Hello everyone, I'm a noodle king who doesn't want to sleep.
This time, let's talk about the story behind the most well-known and popular game manufacturer Ubisoft's "Far Cry" series #那些游戏背后的故事 #
Ubisoft Entertainment is a multinational game producer, publisher and distributor. As a leader in the multimedia industry, its extensive business has steadily expanded, and on the basis of cooperation with various established game companies, it is also constantly launching unique products to strengthen its influence in the international market.
Among the excellent works are: "Rayman", "Assassin's Creed", "Far Cry" series (Far Cry), "Prince of Persia", "Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell", "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six", "Watch Dogs" series (Watch_ Dogs), Tom Clancy's The Divisioner, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Anno, etc.
Noodle Jun believes that Ubisoft, as an internationally renowned game manufacturer, is still quite good in terms of detailed texture, shooting and striking sense, NPC dynamic face model, game story line, etc
Ubisoft's Far Cry series is committed to using games as the body and culture as the bone, and cleverly integrating the rich customs or social realities of the real world into the background of the series.
From the primitive tribal culture set in the Indian and Pacific Oceans (or in the waters near Papua New Guinea or the Solomon Islands) in Far Cry 3, to the Nepalese Buddhist culture and snowman legend in the foothills of the Himalayas in Far Cry 4, to Far Cry 5's reference to the 1993 Waco Massacre in Texas, USA.
In Far Cry 6, the game is set on the "Republic of Yala" based on the island of Cuba in the northwest of the Caribbean, allowing players to experience a Latin American guerrilla revolution in the heatwave rainforest. After playing the level for free, Noodle Jun found that under the cloak of "brainless abruptness", this game is actually a work of Ubisoft's speculative work on American society and politics.
So, how will Far Cry 6 combine a rich realistic background with a game narrative? And wait for this article to tell.
1. The fate of the "banana" of the banana republic
In the setting of Far Cry 6, Yara broke out a revolution in 1967, and the young Anton Castillo witnessed the overthrow of Gabriel Castillo, the ruler and father of Huairou, by the people. But after the revolution, Yala did not get on the "fast track" of development, but became more and more chaotic. Later, Andong, who shouted the slogan of "Rebuild Paradise" in the small Caribbean country of Yala, was elected to power and returned to power, thus beginning decades of iron-fisted rule.
Then, Frankenstein Edgar Reyes, who flouts scientific ethics, travels to the island nation of Yala, where he discovers the phytochemical alkaloid "Yarazin" - an alkaloid that effectively inhibits the spread of cancer cells in the human body in the tobacco crop, which is widely grown in the country. Subsequently, he also developed a fertilizer containing highly toxic substances "PG-240" for spraying tobacco, thereby making the anti-cancer miracle drug "Weiweiruo", and made it an industrial product exported to the world by Yala.
Although Weiweiruo's clinical trial has a significant effect, the drug made by "Divine Doctor" is only a kind of experimental product after all, and a large number of in vivo tests are needed to improve it. On the one hand, President Anton, who aspires to consolidate the military dictatorship, and on the other hand, a biologist who loves human experimentation but ignores life, so the two coincided to come together.
Anton first issued and expanded the "Heavenly Conquest Case", arresting "false Yarras" who did not support his claims for live experiments, or forcing them to work on the Weiweiruo plantation that was directly exposed to highly toxic substances without any protection. The author flipped through the information, but did not find the miracle medicine corresponding to Wei Weiruo in reality, but accidentally found a common plant planting process in South America similar to it. That's the banana! Yes, the banana that we are familiar with.
At the 1876 Philadelphia World's Fair, bananas, a tropical fruit that came to the cold northeastern city of the United States, made the American people feel the trend of globalization for the first time. In order to satisfy the hunger of the American people, in 1899, under the leadership of the US government, the Central American Tropical Trading and Transportation Company, which had been importing tropical fruits for many years, and the Boston Fruit Company joined forces to form the United Fruit Company, which would later "shock the world".
In 1904, the American short story writer O. Henry coined the term "banana republic" in his novel "Cabbage and the King", combining his experience in the Central American country of Honduras for six months. Today, people often use the term "banana republic" to refer to Central American and Caribbean countries whose economic systems tend to be homogeneous due to the penetration of powerful European and American forces such as the United States.
Over the next nearly century, United Fruit Company, known for its specialty of tropical fruits, bribed local governments in the banana republic to obtain land and tax incentives at low market prices, and on the other hand, recruited workers at low prices on plantations and exploited Latin American laborers at will.
Of the nearly century-old years of economic plunder and political infiltration (which maliciously overthrew regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Dominica, and Honduras), the most notorious is the "Guatemala Incident" that began in 1951. Guatemala's elite president, Hakovo Albenz Guzmán, 38, came to power to launch a "land reform campaign" that sought to limit the penetration of United Fruit with fairer tax policies and wage guarantees.
The deep-pocketed United Fruit Company immediately conspired with the then US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to plot the former Soviet Union with the Guatemalan president's plot against the former Soviet Union, instigating new forces supported by the United States to come to power, and causing Guatemala to fall into the following decades of civil war, in which more than 200,000 people are expected to die.
The dead are like Sifu, and the living are long gone. The terrible thing is that even the living conditions of Latin American workers on banana plantations are bleak. Since bananas themselves are very weak in resistance to diseases, they need to be sprayed directly with a large number of pesticides. In order to reduce profits, many workers are forced to cultivate in unprotected conditions.
Workers exposed to chemical pesticides for a very long time have terrible diseases such as blindness and infertility, and the manual harvesting process has many tragic cases of workers cutting themselves. It can be seen that this planting process was borrowed by Ubisoft into the Weiweiruo planting setting of Far Cry 6.
Today, banana republics are a political entity with a monomogeneous economy but high dependence on foreign countries. However, mainland netizens on the other side of the ocean discussed in Zhihu and other media, it was difficult to understand the planting process of Wei Weiruo in the game, and asked: Anton mechanized the workers in the plantation and wore protective shields to make more profitable. But in fact, reality is more cruel than the story, and the situation reflected in the game may be only common in today's banana republic.
2. The father dies and the son succeeds the family
The opening CG of Far Cry 6 mentions that after the 1967 revolution, a dictator came to power in Yala. At that time, many people combined Yala's reference to Cuba's environmental setting and assumed that this alluded to Fidel Castro, Cuba's first supreme leader. But it's a fallacy. Combined with the setting of Diego Castillo, President Anton's 54-year-old son, and the military dictatorship, Ubisoft's design of the final boss character image of this generation mainly refers to the historical facts of former father and son presidents François Duvalier and Jean-Claude Duvalier in South America.
In the game, with the curative effect of the "miracle medicine" Wei Weiruo, President Anton has been living his dictatorship unharmed. However, as mentioned earlier, the Weiwei Ruo developed by "divine doctor" Edgar Reyes is only a test product after all, and President Anton, who has been taking "big health care" for a long time, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2008.
In desperation, President Anton obeyed Maria Maxa, Minister of Culture and "Queen of TV Dramas" in charge of Yala's propaganda work, and the two married Diego Castillo. In the promotional image of the game approved by Ubisoft, we can see that the majestic President Anton puts his hands on 13-year-old Diego firmly and forcefully.
This picture is actually borrowed from the classic group photo of the elder Duvalier holding the younger Duvalier to the presidential throne in history.
This picture is a classic group photo of Haitian President Duvalier Sr. holding the new President Duvalier Jr. to the presidency.
In real history, in 1957, after the doctor-turned-Duvalier Sr. won the election and came to power, he reversed his attitude and established an authoritarian rule at home - secret police, intimidation, and repression can be described as self-taught and captured. In 1971, the elder Duvalier went on a dying day to eliminate dissidents and coerced the Haitian Senate to pass a resolution appointing the 19-year-old Duvalier Jr. as president (later changed to "president for life") - a move that also made Duvalier Jr. the youngest president in the world.
As if learning from the old Duvalier, after coming to power, the younger Duvalier successively cleaned up the modernists led by his sister Marie and the conservatives led by his mother Simone, and staged a modern political palace fighting drama. In addition, the Duvalier family of Little Duvalier captured 90% of the country's wealth and used half of the national budget to raise a "pro-army" including a regular army, riot and counterguerrilla special forces, gendarmes Tongton Makut, voodoo militias, and the presidential guard (President Anton in Far Cry 6 also has his own large army of 300,000 men). In 1980, the unscrupulous little Duvalier paid $7 million to marry Michelet Bennett, the daughter of a mixed-race merchant.
Although like President Anton in "Far Cry 6", Duvalier Jr. introduced a large number of foreign capital after coming to power, objectively achieving certain results in domestic economic development, but the greater harm lies in the high pro-American level, making Haiti's economy highly dependent on foreign countries, making the country's economic lifeline further controlled by external forces.
Thanks to the sustainable development of Petit Duvalier, Haitians have an average life expectancy of only 47 years, an illiteracy rate of 75 per cent and an infant mortality rate of 18 per cent. Even though Duvalier Jr. was ousted by the people in 1986, Haiti did not embark on the road to democracy, and coups and regime changes continued in the country.
3. Ah, goodbye friends
Finally, let's go back to the Far Cry 6 game story itself. The following contains some spoilers.
"Far Cry 6", a first-person shooter open-world game produced and released by Ubisoft in 2021, is like the open-world game "Assassin's Creed: Valhalla" released the previous year, mainly telling the story of the protagonist Danny Rojas's rebel organization "Free Forces" and allied forces around the world to resist President Anton.
As the protagonist shouts: in the game, players can ally with four resistance forces, including the Monteiro family hovering in the west of Yala, the Overrun Slaughter in the center, the 67 Legends in the east, and the Legion of Morality, to defeat the five elite bosses of the tiger-stricken Yala Defense Forces general Jose Castillo, the Minister of Culture Maria Maxa and the "Divine Doctor" Edgar Reyes, the American capitalist Sean McKay and the female Admiral of the Yala Admiral Anna Benitez.
Sadly, when the resistance army arrived at the presidential palace against all odds, facing the father and son of the libertarian leaders Clara Garcia and President Anton who were shot dead, the resistance army was like a rabble who had lost their target, not knowing where to lead Yala next.
At this time, the CG animation also predicted the trend of Yala after the revolution quite darkly and humorously: the representative of the Monteiro family took up President Anton's pistol, and this rich landlord family seemed to only want to extract greater benefits from the chaotic and violent situation; The Overrun Slaughter Representative kicked Anton's corpse hard, an organization keen on RAP like a bully and a hard master; The representative of the Legion of Morals intentionally or unintentionally knocked down the Yala city model on Anton's table, suggesting that this resistance army was keen on destruction and violence; The "good luck mother-in-law" of the 67 legendary generation wants to rescue Anton, who has long been unconscious, and also suggests that this organization may just pursue non-violent non-cooperation.
The uneven behavior of the resistance groups doomed it to be difficult for a fierce man to condense a scattered Yala into a monolith.
In another CG, President Anton accepted a cross-examination from an American female journalist who said why Wei Weiruo did not sell it to the United States. Anton's answer was sharp but thought-provoking: Wasn't the best-selling cotton export in the early years of the United States also built on black slavery? Of course, no matter how rational and justified Anton justifies his reasons, many rulers of banana republics like President Anton in history are just pretending to be generous to the people.
After witnessing this scene, the protagonist, who had the best hope of becoming a leader, was alone and disappointed holding the corpse of 13-year-old Diego. The shattered country and the increasingly infiltrated Yala were nothing more than a repeat of the Latin American revolutions in history.
In the light of dusk, the protagonist Danny Rojas leaves the presidential palace, and the torn Yala is about to go to a future that cannot be recovered.
Behind this desolate reality is also the true portrayal of Haiti's Duvalier family after its downfall: politicians and military men sing and I appear, about 2/3 of the country's population of about 4.8 million people live in rural areas (80% are poor, two-thirds of them are extremely poor), Haiti has also become the darkest country in the Western Hemisphere and the poorest country in Latin America.
Former Mexican President Porfirio Díaz once said the classic saying: "Poor Mexico, too far from God and too close to the United States". Unfortunately, in the vast number of Latin American countries where the Yala prototype borrowed, this statement is always confirmed.
Well, that's it for the introduction of "The Stories Behind Those Games" in this issue. Let's see you in the next issue~
Finally, Noodle Jun wants to end with the Spanish version of "Bella Ciao de Libertad" of the game's classic song "Ah Friend, Goodbye":
The movement
Of freedom
Oh beautiful hello beautiful hello beautiful hello!
It's for everyone
I am Noodle Jun, follow me and recommend more wonderful works to you