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The stupid game 55/3/2023 The game culminates with your pursuing the mission to take down Jacob Seed, the pivotal member of the Seed family, and the only one left by this point as you've taken out his siblings. (There are technically three, but the third is the game's easter egg false ending at the very start.) So let's finally discuss them. And apparently this is the conditioning required to justify one of the game's two endings. Instead the game opts to just declare that it's happened, and then once more force you to play through sections where you're shooting at imagined colleagues who disappear in puffs of green Bliss smoke. We've already discussed at length how atrocious is Far Cry 5's petulant way of literally forcing the player to play its core story beats, and it's within these non-optional poorly timed interruptions to the game that all this supposed brainwashing occurs. ![]() How? By enforced cutscenes and a complete abandoning of logic. You are, by the end, programmed to turn into a Bliss-faced zombie cult-worshipping brainwashed acolyte by hearing the song Only You, by the popular beat combo The Platters. And best of all, just to make sure it's as awful as possible, when someone's under its control this is shown to the player by their head being surrounded by a perpetual green fog, like in a cartoon.Īlong the way through this nonsensical trudge, one of the main bads is, apparently, brainwashing you. ![]() It's a hallucinogenic, but also causes euphoria, but also causes brainwashing, but also causes zombification. The further you get in the game, the more heavily and awkwardly it leans on this lunatic crutch, where people are literally zombified by Bliss, a flower-based drug that causes, er, whatever the game fancies its causing in the moment. For instance, how have they convinced this entire army of men (it's alllll men) to take up arms and fight absolutely anyone who doesn't adhere to the Seeds' religious proclivities? Is it an exploration of the terrifying power of charismatic cult leaders? Have they looked at how major religious texts can be used to convince the vulnerable of twisted notions? Do they explore the politics of poverty, picking up on the issues of the ignored poor white rural Americans raised by the election of Trump? Good grief, no. Zoom in on any aspect and it only gets more woefully ludicrous. The madness is palpable no matter how far out you zoom. So, absolutely not a single tiny speck of even the broadest overview of its concept makes a lick of sense. They've somehow established some sort of invisible borders to the whole area, despite being replete with aeroplanes and helicopters, and you are tasked with helping a team of about five from the county sheriff's department and US Marshals with trying to bring about an end to this heavily armed militia of hundreds, if not thousands. A family of loonies - the Seeds - have taken over a large stretch of rural Montana, a sort of county-wide cult. But what I didn't - couldn't - predict, was that it would be so actively nonsensical, so far from meaningful as to rip holes in the known universe. And I'm not claiming that with hindsight - I wrote it all down last May. ![]() I'd assumed, before the game came out, that they'd serve up a god-awful confusion of half-baked ideas about cults and American militias, and prevaricate and ultimately chicken out of trying to make any form of statement of any nature. I didn't expect Far Cry 5's story to be good. Although believe me, if you've not finished it and read this anyway, you'll only feel more compelled to play it to see if I'm exaggerating. Just in case, let me reiterate, this is an article that contains spoilers to the very end of the game. ![]() It is time to drape yourself in spoiler warnings and embrace the volcano of awful that is Far Cry 5's ending. And wow, does it reach its subterranean nadir when it comes to the finish. Not just in how it so idiotically interrupts you in the middle of other scripted missions to force you to play through hideously badly written enforced semi-playable cutscenes, but in every word uttered by every character from start to finish. It is, by a considerable stretch, the most abysmally written narrative in AAA gaming. Far Cry 5 has a bad story in the same way that the bubonic plague has a bad bacterium.
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