All This Ludo-Narrative Dissonance in Farcry 4 is Bad for Your Stomach
Regular-American man travels, instantly kills and leads revolution.
In Farcry 4, you play as Ajay Ghale on his way to Kyrat, a fictional country in the Himalayas. His purpose: deliver his mothers ashes to their final resting place. On his way, the dictator king Pagan Min sends soldiers to stop his bus. The sociopath then takes Ajay away.
Over a lovely meal in his castle, Pagan tells you a backstory of he and your mothers love, while he tortures and kills your guide (secret terrorist). You make your escape out of the palace and run into the Golden Path. They know who you are (senior Ghale was the big boss), and they rescue you away from Pagan’s grasp.
You begin Farcry 4 here. Your missions involve helping members of the Golden Path further their aims, hunt for the locals, and liberate radio towers to free the country. And free the North to bring your mother's ashes to rest.
From the beginning, the narrative is a mess for Ajay and the player. Its a rush into the story, its a rush into getting the player to ‘care’. But we’ll get into that later.
Utilizing the mechanics of Farcry is underwhelming. The guns never feel exactly right, the weight and recoil for each different weapon being off. The weapon I had the most fun with was the bow, due to the rumble feature on the controller. Enemies come down at you in a wave-type formation. Same with the animals. There is never anything very challenging to think through with enemy encounters even when playing the game on hard.
The stealth sections suffer from undercooked mechanics. Released in the same generation as Dishonored, a superior stealth game by all accounts, Farcry is meagre in comparison.
A few of the powers are interesting. In later sections of the game, upgrades become necessary to pass certain challenges like the arena. The use of explosive arrows especially. The addition of animals to the core combat loops make the game far more engaging with how you want to approach scenarios. And the ability to ride elephants alongside other vehicles was a great touch. The rest of the abilities decrease reload times or hold the bow with no sway, not seriously impacting the gameplay loop. In all, Farcry is a game that does a lot of things, all of them half-baked and a slog to get through on a second run.
Setting, Ubisoft always nails the setting. In each little house, a radio plays a different song in Hindi. Shrines throughout the world are adorned. Kyrat radio stations play in vehicles, murals of characters in the game, and interesting set designs immerse the player. The various biomes of an Indian-Himalayan region fully immerse the player in life in the world. It’s just a shame there’s so little to actually do.
Now, I don’t know why all these Ubisoft games have the same premise. “You are a regular degular dude, who ends up a far cry from home. And suddenly, you’re a murderer”.
There are so many questions at the beginning of the game — why would Ajay kill? Why does he so readily leave Pagan? Who is this character? On the one hand, as a player, it makes sense — I’m threatened, Farcry is a power fantasy, I shoot and kill and escape. On the other, there is a dissonance between the protagonist, name, backstory and motivations. Not every video game’s main character needs to be a killing machine, but the gameplay should reflect them, not create ludo narrative dissonance with the player. Ajay ends up being both a blank slate and a potential sociopathic weirdo. This is something Pagan points out in one of the endings of the game.
Throughout the game, Ajay is helping the brother and sister leaders of the Golden Path terrorist cell, who are rival cells with different visions for Kyrat. The players make decisions on what missions they’ll accept; helping free people, destroying opium dens, etc. Depending on the missions fulfilled, it impacts the leadership of the party and presents an interesting premise. Will you lead Kyrat into modernity with the sister? Or team with the brother, and follow the old ways? Narratively, it is the most interactive and far-reaching premise in the game.
By the end of the game, Ajay has grown to become the successor of Kyrat. And his character reflects none of this growth. Being able to have an ending reflect your faction, kill Pagan or hear him out, kill the leaders you’ve chosen — these are all great options. Yet, Ajay is attached to none of them. This is the issue with trying to have a blank slate character seemingly with a backstory as the main character; there is no payoff or stakes. Or is there? Take Link from Ocarina of Time, who says nothing but fulfills the hero archetype well. The difference is this is purely in the realm of fantasy, and the tropes are well executed in Zelda. Ajay is in an action movie, but he is not an action-oriented character without player input. He listens to Pagan Min expose dialogue. And he does little that is distinctly Ajay in his scenes.
Farcry 4 has interesting ideas, but it is not greater than the sum of its parts. It suffers from underbaked systems and a weak main character amongst strong narrative ideas. Overtime, the Farcry series should return to this game. And build on the ideas that are present there.
