Far Cry 3 Anamolies

[Scorched_Cascade]

The unreliable narrator is, fittingly, seen most clearly during the fight with Hoyt

Spoiler: near ending spoilers

Jason gets his finger cut off and goes down the rabbit hole into crazytown with a hallucinated fight with hoyt. It's a stand up knife fight despite the fact that seconds ago you were sat at a table, pinned by two guards.

After the fight in crazytown Jason "wakes" up and is in the middle of the previous room, all the guards are brutally murdered, blood is everywhere (along with his footprints in the blood) and his finger is bandaged

I loved the story in Far Cry 3 because it's pretty much exactly the allegory of the cave

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

In which Plato describes men that were chained in a cave and had been there their entire lives. All they can see is the shadows on the wall in front of them and that to them is reality. Then one of them is freed and exits the cave and sees the world outside the cave. He later returns to the chained people and tries to describe the world outside the cave, they think he's clearly insane because they have no understanding of this place.

I also loved the Alice in wonderland quotes, I know most of them by heart so it was a pleasant surprise to see them popping up.

I only ever saw Vaas using a combat type knife.

He definitely stabs you with the chinese dagger, I've played it twice and I was keeping an eye out the second time.

Just because you see him do something doesn't mean he did it. There's nothing that says he was actually using that specific dagger and that it wasn't Jason hallucinating again.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

Why are people so concerned about this? You play a game. Stuff happens to you. What's all this talk about reality and hallucinations? It's nonsensical. Can't you people enjoy a game actually playing the role that you are meant to be playing?

 

[blindthrall]

I only ever saw Vaas using a combat type knife.

He definitely stabs you with the chinese dagger, I've played it twice and I was keeping an eye out the second time.

Just because you see him do something doesn't mean he did it. There's nothing that says he was actually using that specific dagger and that it wasn't Jason hallucinating again.

By that logic you may as well not trust anything in the game. Maybe Jason peed on all those pot plants. Maybe Keith was spanked for being a naughty fellow. This veers into "it was all a dream" territory.

Why are people so concerned about this? You play a game. Stuff happens to you. What's all this talk about reality and hallucinations? It's nonsensical. Can't you people enjoy a game actually playing the role that you are meant to be playing?

How am I to know what role I'm playing if I can't know what's "real"?

And something I left out of my original post because of the can of worms it implied...the ghost. The old woman and the plane crash. This makes me think that it is an external force, Rook Island itself perhaps, that is the source of all the high weirdness, and not anything confined to Jason's head.

 

[Scorched_Cascade]

I only ever saw Vaas using a combat type knife.

He definitely stabs you with the chinese dagger, I've played it twice and I was keeping an eye out the second time.

Just because you see him do something doesn't mean he did it. There's nothing that says he was actually using that specific dagger and that it wasn't Jason hallucinating again.

By that logic you may as well not trust anything in the game. Maybe Jason peed on all those pot plants. Maybe Keith was spanked for being a naughty fellow. This veers into "it was all a dream" territory.

No, "it was all a dream" is a shit narrative device. This is "unreliable narrator". There are more than a handful of scenes that show Jason's perspective is not always the one that is actually happening and he hallucinates even when not taking drugs (compass, ghost lady, etc).

He is under a lot of psychological stress, he's under constant threat in a completely unfamiliar environment, his friends are in danger and at least one of his family members died right in front of his eyes as he tried so hard (in vain) to save him by stopping the blood flowing out of the fucking gunshot wound.

This is the kind of stuff that makes people crack. Add in on top of this that he is taking several high strength psychoactive hallucinogens and were he in the more civilised world he'd probably be off to an insane asylum for a short stay.

Why are people so concerned about this? You play a game. Stuff happens to you. What's all this talk about reality and hallucinations? It's nonsensical. Can't you people enjoy a game actually playing the role that you are meant to be playing?

How am I to know what role I'm playing if I can't know what's "real"?

That's your role (italics). You paradrop into an island, see your brother die, experience an extremely traumatic escape and then almost (maybe even) die. From here on is a complete mindfuck combined with the allegory of the cave and an examination of the social contract. Your role is that you can't tell what's real and what's not. You're very much through the looking glass here. Welcome to Jason's mind.

 

[Vaas Montenegro]

Why are people so concerned about this? You play a game. Stuff happens to you. What's all this talk about reality and hallucinations? It's nonsensical. Can't you people enjoy a game actually playing the role that you are meant to be playing?

everywhere i look, everywhere i look, all these fucking pricks, everywhere i look -- doing the exact same fucking thing, over and over again, expecting answers to their questions.

 

[Uszi]

Still a lot of fun to do stealth take downs. Still trying to prefect the drop from a hang glider onto an enemy take down. I'm sure it's possible.

I can confirm that, did a hit quest that way.

I tend to just hit the ground.

all of the sudden she's a stunt driver that isn't phased at all by her boyfriend murdering dozens of people with grenades.

Well she is, as she goes "You're killing people?", "How am I supposed to be calm whilst they're shooting at me" and "I can't do this".

Eh, I get that, but then she just does it anyway, you know?

I mean, it just seemed like a weird section of the game to me. The fact that her dialogue in that scene said one thing but then she drove off-road like a champion.

 

[Uszi]

Also, has anyone figured out if there's an explanation for Vaas having the tribal knife that doesn't involve Jason tripping tribal spirit balls? Not to mention that Vaas planning on burning his compound down on the off chance that Jason Brody survived and would come for him was weird, when everyone, including Dennis, thought you were dead in the pile of bodies.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

I only ever saw Vaas using a combat type knife.

He definitely stabs you with the chinese dagger, I've played it twice and I was keeping an eye out the second time.

Just because you see him do something doesn't mean he did it. There's nothing that says he was actually using that specific dagger and that it wasn't Jason hallucinating again.

By that logic you may as well not trust anything in the game. Maybe Jason peed on all those pot plants. Maybe Keith was spanked for being a naughty fellow. This veers into "it was all a dream" territory.

Why are people so concerned about this? You play a game. Stuff happens to you. What's all this talk about reality and hallucinations? It's nonsensical. Can't you people enjoy a game actually playing the role that you are meant to be playing?

How am I to know what role I'm playing if I can't know what's "real"?

And something I left out of my original post because of the can of worms it implied...the ghost. The old woman and the plane crash. This makes me think that it is an external force, Rook Island itself perhaps, that is the source of all the high weirdness, and not anything confined to Jason's head.

They are all real, because you are experiencing them. You've got it upside down: the significance of your role-playing depends precisely on ignoring the question you are asking, because it's irrelevant.

 

[Nomanslander]

So I just finished Far Cry 3 and...there's alot that doesn't add up.

The idea was that Jason is an unreliable narrator, someone from Hollywood with a Hollywood mindset and going through all kinds of emotional trauma and tripping major balls on who-knows-what from the get go, so it kind of makes sense that nothing really adds up.

I know it's a bit of a cheap explanation, and personally I think they could have made a bit more of an effort to make it obvious in the game's narrative (the lead writer claims it should be obvious from the Alice in Wonderland quotes in the loading screens, but I think that's a bit of a cop-out, like when people said the terminals and novels filled in the holes in Halo 4's story) but that's what it's all about.

Why does it have to be obvious? Why does every game (movie, etc) have to spoon feed you the story so you won't miss anything? I mean granted, some games have done that and done well (Bioshock, Mass Effect); but, sometimes, I want to be the detective and figure the story out for myself. The game has subtext, and last I checked, building a story around that is even harder than straight up explaining everything. Not only do you have to create a feasible plot, you have to hide it under the layer of another plot, and do it in a way where it can still be understandable - not to become too vague.

Farcry 3 actually did that, and did it well...=/

 

[barbzilla]

Everyone on that island is insane. Jason is also insane. More so than anyone else because he just goes along with everyone's insanity instead of going off the island to contact fuckin' authorities which is what everyone in his shoes would have done.

Do you think that American government wouldn't react to their citizens being kidnapped by pirates? What happened to the last pirates who abducted American citizens? Do you remember?

Lets see, if I recall correctly it was the boat captain who was on a raft with the pirates. One second the pirate heads where there, the next they were not. If that was the last one, that pretty well sums it up.

 

[Tdoodle]

Why does it have to be obvious?

I missed out the "more" before obvious, it doesn't have to be obvious, but all the same I think they could have done more to make it apparent that that's what they were going for. You have the drug trips, sure, but not much more than that, and because it always makes it clear what's going on I'm not convinced they're a particularly good example. There are a few bits that made me think Jason was enjoying things a bit too much, but I rarely got the unreliable narrator thing.