Far Cry 3

You know, I'm actually kinda disgusted that game reviewers out there lazily call games they don't like racist, but since they all love the shit out of Far Cry 3, nobody mentions a goddamn thing.

This game is racist as balls. Start-of-game spoiler warning, everything later will be tagged.

Jason Brody, riding high from graduating from some rich kid college for rich kids, goes on a rich asshole vacation through the third world, and jumps his white, fake tribal tattooed-ass out of an airplane with his white friends and immediately gets captured by savage brown people. His brother attempts to escape with him and is killed with the process. Jason flees deep into the jungle and is saved by a Magical Negro, who gives him a magic tribal tattoo on his left arm that basically lets him unlock new combat abilities, also making him a member of the local tribe. While Jason must now search for his white friends and white little brother, he must also play Great White Savior to the native villagers, who are at war with slavers and pirates, and losing badly. Probably because they sit around getting drunk all the time. You know, like natives do.

To be fair, the natives do have soldiers and their numbers increase as you liberate outposts, but they don't venture outside their own territory. They're pretty much entirely just window dressing for your one man army campaign against the pirates and slavers.

Spoiler:

They marketed this game as a break from the worn out power fantasy most FPS games follow of being a badass supersoldier, instead being an everyman caught in an extraordinary situation he must fight his way out of. The problem is that they needn't have bothered thanks to "de tatau," the magic tattoos. A few steps out of the village and Jason is already hunting and skinning game and making medicine out of plants without any kind of learning curve whatsoever. He can always do it to start out with; spending XP only improves these abilities. There is no basic combat move that he can't do; he is instantly familiar with the manual of arms for any weapon he picks up. Remember, his dead older brother's the soldier. Not him.

If anything, this is a way douchier power fantasy than the super soldier, because it's the exact same one yet it lies to you that it's not. The main difference is, you don't have to do anything to earn your place as the apex predator warrior in Far Cry 3, you just sort of show up, and a Magical Negro notices that you have "the heart of a warrior" and gives you the tribe's magic bullshit tattoos, which apparently work better for Jason than any of the actual natives, despite this being their island and their mythos; Citra thinks that Jason may be the warrior from their ancient legends reborn.

'Cause this is what most people think when somebody of a different race shows up to their isolated, homogenous society, right?
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You can tell it's the same power fantasy readjusted based on Citra's pleas with you to stay on the island: "Your friends will go back to America, have kids and lead boring lives!" That this is not the path for a true warrior like Jason and he will be miserable back in America now. It plays to a more grown-up insecurity among gamers, now that we're getting older: The exciting life we planned out for ourselves when we were young has not materialized and now that our guts are getting bigger and our hair a little thinner, fantasies of being a super-soldier are wearing thin. We still want to think there's some way we can get out and be strong, powerful, and badass, doing exciting things all the time. So the fantasy is grown up a little, from being a young soldier to a college grad out in the real world, and been adjusted to assuage our fears of being completely bored with our privileged lives.

TL;DR:

I mean it's a fun game and all, but the plot is hooooooooooorrible.

While the racial issues were brought up at Rock Paper Shotgun, and the RPS article got a mention on Kotaku, the fact remains most reviewers either didn’t notice or didn’t care. However, I’m not going to harangue that point here. The RPS article is worth mentioning because it got a response from FC3’s writer, who essentially said “Yes, I’m aware of all those tropes. In fact, I included them on purpose. It’s a satire!”

His actual words here:
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It’s the standard dev response to the slightest controversy. “I did what I set out to do, I’m happy with what I did, the token complainers just didn’t get it.”

But here’s the thing. If all of this was meant to be a parody of the grotesqueries of violent video games, reviewers would eat that shit up. But none of them are even mentioning it. They’re all too busy talking about what a fun game it is and how awesome it is that the protagonist is not a soldier.

Spec Ops: The Line did it. Ham-fistedly, but it made its point very, very well: “You came here to be something you’re not.” Your power fantasy is pretty fucked up, yo. And the reviewers, en masse, sat up and took notice.

Not so in Far Cry 3. Everything is played absolutely straight. There is no punch line, nothing that shows the irony. That’s because there isn’t any. Jeffrey Yohalem is throwing out the corporate version of the old “LOL I TROLL U” defense.

Quote :

“Yes, I’m aware of all those tropes. In fact, I included them on purpose. It’s a satire!”

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaame.