To say I was disappointed with Far Cry 5 is an understatement: It’s the most I’ve been let down by a game in years. If you want my full thoughts you can find it here. That’s not what I’m here to write about today, though. I want to take today to focus on the endings of Far Cry 5 and how it speaks to a more significant issue in gaming today, because I couldn’t dive into that sufficiently in my audio review. Games can’t seem to figure out how to properly end their stories in a satisfactory way.
Before we go further, SPOILER WARNING FOR ANY GAME MENTIONED! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED. IF YOU KEEP READING, IT IS NOT MY FAULT THESE ENDINGS GET SPOILED FOR YOU.
With that out of the way, let’s look at Far Cry 5 first. You can achieve two endings in the game based on the decision you make going into the game’s final fight with villainous cult leader Joseph Seed. If you choose to let Seed live, you walk away with your partners and drive away vowing to bring the national guard. There’s just one catch: your protagonist has ingested a hypnotic drug triggered by a song. When a specific song plays, your avatar goes on a murderous rampage. Conveniently, you can guess what starts playing in your car as you drive off.
Ending number two has you fighting Seed and your hypnotized friends. You eventually save your friends, only for a nuclear warhead to go off and destroy the state of Montana. Your friends die, Seed somehow lives, and the two of you get stuck in a bunker for what seems to be the rest of eternity. Awesome, right?
Both endings somehow manage to make the whole point of the game moot. You don’t win, and you don’t defeat the evil cult leader despite the many hours you’ve spent working to take him down. Somehow his messed up idea of religion saves him and screws you over; thanks for playing! Maybe the game is speaking to a more significant point about how hard it is to take down cults no matter how crazy they seem? Okay, I could see that being the case if the game didn’t have me siccing a bear called Cheeseburger on people not twenty minutes before the big fight? If that’s the point they wanted to make, then they need to pick their tone and stick with it. Have the game feel threatening and desolate the whole time, so the ending stings for the player. Don’t make it such that I can take a purple eighteen-wheeler with flames on the side and destroy pretty much every car in Montana with the press of a button.
The problem Far Cry 5‘s endings present is the fact that they take all the satisfaction for making it to the end of the game away from the player. At this point, the player wants to take Seed and stop him any means necessary. I didn’t even want to kill him; I just wanted him to face justice properly and rub it in his face that he lost. I didn’t get that, though. All the hours I put in was just so the game’s villain could essentially give me the middle finger. It’s not fun, and it sours any chance of me wanting to go back and play Far Cry 5 ever again. There’s something to be said about the fact that they couldn’t even wrap up Far Cry 5 with an ending where you do go through a final boss fight and end up defeating Joseph. It’s unfortunately not the first game in the last ten to fifteen years to end on a sour note; e.g., Batman Arkham Asylum, Gears of War 2, Fallout 3, Mass Effect 3, Rage, Outlast… I could go on, sadly.
The thing to take away from Far Cry 5’s ending is the simple fact that people sometimes play games to escape, relax a bit, get invested in a story, and see that story resolve in an exciting way. Far Cry 5, unfortunately, forgets this in a game that encourages you to have fun in crazy ways, and it suffers in the long run because the ending doesn’t offer any fun at all.
Related posts:
Was the Zelda:TP ending appropriate? Or a letdown?
Chrono Trigger DS brings a new ending along for the ride
The never-ending flood that is Multi-Man Battle returns for Brawl