digital tourist in an Assassin’s Creed game it takes itself seriously.
