MHWilliams said: Even then the darker of the two games neglects to really take a side on anything and sort of gets mired in Bioshock Infinite style morality at the very end. Click to expand... Click to shrink...

I mean, Far Cry 5 is written by Bioshock: Infinite's co-writer. And Bioshock: Infinite is an example of a game that I think some people missed the point of because they have a naive view of revolutionaries-slash-freedom-fighters. While Infinite kinda muddled itself up with alternate universes (and that is a very fair criticism), the fact remains that if you support any kind of resistance movement, beware lest they murder the shit out of you once they get power. This is an extremely predictable pattern backed up by centuries of revolutions -- socialist revolutions in particular. I think some people wanted Bioshock to be this sliiiiiiiightly delusional fantasy where you free the oppressed and then the oppressed don't proceed to kill everyone they don't like. They wanted a feelgood revolution story. The problem is the OPTICS of depicting groups the audience is sympathetic towards as being monsters in the making. Remember HAZE? The big twist in HAZE was that the revolutionaries just wanted the nectar technology. Sure, Mantel were evil and they should be fought against, but you'd haplessly become a tool of people just as bad, if not worse, than Mantel. In the really real wold, the oppressed are often just as bad as their oppressors. (Just look the history of Catholics and Protestants hanging/burning each other every time they managed to get power.) But in the modern political context these unpleasant truths play very poorly with in particular more progressive-minded audiences. Regardless of the core truths in such stories, the optics of them are far too taboo. You have to cloak the entire thing behind fictional countries and fictional causes.That said, I think there's an interesting reading of Far Cry 5 -- the player character is a federal agent. They are an instrument of government oppression. This comes back to the whole right to collect rainwater thing that is touched upon early in the game. The player character is both a force of government oppression and meddling, and a force of impartial liberation. People hate the government spying on them and harassing them, but they do like the government saving them from the crazy people. There's a duality there.I think that ultimately the Trump thing has caused a huge problem of people reading what they want to read into stories that are overtly political but not in the way those people want them to be. Back in 2016, Homefront: The Revolution, which FC5 arguably takes some influence from, was bashed by several outlets because they were convinced the game was xenophobic, that it celebrated white supremacist rhetoric, and stuff like that. The game even managed to get a Playboy article attacking it. But that really wasn't the case. HFTR's story was an allegory for American oppression, for American corporations. These entities were simply swapped for Korean equivalents that behaved exactly like Americans. Everything the KPA/APEX were doing to the Americans was something the Americans had done to someone else, and the game was very explicit about that. In a pivotal scene, the traitor character shouts that "WE WEREN'T HERE FIRST! EVERYONE GETS REPLACED!" Which is touching on the fact that the Yellow Zones are effectively reservations akin to the ones set up to contain the Native American population. I guess where the problem lies in HFTR's narrative is A: How much content they cut and how fragmented the core story is, and B: the absence of, for instance, Native American characters who could lend weight and gravity to the story.