Month: July 2024

Figment 2 is about a figment of the mind of some guy. The figment is Dusty, the man’s courage, and his job is to defeat nightmares, which the mind fears. He is accompanied by Piper, a Navi-esque bird sidekick and what exactly she’s supposed to represent psychologically is not clear to me. I could take some guesses based on her personality, but I don’t think anything is ever nailed down in dialogue. She’s also pretty new around here. Both of these characters were also in the first game, according to Google, and that game was set in a teenage girl’s mind, with Dusty fighting against fear and depression. We’re clearly in a completely different person’s mind here, so I guess everyone has a Dusty and Piper floating around.

The game opens with Dusty fighting a giant evil pig representing fear of the dark, but the main plot is about fighting the Jester, the man’s lost sense of fun, who’s been crushed under adult responsibilities and is now going rogue and attempting to tear the Moral Compass apart in order to be heard again. Brief illustrated cut scenes of the outside world make it pretty clear the strain that all the extra work is putting on the relationships of the unnamed man Dusty and Piper are knocking around in, but it’s never clear what dangerously irresponsible things he’s considering doing under the Jester’s influence. The game’s ultimate message is that the Jester is good and the man should listen, but there’s also an implication that the Jester will wreck the man’s life if they keep taking desperate action, so the character arc for Dusty is about learning to trust and work with the Jester rather than fighting to the death, so it makes sense to focus on the damage done by the Jester’s absence over what they’ll do if they win by defeating Dusty. Still would’ve been nice to see, though.

The game is a hack-y slash-y roll-y around-y sort of game with frequent but only mildly challenging puzzles. We aren’t at full Lego Star Wars mindless puzzle levels, but it’s, like, one notch up from that. The game’s major selling point is its emphasis on music. Certain enemies attack in time with the combat music, although most do not, and bosses will sing songs at you while you fight them. This is a neat idea, but it suffers from the problem that all the songs are really forgettable. On the one hand, if you want a musical action-adventure game, you aren’t getting one anywhere else, and Figment 2 (and, I assume, the first Figment) are musical action-adventure games. I’ve given Assassin’s Creed games passing marks for historical tourism to eras I otherwise don’t get to interact with much in other video games, like the French Revolution, even when they’re mediocre in basically every other way, and objectively that’s the category Figment 2 falls into: Flawed, but it does deliver on its core premise.

But Figment 2 is flawed. Its story is that of the overworked husband and father who needs to spend more time with his family. Serviceable but rote, not a bad thing, but not a redeeming quality either. The gameplay is the same, a half-dozen different enemies and your standard roll-and-attack third person melee gameplay that’s been the norm for something like a decade now. It’s hard enough you can’t sleep through it but easy enough that I don’t get stuck on it, which is good, because it’s pretty forgettable so drawing attention to itself would be bad. The thing where the music is diegetic and enemies attack you in rhythm with it is new, but the music itself is the same serviceable-but-not-a-selling-point tier as everything else.

If you love the idea of this game’s core premise, then nothing about is bad enough to be disqualifying. Unfortunately, I’m not super into its core premise. I was willing to give it a chance because it was under 5 hours (about 3 hours and 20 minutes for my playthrough), but having tried it out, yeah, this series is not aimed nearly directly at me enough to overshadow its flaws.

Stray Gods is a visual novel where the gimmick is that it’s a musical and some of your dialogue choices are made mid-song, changing the course of the song. I don’t normally like visual novels, but not because I’m opposed to them in principle, just because I find it very annoying to advance the dialogue with a mouseclick every two fucking sentences. The game keeps asking me for inputs and it keeps not mattering. Stray Gods isn’t like this – the scenes just play out, voice-acted, until they reach a point where a decision is needed. Sometimes that decision is just to ask X or Y optional question or go ahead with the main plot immediately, and sometimes it’s an important choice with consequences for the plot, but either way, whenever I’m asked to interact, it’s because there’s a decision, minor or major, about how this story is going to unfold. It’s weird to me that this makes such a big difference, but it does – I’ve struggled to get through visual novels with really good writing in the past but have no difficulty getting through Stray Gods.

The premise of Stray Gods is that you are Grace, twenty-something in a band who doesn’t know what to do with her life who busts out an I-Want song, which a woman named Calliope steps in to complete. Later that night, Calliope shows up at Grace’s apparent bleeding from a mortal wound, dies in Grace’s arms, and passes on her god powers to Grace, because it turns out this Calliope is the Calliope, a muse. Calliope’s god power is that she can force people to bare their emotions in song, and Grace has inherited that power. So that song at the beginning was fully diegetic, but hey, Grace is a musician and also Calliope presumably used her god powers at some point, although implicitly only after she heard Grace start to sing. Anyway, since a god died in your apartment, the gods in charge (Apollo, Athena, Persephone, and Aphrodite – there’s been some vacancies) decide it was probably your fault, but give you a week to track down the real killer to prove your innocence. Musical shenanigans ensue!

That’s all the first, like, 45 minutes of this 5-hour game, so it’s not really spoilers, but beware that spoilers will ensue. The rest of my non-spoilery review for if you’re reading this to see if you want to play it is that the voice acting and illustration are great, the music is technically very impressive for how it interacts with your dialogue options to result in many, many different versions of each song all of which make sense and flow with each other, but in terms of actual soundtrack quality the good songs are heavily frontloaded. Pan’s song, Persephone’s (first) song, and Medusa’s song are killer, but then Orpheus’ and the final confrontation with the killer and your accuser near the end are a disappointment. Spoilers go below the break.

Continue reading “Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical” →

I couldn’t find a place to put this in the main Far Cry 5 Is Dumb post, so I’m splitting it out instead.

In the Jacob Seed sub-plot of Far Cry 5, you get kidnapped like three times. This happens in all of the game’s three sub-plots, and the only one where it even slightly works is in Faith’s, because there it’s unclear how physically captured you are by any of her drug sequences and it’s totally plausible that Faith is actually just talking to you over the radio (as video game enemies do) while you’re high on the large ambient Bliss in her region of the map. Here in Jacob’s region, you get physically kidnapped for multiple days on multiple occasions and at no point does Jacob just fucking kill you, but instead does some sci-fi Manchurian Candidate bullshit. He does succeed in getting you to kill the region’s resistance leader Eli, but he was winning against Eli and he is losing against you. His threat prioritization is totally backwards here.

Unlike Bliss, a made-up mind control drug, Jacob’s mind control is supposed to work on classical conditioning. But, like, classical conditioning doesn’t work like that. Training someone to salivate in response to a bell is not the same as playing music that induces a mindless murder fugue. At best, and this is a reach but it’s close enough to real that the game could still call itself gritty with a straight face, you might be able to condition someone to draw and fire a gun in response to a specific stimulus. Even that faces serious limitations, though. You’d need the stimulus to be rare enough that they don’t train themselves out of it once released from your program, like, if it’s a certain birdsong common to the area then they’ll get triggered at random and learn to suppress the reflex.

But then you also need to be able to play the stimulus at-will, so it does need to be something like a specific music track, except it also needs to be sufficiently loud and startling to trigger an immediate reaction, because classical conditioning does not erase decades of regular human social instincts with two weeks of training, so there’s going to be quite a bit of resistance to shooting anyone the target knows and cares about, even a little. Even a half-second of hesitation is enough for the conscious mind to catch up with what’s going on and override the reflex, because no matter how much classical conditioning you do it’s still a reflex. Like, have you ever reflexively started driving somewhere more familiar than your intended destination because you just switched to auto-pilot while on a familiar part of the route, reflexively punched someone in a haunted house, or looked for HUD elements for half a second in a real life situation that resembled a video game you’d been playing a lot? Classical conditioning is just building in instincts like that on purpose.

Militaries do use that for the much more macabre purpose of training soldiers to reflexively aim and shoot lethal weapons at a human silhouette (you know those shooting range challenges in shooter games where little human silhouettes pop out from behind cover? Yeah, that’s why those use human silhouettes and not circular targets – it’s about training reflexes in response to stimulus, not accuracy). But there’s no secret turbo-hardcore version of this that ingrains the instinct any deeper than what video games accomplish. The idea that a slideshow and some music repeated long enough will cause a victim to find and assassinate a specific target is as stupid as the idea that you would actually search for or hallucinate stealth indicators while crouching in tall grass because you’ve played a lot of Assassin’s Creed games lately. You totally might reflexively search for icons indicating if you’ve been spotted in that situation, but a half-second later your conscious mind catches up, knows immediately that this is ridiculous, and discards the idea. No amount of additional trauma in the conditioning process will change that (it can build in-group loyalty for other reasons, so there are tactically sound reasons for a psychopath cultist to do it, but it won’t make the conditioning any more potent).

And when the game tries to use video game conditioning on the player, it’s bad at it and it didn’t work on me. As I said earlier, games totally can condition reflexes into players and it’s a foundational part of many common kinds of gameplay. Far Cry 5 tries to take advantage of this, by having sequences where you’re being conditioned where you have to use provided weapons to clear a ghostly hallucination type area of enemies within a time limit, and since it’s not a real location, it involves things like a short labyrinth full of enemies who shoot at you when you turn the corner. This does indeed train the player to follow a specific path and shoot enemies immediately after turning the corner, without allowing their conscious mind to catch up and process what they’re seeing. In the final conditioning sequence, the last enemy you have to kill is the leader of this region’s resistance. They’re trying to do a thing where the player actively participates in being brainwashed into killing the resistance leader Manchurian Candidate style.

Except each conditioning sequence is slightly longer than the last one, adding an additional section to the end. So what I was actually trained to do was to be on high alert for new information as I was reaching the end of the familiar part of the sequence. I knew from previous training sequences that they got extended each time, that it was easy to get lost in a new environment (especially since these hallucination environments make no sense, which makes them harder to navigate), so far from reflexively snap-shotting enemies who were exactly where I expected them to be, I was paying a lot of attention to the new environment and noticed immediately that these guys were ragdolling and leaving behind corpses instead of vanishing into a puff of smoke like the hallucinated foes in earlier parts of the sequence, which made it easy to guess what was going on. When I reached the named character with a unique model I’d been sent to assassinate, I waited out the clock to see if anything would happen. This just resets the sequence like any other failure, so fine, I went through with the assassination to progress the plot (it’s not like it would’ve been hard to program in a slight branching path here, we’re at the end of the Jacob Seed sub-plot and the sub-plots are completely silo’d off from each other, geographically separated and with no characters in common, so the death or survival of the resistance leader would’ve had no impact on the rest of the game).

If they’d made the resistance leader one of those guys in the labyrinth, placed in the exact position as one of the hallucinated enemies from the earlier sequence, odds are fantastic they could’ve successfully conditioned me into turning a corner and blasting him without even thinking about it. But not only do they vastly overstate what classical conditioning can accomplish, they aren’t even capable of using classical conditioning competently for the things it can do.

And this kind of thing bugs me because it usually stems from the belief that being evil grants you magic superpowers, which is one of the most persistent obviously false beliefs which make the world a worse place. Compassion and empathy are not inventions of civilization. They are instincts which we evolved because they work. We also evolved instincts for selfishness and aggression because there are other situations where those work, and you can do a lot better strategically than blindly trusting your instincts all the time anyway, but blindly acting against your instincts all the time is not an effective way to accomplish anything. “Evil = superpowers” is the kind of stupid worldview held by someone too dumb to operate in the real world where you have to be observant and analytical and figure out when to use one approach or the other, so they hard commit to one strategy all the time and hope that it works out.

Not 21st century Mormons, definitely, but is Far Cry 5 about Mormon Classic Flavor, from the 1830s and 40s? There’s two primary reasons I think this might be true: Firstly, their leader is Joseph Seed, who has the same first name and initials as the first Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, and second, Joseph Seed’s Eden’s Gate cult have their own special bonus book of scripture written by Joseph Seed, which is explicitly not the Bible even though it kind of looks like it. In the John Seed storyline there’s a mission where a regular preacher in the Resistance is being coerced into participating in a confessional ritual run by the cult, and pulls a switcheroo with the cult’s off-brand Bible with his own fake Bible, which is a real Bible that’s had a big ol’ hole cut through the pages to conceal a revolver in it. This is a reasonably practical thing to do when you’re in an armed resistance against an authoritarian theocratic doomsday cult, but narratively it is kind of garbled that the symbol of regular folksy Christianity cuts the Bible up to hide a gun inside while the fake cult just uses a different book in addition to the Bible (they quote Revelations a lot, so it doesn’t seem like Eden’s Gate has abandoned the Bible altogether). That’s not the only time the cult’s bonus scriptures come up, either, it’s low-key but Far Cry 5 does make a point out of how Joseph Seed’s own writings are considered scripture on par with the Bible by his followers.

There’s other things that line up, although in a way that would be much more easily chalked up to coincidence without the Joseph Seed->Joseph Smith parallel. They’re a vaguely Christian sect with secret practices who come to a place and take over, which is basically what the Mormons did in like three different towns. Of course, Eden’s Gate does this with automatic weapons and the Mormons do it because they were a sub-culture with high in-group trust who arrived en masse all at once, instantly creating a counterculture that was more economically successful and sometimes even more numerous than the original inhabitants. The people who came before them were understandably upset about the sudden overwriting of their own culture under the force of more economically successful outsiders, but it’s not like the Mormons committed any crimes (I mean, there was the pedophillic polygamy towards the end, but people were pissed at the Mormons way before then) and, y’know, the “original” inhabitants were like one generation removed from people who had seized the territory by force from the originaler inhabitants, so the fact that Missouri flipped the fuck out and legalized the murder of Mormons (technically still a law on the books!) isn’t painting them in the best light.

Eden’s Gate first puts down roots in the game’s setting of Hope County in the Henbane River region, so a lot of their original buildings and early history is concentrated there, and it does seem like this is how they were initially. Whereas the Fall’s End region, home to the largest still-inhabited town in the game, has lots of side quests about how Eden’s Gate cultists terrorized the locals, the Henbane River region has ltos of side quests about how they converted the locals. Like, obviously now you’re fighting a shooting war with Eden’s Gate and there’s not a whole lot of persuasion involved in the first person shooter mechanics, but your quest givers talk about how their friends and family defected, rather than being assaulted, driven out, or killed by unnamed Eden’s Gate cultists, who by implication are strangers (not necessarily outsiders entirely, though – Hope County is big, someone from two towns over could be native to the county but totally unfamiliar to you).

There’s also a quote from Henbane River’s primary antagonist, Faith “Seed” (she’s not actually related to Joseph Seed and she isn’t even the first Faith Seed – it’s not clear if either of the other two lieutenants are real family or not, but they all use the “Seed” name), that “we are all born in purity” and you can be pure again if you follow her. This is in direct contradiction to the doctrine of original sin, which is something the Mormon Church very explicitly rejects – the falsehood of original sin is one of their Thirteen Articles of Faith. On the other hand, Faith also has a sort of childlike purity vibe going for her, despite her backstory making it clear that she’s got to be at least sixteen or seventeen years old, and while I’m bad at reading age even on real people, let alone good-not-great video game models, Faith looks like she’s twenty-five. She has this giggling girlish barefoot-and-sundress vibe to her, though. It is, honestly, a really good portrayal of the creepy fetishization of childishness in women that often stems from (or gets justified by, chicken-and-egg problem there) an obsession with purity and virginity. And while I don’t think any religion is as direct in their rejection of original sin as the Mormons are, they’re definitely not the only Christian sect to reject it overall. It’s just usually something hashed out semi-formally in preachers’ letters from 1870, relegated to obscure trivia that only the most obsessive know about, rather than part of a list of articles of faith that congregants are expected to memorize like the Ten Commandments.

Also, the Mormons in Illinois had their own militia, the Nauvoo Legion, which ruled the city and its surroundings under martial law for a while when tensions got high, and in addition to Eden’s Gate generally being full of stormtroopers to shoot, one of the three lieutenants you take out on the way to Joseph Seed is the leader of that militia. But, I mean, it’s a Far Cry game. Obviously enemy militia were necessary.

It might just be because I live in Utah and there’s a bunch of Mormons here, but it does feel kinda like Far Cry 5 is a modern retelling of the Mormons being driven out of Nauvoo, Illinois told from the perspective of the non-Mormon Illinoisians, and propagandized so hard that they kinda forgot that the Illinois government was pretty firmly supportive of Joseph Smith. Like, yeah, the Nauvoo Legion was Joseph Smith’s own private army and turned out in the hundreds to prevent Smith from being arrested by Missouri authorities, but, like, the governor of Illinois was cool with it and the governor of Missouri was a fucking psychopath. When the Illinois authorities arrested Joseph Smith for siccing the Nauvoo Legion on a newspaper he didn’t like, he went quietly, and then got assassinated by a mob. The Mormons aren’t unambiguously the good guys here, but they look a Hell of a lot better than Joseph Seed does.

Less charitably, you could even call Far Cry 5 a retelling of the Mormons being driven out of Missouri, propagandized so hard that they’ve skipped over and conveniently ignore the massacre of more than a dozen Mormon men and boys that led to the raising of pre-Legion paramilitary groups to guard Mormon settlements.

But the main takeaway here is that canonically, Joseph Smith did in fact get killed by a mob, so there’s no fucking reason why I don’t get to kill Joseph Seed at the end of Far Cry 5, dammit.

I’m pretty harsh on Far Cry 5 in other places, the series never handled its Just Leave theme perfectly even at its peak but they completely bungled it in Far Cry 5, and the game is also just buggier and less polished than previous titles in the series, even playing it long after launch. Weird that they put so little effort into the game whose spicy theme made it the biggest swing of the series so far.

I say that up front only because I want to clarify that this post isn’t a criticism. It’s kinda funny, but, like, it’s fine. It’s not a problem to be solved.

See, Far Cry 5 tracks how many kills you’ve gotten in the game. A lot of games do this, and I like to doublecheck this figure at the end of my playthrough and guesstimate what total fraction of the enemy forces I am single-handedly responsible for killing. Usually it comes out to somewhere between 0.1% and 5%. The upper end of the scale gets kinda funny, while the lower end, though still absurd in the absolute body count involved, suggests I was only critical to the war effort because everyone else was too lazy to push the go-button on an outpost takeover mission.

In Far Cry 5, though, the battle is for a single Montana county. If we take the least densely populated Montana county, assume that Eden’s Gate replaces, rather than adding onto, the people there, make up about 50% of the population, and only 10% of their membership are combatants, they could plausibly have fewer than thirty armed members. I killed 1,986. So, probably no need to lowball things here.

If we instead assume that Hope County is at about the median size county for Montana at 7,000, that 75% of those original inhabitants are old enough to vote/fight against the cult, and Eden’s Gate combatants outnumbers these potential opponents 2:1, that gives Eden’s Gate 10,500 combatants. This is a really high mobilization rate, even for a death cult, but the cult doesn’t have to sustain it long term. It’s a burst of total mobilization within driving distance of their homes, made possible because they’re all living off of stockpiled food for the handful of weeks the conflict takes place over. Even so, I single-handedly eradicated nearly 20% of their forces. That’s the level of losses past which units start breaking and routing altogether. The militia might actually have just shown up to garrison outposts I sacked, without ever taking any offensive action or facing any significant counterattack outside of that which I was personally present for.

Given the cult seems to be near-totally eradicated by the end, though, probably even at this scale, and this level of absurd lethality on part of the protagonist, the militia was probably still responsible for destroying another 60% of the cult, with the remaining 20% fleeing into the wilderness.

Since Far Cry 2, which was such a departure from the original as to be the de facto starting point for the series, the Far Cry series has had an underlying theme of Just Leave. You are coming to a terrible place and your video game protagonist skills of incredible violence simply are not going to help here. How much this has worked has varied from game to game.

As dumb as the Jackal’s plan at the end of Far Cry 2 was, the overall Just Leave theme was 100% valid. While you can help a few civilians evacuate, for the most part the only thing you do in the Ambiguously African Republic is make things worse. The country is divided between two factions which, whatever their initial motivations, are now completely interchangeable with each other, you completely clean out the leadership of both factions and it changes nothing, the missions each one assigns you are individually distinct but you could swap half of the missions from one faction for half of the missions from the other and you wouldn’t notice. For all the people you kill, you never fix anything. The lack of any visible civilians past the opening and a handful of cut scenes, in neither case putting them in any danger from stray bullets, makes it seem like you aren’t actually making things worse, just failing to make it better, but if you suspend your disbelief a little, starting all these gunfights in what look like they should be populated areas are surely increasing the civilian body count while not altering the political situation in any meaningful way.

Far Cry 3 is the least heavy on the Just Leave theme. On the one hand, protagonist Jason Brody definitely should Just Leave, but also, like, that’s the plan for the entire first half of the game, and when he decides to stay it is to help the Rakyat fight off a colonialist mercenary army and also turns out to help him save his younger brother Riley, so even if his motives were impure it was actually 100% the correct decision to not Just Leave. Far Cry 3 instead leans more on the second theme, somewhat present in Far Cry 2 with its beautiful (though slightly poorly aged) rendition of the African bush, of the Murder Vacation, where you come to an exotic and beautiful place and get to do exciting things there, like paragliding or scuba diving or gunfights with pirates. There’s a nod to the Just Leave theme when your Rakyat allies turn out to be just as brutal and savage as the mercenaries they were fighting against – just because they’re an oppressed people doesn’t mean they’re good people – but the Murder Vacation is much more firmly in focus, to the point where Just Leave gets undermined by any analysis of the actual plot.

Far Cry 4 caught itself in the jaws of these two competing themes. It had all the ingredients there for a nearly perfect Just Leave plot with three exceptions: One, the option to Just Leave requires waiting around for ten minutes doing nothing at the start of the game, which is way too obscure, if you really want to nail the Just Leave theme then there should be an in-gameplay option to get the Just Leave ending unlocked in an obvious way at some point in the first half of the game and it should stay available for a long period of time.

Two, the way your resistance allies are just as bad isn’t signaled nearly strong enough or nearly long enough in advance. It’s fine to keep that close to the chest early on, but there should be some foreshadowing close to the end of the first half of the game on the southern map and should get very obvious in the second half of the game on the northern map. Instead, the only clear signal comes from a drug hallucination which, yeah, I know that hallucination serves a narrative purpose, but there’s no reason why protagonist Ajay Ghale should give it any credence.

But mostly three, if you’re doing Just Leave, you have to pull way back on Murder Vacation, and Far Cry 4’s side quests were soaked in Murder Vacation vibes. This is especially the case because of how Pagan Min, the main villain, is a charming psychopath type who kills people in fits of pique or as a punchline. In order to make the villain more fun to fight for the Murder Vacation, they had to make him noticeably worse than either of your two allies. Not by a lot, so it’s not like the Just Leave theme is mortally wounded here, but the war between the resistance and Pagan Min was ongoing when you got there and the triumph of the resistance is a marginal improvement, even if it wasn’t worth all the war deaths. But since you didn’t start the war, just resolved it in favor of one of two slightly better options, you actually did help. A disappointingly small amount for all the effort you put in, but still.

But it came really close to making it work. And all of Far Cry 2, 3, and 4 had one thing about the Just Leave theme nailed: Your allies were little better than your enemies, and winning for one side or another made little difference to the lot of the average inhabitant of whatever place you were fighting over.

And Far Cry 5 bungled this completely.

The idea that, in the Trump era, you could set a Far Cry game in the United States was a killer marketing hook, but they tried to ram a Just Leave plot into it and it was an utter, abysmal failure. It’s not just that it lines up poorly with the real world inspirations for the game’s events – there had and has yet to be an actual shooting war with a right-wing militia, so there was always going to have to be a lot of creative liberties taken there. No, it’s that the team you’re on is very unambiguously the good guys. Joseph Seed’s cult kidnaps, tortures, and brainwashes people, and the resistance does not do that, nor anything like that. Nor is it that you can’t help the resistance win. You absolutely crush the cult as a going concern. Outposts are liberated, lieutenants are killed, if you 100% a region the map tells you explicitly that the cult is no longer present in the region and their presence in gameplay is reduced so far that I think it might actually be totally eradicated (there’s an option to give all the outposts back to the cult in the post-game, which I think supports that it is possible to wipe them out to the point where no patrols spawn anymore).

The game has three endings, the first is the Just Leave ending where you, despite being a (deputy) US marshal (or maybe a sheriff’s deputy? Both the sheriff and the marshal act with a certain level of familiarity that suggests you are their deputy in particular, but either way, you are doing your actual job here), decide not to arrest Joseph Seed despite having come here with a warrant. If you do arrest him and play the rest of the game, you find unambiguous evidence of a huge host of crimes – kidnapping, false imprisonment, rampant theft and mugging, a gazillion murders. This guy is breaking tons of laws and you are the proper authorities. Normally in Far Cry you’re a rando outsider coming into the country to try and fix things with guns and blood. Not without significant provocation, but still, you don’t represent anyone or anything except your own personal interests. In Far Cry 5, though, this is your actual job.

In the game’s second Just Leave ending, you can walk out on the final boss fight, leaving Hope County to Joseph Seed with the tattered remnants of his cult while evacuating all the named characters and, presumably, the bulk of those who opposed Joseph’s illegal theocracy. I guess you can ring up the National Guard once you’re out. Except you get mind controlled by the special Bliss drug that Joseph’s been using to enforce cult loyalty through the rest of the game, and implicitly attack your friends and, since you’re Player One, you probably win.

In the game’s true ending, where you actually fight the last boss, you cut down what are possibly the very last remnants of Joseph Seed’s cult (assuming you’ve been 100%-ing the game, which is uncommon but totally possible and does not change this ending), and then it turns out the nuclear apocalypse is coming, and also you end up a prisoner of Joseph Seed and being mind controlled by Bliss again.

None of these are inevitabilities of your intervention. Unlike Far Cry 2-4, it’s not that you can’t help because one very effective combatant simply is not the solution to the problem here. It totally is! There are clear good guys and bad guys, and even if the nuclear apocalypse is inevitable (it only happens in one ending, but that’s the ending where you fight Joseph Seed, so in the other ending it might happen like fifteen minutes after the fade-to-black, accounting for the time the boss fight takes), you can just take the cult’s bunkers for the resistance. There’s definitely a lot of fire and explosions involved in the battles to take out each of the bunkers in turn, but, like, they’re nuke bunkers. While the squishy people inside are certainly affected by all the burning and gunfire, the key feature of the structure itself is that it can stand up to much worse than a few detpacks and gas explosions. Hell, a bunch of resistance members also have bunkers. When you’re killing Joseph’s lieutenants a bunch of them ask “have you ever considered that Joseph might be right?” and I’m like “yeah, sure, whatever, my team is also full of apocalypse preppers and none of the evil shit I’m killing you for is helping you to prepare for the nukes in any way.”

You aren’t doomed from the start by the hubris of thinking you can murder your way to democracy, you’re only doomed because the hand of the author reaches down from the heavens to destroy your progress. It’s also the only Far Cry game (except maybe 6?) where you can’t kill the charismatic villain at the end. It’s not just that it’s possible to leave him alive – there’s actually no way to defeat him. While I can imagine a story where this would be thematically necessary, every time it happens in a video game it has been strictly inferior to an ending where the villain straightforwardly loses, even if that doesn’t result in a straightforwardly happy ending. It’s very easy to create a story where a lone individual cannot meaningfully fight against the gears of history, but very hard to create a first-person shooter where a lone individual can’t kill a specific guy. We kill a shitton of specific guys in this story, Joseph Seed is just another mortal man and he’s right in front of us. The only reason we can’t add his body to the pile is because he’s the author’s specialest little boy.

This must’ve been a common enough complaint, because (according to the wiki) in New Dawn, the post-apocalyptic Far Cry 5 spin-off, Joseph Seed returns and you either kill him or leave him begging for death on his knees. That’s great, but I’m not buying a second video game to play for 15 hours just to reach the part you should’ve put in this game. I’m just going to alt+f4 as soon as I finish the boss fight.