Far Cry 3: The Mistake Of The Wrong Protagonist

Video Games

May 8

The Far Cry series has been one of the most popular in gaming over the past several years. Starting as a fairly liked game and sequel, the series hit its stride with the release of Far Cry 3 in 2012. The game was praised for its story, visuals, and especially its villain, Vaas Montenegro (Michael Mando, Better Call Saul).

You play the story as Jason Brody, a sort of dude-bro who has no direction in life. He has a loving girlfriend in Liza, but she’s frustrated by his inability to act like an adult. He’s fine just cruising along. After being drugged and kidnapped while on a trip to Thailand, Jason must rescue his friends and fight the pirates of Rook Island, ruled by the South African drug lord Hoyt Volker. Along the way he integrates into the local tribe of the island, the Rakyat, eventually becoming a warrior revered by them. His main enemy is the pirate lord Vaas Montenegro, who used to be a Rakyat but was lured away by Hoyt with drugs and money. Eventually, Jason saves his friends (in the good ending), kills Vaas and Hoyt, and escapes Rook Island, seeing himself as a monster for everything that he’s done, but hopeful that he can find the good inside of him again.

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It would be a good story if it wasn’t for the even better one hiding in the background; the one they should have used.

The first time you take control of your character is when he escapes the pirate camp with his brother, Grant. It’s revealed that Grant used to be in the military, and he uses a bit of that training to help Jason escape the camp, but just as they finally get out, Grant makes the stupid decision to touch base with Jason right outside of the camp instead of going deeper into the jungle, then making his plans. He is shot and killed by Vaas for his mistake.

It’s too bad because the game would have been much better with Grant as the protagonist.

Firstly, it would solve the problem of how Jason knows to use all of these weapons he finds, even though he’s never touched something like a rocket launcher before. I know that Dennis (the character who saves Jason after escaping the camp) sees the heart of the warrior in Jason or something like that, but it would still take a ton of training to become proficient in a wide variety of weapons. There’s a throwaway line during one of the game’s many hallucination scenes where Jason remembers Grant praising him for his marksmanship, but that’s still kind of weak.

Now yes, Grant was merely in the reserves, but it would be a quick fix to make him special ops. His backstory would have been that he had been deployed to a war zone with heavy fighting, and Grant had to lose himself in the violence and death just to survive. It’s something that he would still be struggling with at the start of the game.

With all of that in mind, here is a humble presentation of a better story.

It starts the same. Thailand. Captured by pirates. Grant and Jason separated from the rest of their friends. Escape the pirate camp. Instead of being led through the camp, you’re the one leading Jason through, protecting him from danger. Grant still makes the same mistake of talking to Jason ten feet outside the boundaries of the camp, but instead, it’s Jason who gets shot. Grant flashes back to a time in the military when he was in this exact position, putting pressure on a bullet wound in a futile attempt to save a life, but this time it’s his brother, and it’s because he didn’t think to move farther into the jungle.

He flees Vaas and ends up with the Rakyat where Dennis still saves him and gives him the Tatau (the sacred tattoos of the Rakyat warriors) and from there the game is very similar, with Grant having to save his friends. Along the way he’s wracked with guilt at being unable to save his brother, and can barely look Liza in the face, knowing that it was his mistake that got Jason killed. As the game progresses, Grant increasingly starts going back to the mindset during his previous combat, compounded by the hilarious amount of drugs that the Rakyat gives him, as well as the brainwashing that Citra (the leader of the Rakyat) puts him through, saying that the brutal warrior he tried to escape was always who he was meant to be. It gets to the point where his girlfriend Daisy flashes back to the man Grant was when he came back from the war, but she can’t do anything about it.

Grant finally has his final fight with Vaas (who does still get his iconic “definition of insanity” speech) as it becomes clear that the two are far more alike than Grant would like to admit. Vaas had his mind destroyed by greed and drugs, and Grant by all of the blood he’s spilled, but they’ve both fully embraced their mindsets, and are likely too far gone to change into the good men they once were.

He kills Vaas, then takes down Hoyt, and the game ends with more or less the same choice that the actual game did.

The original game had an Alice in Wonderland theme to it, down to using many quotes taken directly from the book. They’re usually used whenever Jason is on one of his many drug trips. With Grant, a Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now theme would fit better. Some games have used that framework before (Spec Ops: The Line being a good example) and it would work very well here.

With this proposed story, two important scenes in the game would be even more tragic. The first is when the player tells his girlfriend that he’s staying and finally becoming the man he wants to be. With Jason, it’s almost annoying because now this dude-bro is abandoning one of the few people who loves him. Liza actually cares. Citra is just using him. With Grant as the protagonist, the scene would be heartbreaking. Have Daisy be the girlfriend who stayed with Grant no matter how hard things got. She was the main person who helped him recover both physically and mentally from the horrors he endured. Now he’s given in to that mindset again, and he’s abandoning her for someone who is just using him.

Another key moment is when Jason is forced to torture his brother Riley to get into Hoyt’s inner circle. It’s a brutal scene as is, but imagine how much worse it would be with Grant. He’s already made a mistake that cost Jason his life, and now to keep the charade, he has to torture the only brother he has left.

Overall, Far Cry 3 is still a really good game. It’s one with near-endless replayability and one of the best video games of the last decade. It’s too bad that the major missed opportunity is in the main character. It’s a great game, but with Grant, it could have been amazing.

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