Thoughts on Story?

[nikolistary]

So i just beat FC6 and I'm mostly underwhelmed with the story. I was hoping for more emotional impact, but there's very little here. Rather than make a huge paragraph, here's my list of Story pros and cons:

 

Cons:

• The ending was very underwhelming. Castillo and Diego die at the hands of Anton, leaving the player no option to do anything about it. Diego had potential but was snuffed out, not tragically, just lazily like the devs didn't know where to go with him.
• Castillo was incredibly underused, like most villains after FC3. There's almost zero interactions with you and him. All that marketing hype and buildup to go after Breaking Bad's villain was a fallacy, as you never see him and can't kill him.
• Castillo never really emoted fiercely. His country and government are burning, he's under siege by guerillas, and he just seems...inconvenienced? I know that dictators don't get mad easily and like to maintain confidence even though they're being stormed by their enemies, but it would've been nice to see him go from calm and cool to a livid, furious, genocidal maniac from frustration in not being able to suppress the guerillas
• Aside from a few characters like Clara and Diego, nearly all the NPCs are annoying, tonally-wrong for a bloody revolution, and developed by Gen Z kids FOR Gen Z kids. Maybe I'm an old fart at 32 years old, but this gave me hard Saints Row Reboot vibes. The Maximas music douchebags were incredibly unlikable pussies nowhere near capable of staging a coup against the government. El Tigre was a cartoon, not a shellshocked guerilla veteran. FC3 did an amazing job at showing NPCs as either psychotic enemies or non-violent NPCs that were insane from being around so much death and drugs and blood. Allies in FC6 act as if it's a party going on, not that thousands of people are being killed daily.
• Like the last point above, there's no seriousness or gravity here. You're in a country with a dictator instigating martial law, your family and friends have been murdered, citizens are being enslaved to make medicine and die of poison exposure, but hey...let's throw a music show and record it with our iPhones to really party it up...I mean inspire the denizens.
• Dani Rojas was a huge meh. Male or female, it doesn't matter. Dani is an orphan, which is becoming very trendy these days as a convenient way-out for devs to not go into deeper territory or explain the justifications for killing. Danny has no family, doesn't care about Yara, he's just...there. He cares about nothing and nobody, but is willing to help anyone and everyone. Just doesn't make sense. I just finished AC Odyssey and Alexios is, you guessed it, an orphan. It doesn't matter to him if he kills Greeks or Spartans, he's just there to unload. The voice actors did a good job, but there's something largely off about Dani's presentation. No arc, no development, no catharsis or epiphany, no atonement, no nothing.
• I was very excited before the game came out when Ubisoft said they're doing cutscenes in 3rd person so you can actually SEE your character. When I finally played it, I kind of hated it. It 100% breaks the immersion a visceral FPS should have. It become more like watching a movie passively. Remember those cutscenes with Vaas and Hoyt? Or even you and Joseph Seed? Those cutscenes were electric, arresting, captivating. In first person, when an enemy comes at you and starts to strangle you, it's way more emotional than watching a guy get choked like a movie. I hope FC7 doesn't implement this. But from what I hear, FC7 is just a multiplayer-only GaaS game.

 

Pros:

• Voice acting was great by the actors
• Logical reason for a local Yaran to pick up a gun and take back their country, structure makes sense
• A few characters like Clara and Diego gave much-needed emotional weight to the story, just not used enough

 

Personally, I think the reason FC3 is still the best in the series was the Insanity angle they took. M-rated FPS that are about an outsider being dropped into a violent, unknown land simply worked on all fronts with FC3, because they were exploring the reason as to why we play gory, violent shooters to begin with, it was meta on meta on meta. Focusing on Control, Collapse or otherwise is adequate enough, but if we were Ajay, Rook, or Dani we would clearly have gone insane with PTSD and the same goes for anyone around you. Nobody is so flippant and chill living in a country on the verge of annihilation; they're drunk and on drugs 24/7 to cope with reality, they're paranoid in getting murdered, actual life and death. This just felt like playing the Saints Row Reboot alpha, where it's a bunch of 19 year olds playing with their smartphones and these are our battle-hardened heroes. It just kinda stunk.

 

What are your thoughts?

Edited November 30, 2021 by nikolistary