Torture
me, kill me, just please shut up.
Vaas from far Cry 3 was received well.
His ‘definition of insanity’ speech was a big deal. People liked being menaced
by the guy. The sad part is, in a game like Far Cry it’s difficult to have a
conversation with the bad guy, since you’ll want to you know, shoot him. So he
has to find you in a situation where you can’t shoot him. And that’s a tricky
thing to accomplish.
And so in Far Cry 3, Jason Brody never
checked his corners, and kept catching baseball bats to the head so he could be
trussed up, and Vaas would throw him into a deathtrap James Bond villain style,
after being a crazy dude at him.
This, in recent years, has metastasized
into the stuff from the new Wolfenstein series. Our unstoppable hero seems to
be kidnapped, incapacitated, tied down and so forth with the regularity of an
adult film star, so that the Nazis can menace him and do terrible things to
him.
Meaning that to me Wolfenstein feels
like a weird version of a hurt-comfort fanfic, where someone hurts you and you
comfort yourself by battering the crap out of faceless drones.
Far Cry 5 buys into the Wolfenstein
model. You essentially get kidnapped or incapacitated by the bad guys about 15
times so that they can monologue at you. And oh my God do they monologue. It’s
just endless cavalcades of bland, ridiculous, senseless and vapid attempts to
make it seem like they have a point.
The devs have said that part of the
theme of 5 is the danger of blind belief, and in the case of the People at
Eden’s Gate, they’re definitely blind since no real clear philosophy or
theology is established for the Peggies besides ‘the collapse is happening,’
‘souls operate like in dark souls,’ and ‘Joseph Seed is..somebody.’ Despite
claims that they’re Christians, they never seem to really reference ‘God,’ or
‘Jesus’ and almost all of their biblical references are out of context stuff
from a book it sounds like none of them ever read. So they sound like a cult,
which they are. The problem is the game wants us to take them seriously, and be
‘troubled’ by their statements about whether Joe Seed ‘might be right.’
And the game continually tries this.
Even up until the endings. Keeps trying to act like we actually are
considering, or worried that this maniac might be right. The problem is, he
doesn’t give us any reason to think that, and his religion seems to have gained
its followers through brainwashing and drugs, which makes me question how the
hell it got so large to begin with.
And I think this is a major weakness.
The most effective monologuer of the bunch is Jacob, and Jacob is effective
because his monologues give us a good vantage into his mindset, and are very
clearly designed in a workman’s way to actually brainwash us. I didn’t mind
Jacob talking to me because well, he spoke the least, and his means of trying
to seduce me to the dark side were better thought out. See. He tortures and
attempts to psychologically condition you, Manchurian candidate style. It’s actually
pretty damned brilliant.
Faith and John though? Holy shit they’re
terrible.
Faith is the typical Far Cry “Drugs are
magic” bad girl, and her entire thing revolves around stupid visions and
generic commentary about ‘being happy in the bliss,’ and we’re forced to wander
around through vistas that resemble a Parks Department Screen Saver while she
dispenses more But-Thou-Musts then other mysterious fairy princesses.
John gives us the same talk. The same
talk again and again. He’s the Evangelist, with his ‘Say, Yes’ program and his
weird torture stuff. John’s actually not a bad villain, but he talks too much,
and we’re forced to watch him talk too much. He says the same thing every time,
and we get no real glimpse into his character besides ‘he likes hurting people,
and uses contrition as an excuse.’ Since I started this rant they seem to have
added something so we can skip cut-scenes, it’s made dealing with John a
thousand times better.
And see, that’s the problem. I shouldn’t
be reaching for the ‘skip cut scene button’ the first time I saw the cut scene.
And if I fail a mission, I shouldn’t have to sit through the guy being a jerk
to me again and again and again.
The most irksome thing though. We can
never just ‘shut up’ the bad guy. Even when we get to fight them, they get
death monologues. We’re forced to sit there, listening to the crap coming out
of their mouth, without saying anything of our own. After I killed John, I just wanted to rifle
his body with M60 shells and leave him for the cougars, but no, I had to walk
over so he could grab my shirt lapel and vomit a ton of borax about his brother
being guided by the heavens at me.
It robs you of your sense of beating
the guys, which makes their role as antagonists feel, well, hollow.
Brevity is the soul of wit. Shut up. Or
at least let me shut them up.
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