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.
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