Far Cry 6 is a revolution for nobody
full spoilers for Far Cry 6 follow.
As the rock-bottom of humanity that terminally-online, capital-g Gamers tend to be, severe backlash towards anything in their shiny new games perceived as ‘political’ (read: not aligned with their politics) is as sure a reality as the sun coming up every morning. As a cowardly concession to this (admittedly) small but (incredibly) vocal group of people, videogame developers and publishers have found themselves going to increasingly absurd lengths to avoid even the potential for discussion of any real message in their games; to the point that the corporate assertion of ideological agnosticism itself has become a bit of a running joke online.
Being one of the largest and thus potential buyer alienation-adverse developers in the world, Ubisoft is notorious for this practice. When they aren’t following the industry in developing the umpteenth installment in franchises predicated on the idea that the US military is, the occasional bad apple aside, ultimately doing the right thing (a message which, of course, isn’t in any way political), they occasionally take a breath and center their games around some otherwise vaguely relevant concepts; such as a right-wing, religious militia overtaking a chunk of rural America in Far Cry 5. However, if you asked a Ubisoft PR rep whether any real-world commentary was intended by what their games depict, you’d get a response explicitly denying any intentions within the material aside from pure, clean fantasy.
Granted, if you asked that same rep whether Ubisoft higher-ups had spent decades covering up and participating in a toxic and abusive workplace, you’d probably get the same flat rejection of the notion.
Go figure.
I’d considered exploring the dichotomy between the company’s official line and what their games actually depict before, but it wasn’t until their latest release, Far Cry 6, that I’d felt there was truly a distinctive line being crossed. Their 2020 game Watch Dogs: Legion admittedly came close, shirking any real bite in its ostensibly antifascist through-line by having the perpetrators of an authoritarian takeover of London be a completely original, personally-motivated private military contractor instead of…you know…the police. It’s uninspired under even the best of circumstances to do ‘dystopian’ fiction this way; to dress up your game’s conflict in aesthetic gestures towards something entirely possible, if not actually ongoing, and then swear up and down that all the obvious parallels to reality are simply coincidental.
Far Cry 6 takes things a bold step further into ‘we promise it isn’t political’ fantasy, though, because the game throws you into honest-to-god Cuba, and tasks you with overthrowing the country’s military dictatorship.
Well, not actual Cuba, but Yara — a fictional Caribbean island nation so clearly intended as a Cuban stand-in that the mere discrepancy invites a slew of never-to-be-answered questions. For instance: why bother going through all the trouble of creating a fictional nation’s history both locally and internationally that so closely mirrors Cuba’s own, only with a host of proper noun swaps? Did Ubisoft really believe that such a paper-thin degree of separation would render any parallels inert? The country’s capital, Esperanza, is heavily influenced by the layout and architecture of Havana; it’s to the point where Yara even had a history with the USSR, one important enough that the in-game store allows you to buy a ‘Motherland Bundle,’ which includes a Red Army uniform for the player character.
I would be remiss if I didn’t state that actually, Cuba does exist in passing reference within Far Cry 6’s world, suggesting that there must be another, almost identical island nation with an eerily similar past situated right next to Yara in the Caribbean. It’s such an easily-missed detail that it comes across as though someone realized late into development they hadn’t really stated anywhere that Yara and Cuba are two separate things, and had to scramble to establish the technicality.
You play as Dani, a Yaran native whose gender you decide at the game’s start. At first, Dani is merely looking to escape the regime for the beaches of Miami, but they eventually (and rather alarmingly quickly) end up rising through the ranks and ultimately leading Libertad, the revolutionary group looking to overthrow dictator Antón Castillo (played by the fantastic Giancarlo Esposito) after his decades-long rule over the nation, following a previously successful but short-lived revolution which took down his father back in ‘67.
Setting circumstances aside for a moment, Dani is a perfectly likable character. Following two Far Cry games with silent, blank-slate protagonists, it was refreshing to have a voiced, personality-intact character to control again. They were cemented as far and away my favorite protagonist of the series (admittedly a low bar to clear) the first time Dani began to sing along to the music on the radio as I was driving; a small detail, but one that’s endlessly endearing on the occasions it happens. Far Cry 6 throws you at characters and situations ranging from well-considered and genuinely moving to hopelessly absurd — delivered at a breakneck pace, given there’s rarely a cutscene that breaks the ninety-second mark — and so it’s a testament to the colorful writing and sharp acting that Dani slots in equally as naturally in nearly every single one of them.
It’s a real shame, then, that you and Dani are stuck turning the gears of one of the most weightless revolutions I’ve ever seen depicted in media. There are moments that work here: a few lines hint at cool (and dare I say political) ideas, and a handful of character beats that are delivered too deftly to pass by unnoticed.
However, the problems with the game’s conceit begin to break down as soon as you consider how much it directly pulls from the real world. For one thing, the game, much like Watch Dogs: Legion, completely removes any real-world institutional involvement in Yara’s conflict, outside of a few winks here and there. A US dog tag with a description along the lines of ‘of course the CIA was involved with Yara at some point, let’s not kid ourselves here’ is the curtest nod towards the nation’s history of exploiting practically every corner of Latin America that we get, aside from a late-game plot revelation that Libertad (unbeknownst to its current leader) is trading with the fucking CIA in order to fund itself — a revelation that goes absolutely nowhere, and is, remarkably, entirely forgotten even before the end of the mission that introduces it.
The actual Cuban Revolution saw Fidel Castro and the 26th of July movement overthrow the US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, and the island nation — I cannot stress this enough — has not seen a day without punishment from that moment onward: punishment for its audacity in successfully rejecting military occupation by the most powerful empire on the planet. The CIA would go on to attempt literally hundreds of assassinations against Castro in order to install a new puppet and guarantee sovereignty over the nation — and more importantly, its resources and strategic position — against the will of its people. Despite decades of US sanctions and economic blockades severely restricting its ability to rebuild and access even basic necessities, however, the nation still manages to match or outdo its oppressor in significant metrics — including life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and the transparency of its electoral process (the country even ratified a new constitution in 2019, setting many things in stone we have yet to push through a controlled-opposition gridlock here in America).
A bit more on that: Cuba has, as a result of these sanctions, been unable to directly import needles throughout the ongoing pandemic. After rejecting America’s offer of a million doses (less than 1/10th the population of Cuba), it instead developed its own vaccine, and now, with a vaccination rate far above that of the US, it has even begun exporting that vaccine to other nations.
Cuba has managed to stave off further attempts at occupation since Batista fell (including the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, which was — of course — funded by the CIA), despite our best efforts to make its citizens miserable enough to justify regime change under the guise of ‘liberating’ the nation; a tactic we have ‘successfully’ used countless times before.
To that end, twice in the past year, the US government and its propaganda arm of the media have attempted to frame large protests against the effects and principle of its own sanctions as a show by people desperate for us to instead ‘save’ them (including pictures of protestors holding up M-26–7 flags alongside their claims), or paint tiny anti-Cuban protests led by right-wingers as would-be mass uprisings that conveniently fizzled out the day before due to some sort of government crackdown instead.
Even then, amidst Cuba’s resilience to our attempts, America has kept an illegal prison known for its use of torture and indefinite, unsubstantiated imprisonment operating within the nation’s borders for nearly two decades now; against the wishes of Cuba, countless Americans, and the world in general. Make no mistake here: America is and has been unequivocally in the wrong, and no failure on the part of Cuba’s government should be stated without the qualification of how much damage we have intentionally inflicted upon it and its citizens for more than half a century.
That’s a lot of history, I know, but context is key here. You can’t just go around pulling from that sort of history while building a fictional world without consequences. For Far Cry 6 to do exactly that — to use a broad brush to paint on the look, atmosphere, and surface-level culture of Cuba — and then cowardly trap the game’s conflict within a vacuum that refuses to name the real things that led to the revolution it wears the hat of, is beyond disrespectful. By choosing to engage with the aesthetics of a nation’s ongoing struggle, Ubisoft destined itself towards callous apathy with its surgical removal of any mention — let alone actual criticism — of the real-world perpetrators.
Even Libertad itself, if taken at face value, is woefully devoid of having anything meaningful to say; a glaring oversight as it ostensibly (and rather easily) fights against fascism. As catchy as its mantra of ‘free elections, free expression, and a Yara free of Castillos’ might be, it is quite literally the furthest into the group’s ideology that the game ever bothers to explore.
If your response after all that is ‘it would also be tasteless to actually set the game in Cuba,’ then I would agree, and suggest that maybe the game shouldn’t have been made the way it was at all. England is an empire, and so the liberties taken in Watch Dogs: Legion are more easily dismissed as part of its alternate-future setting. The game directly prods at the nation’s dense history of seizing, stripping bare and leaving to rot countless nations across the globe throughout centuries of imperialism. With Far Cry 6, we’re instead supposed to uncritically get invested in the liberation of a fictional country inextricably linked to one still fighting to this day for the right to exist on its own terms.
Far Cry 6 is, otherwise, as safely progressive a game as you can expect from a multibillion-dollar company. It briefly explores the reality of trans peoples’ separate struggle in the aftermath of a revolution to overthrow a right-wing government, and seems to understand the ways in which nationalism is utilized by fascists to isolate themselves from any and all ideological opposition. The game brings attention to how slavery was ‘America’s first corporation,’ in its own words, and acknowledges our private prison institution as the modern-day descendant of that same system. Likewise, it addresses through Dani’s early desire to flee to Miami the ways that white Americans overwhelmingly see and treat brown immigrants like them upon their arrival to the country — the quote ‘the American Dream doesn’t come in our shade’ stands out as tauntingly political, cliché as it might be. Despite these mildly left-leaning takes espoused by the game’s cast, however, they are all ultimately ancillary ideas struggling to patch over the threadbare core of what the game simultaneously purports to, but ultimately refuses to actually be about.
Far Cry 6 ends abruptly after Castillo’s death; the murder-suicide of himself and his teenage son as Libertad seizes control of his fortress is a last, sputtering grasp at drama that’s followed by nothing. No look at the consequences, no attempt to show what comes next for Yara, and certainly no exploration of the struggle to fill the power vacuum left behind, and what it would take to rebuild the nation. Instead, Dani immediately leaves Libertad after Castillo’s death, offering no more than this:
When tyranny is law, revolution is order. Yara is yours; don’t fuck it up.
Following that rather economical final stretch of narrative, we’re offered a vague excuse to go back to the open world and finish up any tasks left undone under the guise of ‘ridding Yara of the remaining Castillo forces.’ As one final twist of the knife, it’s clear that not even giving the story a modicum of finality can come at the expense of keeping players playing, and potentially dropping some money into the game’s store while doing so.
Far Cry 6’s very foundation is a misguided, crass attempt to filter merely the surface image of revolution and resistance through equal parts nostalgia and theme park-style empowerment. That in itself is certainly nothing new for videogames, but it comes across as especially egregious in this case, as Ubisoft rips pages of inspiration from a book that is still being written in defiance of imperialism to this day. While I can sympathize with what seems to be developers genuinely trying to form any message under a ‘zero-politics’ mandate by the company’s management, I can’t help but feel that it was ultimately the wrong game to make, at one of the worst times they could possibly have made it.
For all its bombast, conviction and beauty, a revolution with nothing to say for itself is a revolution in nothing but name.
