Video Game / Far Cry 4

Darling, you got to let me know:
should I stay or should I go?

"Now, before we begin... ah... to whom am I speaking? Hm? The son who returned to scatter his mother's ashes, or the lunatic who has murdered his way to the top of my mountain?"

— Pagan Min

The fourth game in the Far Cry series (a thematic sequel, but with references to Far Cry, Far Cry 2, and Far Cry 3), set in Kyrat, a war-torn Fictional Country in the Himalayas.

You play as Ajay Ghale, a young man visiting his home country of Kyrat after his mom's passing with the vague instructions to "scatter my ashes at Lakshmana". After a violent border crossing, Ajay meets Pagan Min, the flamboyant and insane self-proclaimed ruler of Kyrat. After escaping Min's Lunch Ajay soon meets up and joins local resistance group The Golden Path (which is his dad Mohan Lead). on his way to stop Pagan Min and free Kyrat from his tyranny Ajay with find out that the good guys are not as righteous as they believe, Min might not be as bad has he seems and that moral lines are a lot more blurry then they look. The game features a greater sense of verticality than its predecessors, with a grappling hook and miniature helicopters joining the wingsuit from the previous game as major methods of traversal.

Far Cry 4 also features drop-in drop-out co-op, with players on PlayStation systems being able to join a friend's game for co-op free-roam without owning a copy.

It was released 18 November 2014, with versions for the PS3, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One and PC.

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Far Cry 4 provides examples of the following tropes:

• 100% Completion: The game has a comprehensive menu section devoted solely to helping you keep track of your progress, with subsections for every mission type, collectibles, weapons, vehicles and whatnot. Your overall completion percentage is also prominently displayed right in the main menu among others. Sadly, attaining the coveted 100% doesn't net you any reward aside from knowing for sure you did everything there is to do in Kyrat, and since the game has only a single savegame slot, starting a new game erases all your hard work (unless you back up the files manually beforehand).
• Aborted Arc: Depending on player choices, the Bhadra subplot can ultimately be reduced to this. If the player sides with Amita as leader of the Golden Path, Bhadra is "sent away" in the ending and all the game's carefully constructed Foreshadowing about Bhadra becoming The Chosen One goes absolutely nowhere.
• Action Bomb:
  • Hurk's exploding, C4-covered monkeys from the Rook Islands appear in at least one hallucination. They also make a non-hallucinatory appearance in one of the Hunting sidequests, in which an escaped convict who used them to break out of prison hires Ajay to put them down. Ajay tells the convict that he's heard of this stupid idea before.
  • In the Shangri-La segments, Beasts summoned by Hunters.
• Affably Evil: Pagan Min seems to be very friendly towards Ajay. This is right after murdering a soldier in front of him for shooting at the bus he was on, and just before kidnapping him. With blood still all over his face. A secret ending shows Min personally transporting Ajay to the site where his mother wanted to be put to rest. At the end of the game, he chooses to Face Death with Dignity, though he has one final plea for his life. The player then has two options: "Execute", where Ajay puts a bullet in his head after Pagan Min has had his final meal, or "Negotiate", where Ajay accepts his pitiful 'surrender'. Even in the "Negotiate" ending, the only retribution he reaps upon Ajay is pulling a Screw This, I'm Outta Here, right after crowning Ajay as the next king of Kyrat, even going so far as to call a "do-over" after all of the pain Ajay has caused him.
• Agent Peacock: Pagan Min likes to dress flamboyantly and isn't afraid to wear his more theatrical influences on his sleeve. Doesn't make it any less terrifying when he stabs Ajay's companion in the back with a fork and dares him to cry for help.
• Airborne Mooks: This game features the most aggressive eagles in the world. They will routinely swoop down from the sky to attack the player at random times, and while they do always announce their attack with a distinctive screech before swooping in, their attack animations start about 20 feet away from the player, making them nearly impossible to avoid or kill in time if you don't find them before they start their dive.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us:
  • Occasionally, Pagan's troops will attack outposts Ajay has liberated, requiring you to come back and push the attack away. Taking over one of the four Fortresses will stop counterattacks on outposts within its territory.
  • In the mission "Return to Sender", the player's first home base Banapur is torched by Pagan's army, and the player has to get there quickly to fend them off and rescue any survivors.
  • After the player decides how to deal with Jalendu Temple, the rebel outpost Utkarsh is shelled by artillery; if the player sided with Sabal and took the temple, they get the mission "Take Cover", where they have to rush to defend the town from waves of Royal Guard between the occasional shelling while Sabal and the Golden Path moves to disable the guns, while if they sided with Amita and destroyed the temple, they get "The Valley of Death", where they have to find the guns themselves, take out their crews before they can destroy the town, then defend Golden Path sappers as they take out the guns.
  • Several Balance of Power missions which require you to take over a location for the Golden Path, like the Kyra Tea Factory or the Rochan Brick Factory for Amita, unlock a Bomb Defusal sidequest where the Royal Army comes back and sets bombs to destroy the location outright to deny it to the Path.
• And Then John Was a Zombie: Also counts as a Gainax Ending. Valley of the Yetis ends with Ajay being turned into a Yeti after destroying Yalung's Relic. Assuming the DLC takes place after the end of the main campaign, and this is the ultimate end of Ajay's and Far Cry 4's story, it comes pretty close to BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea levels of WHAAAAT?!.^note The game's creative director has clarified that, while Valley of the Yetis takes place after the end of the main campaign, its plot shouldn't necessarily be taken literally. In other words, Ajay's not a giant monkey if you don't want him to be a giant monkey.
• Animals Hate Him: Just like Rook Island, Kyrat is full of animals who want to destroy Ajay. Crocodiles, super-tough rhinos, tigers, dholes, honey badgers, bears, and demon fish all want a bite of him. Even eagles get in on the action.
• Animal Motifs: Elephants and tigers, mainly. The elephant represents wisdom and defense, while the tiger represents ruthlessness and offense. The elephant covers all the defensive or crafting abilities in the skill tree, and stealth and shooting is covered by the tiger. This is also the main divide between the two would-be leaders of the Golden Path: Do whatever it takes to get an edge, even if it means sacrificing all traditional morals, or stick to what you know, even if it stands in the way of progress.
• Annoying Arrows: Thoroughly averted. Royal Army Hunters wield bows of varying technological standards instead of big-ass rifles like their sniper colleagues, but they will wreck the player in seconds if they spot them, regardless of distance, cover and body armor. Gets even worse when they whip out their fire arrows, which not only deal more damage on impact but, surprise, set the target and everything around it on fire.
• Anti-Climax: The secret ending. If the player just has Ajay sit and wait for Pagan at the beginning of the game (for about 10 minutes in real time), he'll come back, tell Ajay everything about his mother, and then takes him via helicopter to where his mother wanted her ashes to be buried, allowing Ajay to fulfill his objective without any problems at all.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • A rare in-universe variation. If you're low on supplies in the arena — health syringes, ammo, grenades, etc. — audience members may toss those supplies down, yelling something along the lines of, "I'm betting on you! Don't die!"
  • Speaking of the arena, your arena level isn't reset upon starting a new game, though you have to at least participate in one full match, win or lose, in the new game to register your previous level. This essentially means you only have to farm for arena levels for the Bushman once.
• Arbitrary Mission Restriction: The game has several examples.
  • The "Hunting: Supplies", "Eye for an Eye", and "Kyrat Fashion Week" Side Quests require the player to track down specific animal or human enemies and kill them, but like the "Path of the Hunter" and "Wanted Dead" sidequests in 3 the deed must be done with a specific weapon. This is in stark contrast to most of the game, which encourages the player to use whatever tactics and equipment they see fit. Stealth-centric players aren't likely to ever touch a shotgun during the campaign, but some of these side missions require it.
  • The "optional objectives" variant is featured in "Assassination" missions, where an extra cash bonus can be obtained by hiding the target's body in a specific location before fleeing the area afterward.
  • In what is probably an unintentional example, the game has very restrictive ideas about what constitutes "out of the mission area", to such an extent that some missions make it very difficult to use a "long-range sniper" play-style, as the game simply won't let the player get far enough away before failing them for going out-of-bounds. The entire opening act is a particularly noteworthy case of this, as you're not allowed to leave the area covered by the first bell tower you deactivate until doing multiple missions there.
• Arrows on Fire: Army Hunters again, as mentioned under Annoying Arrows. You like to snipe unsuspecting outpost guards while squatting in a nearby bush? Nice and cozy, sure - until some sneaky hunter you didn't notice before sets you, your favorite bush and the entire undergrowth around it on fire with a single arrow out of nowhere. Which also tends to alert everyone still alive in the outpost to your position. There are two small upsides, however. First one: hunters don't just nock fire arrows like their normal ones, they do an elaborate twirl beforehand that looks really cool but leaves them open for retaliation, if you're lucky enough to spot the bastard before he turns you into a crispy pincushion. Second one: players can deploy bows and fire arrows themselves and thus potentially turn these tactics against their enemies. Nothing more satisfying than offing a hunter with a flaming arrow.
• Artistic License – History: Not Kyrat itself, which is made up and can have whatever history it wants, but in a few places in the game it is stated that Kyrat was used as a staging point for the British to invade India. The British takeover of India was a gradual process rather than a singular invasion and came up from outposts in southern India, not from the Himalayas where Kyrat is supposed to be.
• Ascended Extra: A Yeti is first seen when Ajay escapes from Durgesh prison at the end of Don't Look Down and presumably being the one who brought him back to Kyrat. Yetis later become a recurring enemy in the Valley of the Yetis DLC.
• A-Team Firing: The Golden Path rebels' combat abilities in a nutshell. The vague rumors about those strange iron sights on top of their assault rifles being useful for, you know, aiming apparently never made it into their training manuals. Pretty much everyone who isn't toting an RPG either blind-fires entire mags over their cover in the vain hope of hitting something, or charges the enemy while hip-firing on full-auto, with predictable results. Might be a case of both Gameplay and Story Integration and Truth in Television since most rebels are little more than untrained civilians with guns, but even the allegedly battle-hardened and well-equipped veterans the player can call in by means of their expensively upgraded Guns for Hire tokens are ridiculously useless in a fight due to their inability to hit the broad side of a barn.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Assassination targets have about twice as much health as the most heavily armored regular enemies (not counting Heavies), though it doesn't mean much if you shank them with a kukri. Similarly, Pagan Min's body double, Sabal, and Master Sandesh from The Valley of the Yetis all can survive quite a bit more damage than regular Mooks, though none of them last long against headshots or high caliber rounds.
• Automatic Crossbows: This game one-ups the recurve bow from 3 by adding not only a lower-quality "Hunter's Bow", but one of these as well, built out of the same base as the BZ19 submachine gun - it doesn't get alternate ammo types, but it does get more ammo carried at once, a faster rate of fire, actual magnified optics rather than just a sight to compensate for the arrow drop, and the ability to be used one-handed.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Harpoon Gun from the "Hurk's Redemption" DLC kills most human enemies and animals in one shot, can retrieve the ammo afterwards like the bows, and looks really cool. Unfortunately, it can only load one harpoon at a time, does pitiful damage against Heavies, rhinos, and elephants, and despite being technically silent it has a bad habit of throwing corpses five-plus feet away, which is just as likely to garner suspicion. Its description in the shop menu lampshades this. It's also useless underwater because it isn't a diver's harpoon gun, but actually a BFG the likes of what is mounted on the prow of whaling ships, which aren't designed for underwater duty. By rights, Ajay shouldn't even be able to carry it around.
• Bag of Spilling: Kalinag - your Player Character in the Shangri La missions - starts out with three health bars but can upgrade to six by finding three hidden amulets throughout the level. He has to do that again and again in every single level which, considering the tons of lethal enemies everywhere and the very limited combat options at his disposal, is frustrating to say the least.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: Yuma is a master of Mind Rape drugs and only faces Ajay when he is under the influence, effectively making her some sort of Master of Illusion. This merges with her obsession with Shangri-La; she actually becomes the famous warrior who discovered Shangri-La (the same guy you play as in the Shangri-La segments) during Ajay's final encounter with her.
• Beak Attack: Prepare to suffer a lot of those whenever you're outside a building, because those Kyrati eagles really don't like humans, and unlike other predators they are everywhere.
• Bears Are Bad News: Asiatic black bears make an appearance as a predator species. In the missions taking place high up in the mountains, Himalayan brown bears make an appearance.
• The Beastmaster:
  • With the right skill, Ajay can ride elephants into battle. He can also throw meat chunks in order to attract predators, most likely in an attempt to turn them on his human enemies. This is a very high step up from Far Cry 3, where every animal would either run away or bite you in the neck (though they still do here if you aren't careful with them). As for the Shangri-La episodes, the protagonist of that story can summon a giant spirit tiger to kill demons.
  • This is one of the Army hunters' most annoying abilities - they can instantly charm any predatory animal into attacking only Ajay while ignoring the hunter and their allies.
• Benevolent Architecture: Enemy outposts and fortresses are nearly always overlooked by good sniping positions.
• Beware the Nice Ones: The game divides animals into carnivores and herbivores, but make no mistake: a great many of the latter are at least as dangerous as any carnivore. Boars, yaks, rhinos and co. will wreck you if you make the mistake of getting too close to them. They're arguably even worse than leopards, tigers or honey badgers because all of them have powerful knockdown attacks that almost inevitably trap Ajay in a Cycle of Hurting. To make matters even more sadistic, often the first clue you have that there's even a rhinoceros in the area is when you've somehow pissed it off and it outright blindsides you - and, on top of it, if you want skins for upgrades, or God forbid are trying to use the bow for it to get two skins per animal, the rhino has outright ridiculous amounts of health. Last but not least, large herbivores like said rhinos and elephants are the only animals that have no problem attacking you while you're in a vehicle, resulting in a One-Hit Kill in a place no carnivore can touch.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Pagan, Amita and Sabal, due to the latter two each being revealed to be the game's Hidden Villain in a post-credits scene if the player sided with one of them.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti:
  • It is heavily implied that Ajay encounters a Yeti in the main game when he sees a giant ape-like silhouette in the middle of a blizzard just after he escapes Durgesh Prison.
  • The Valley of the Yetis DLC features Yetis front and center, as Ajay is trapped in the eponymous valley with an evil cult hell-bent on offering him as a Human Sacrifice to the mythical beasts. The Yetis are giant, powerful monsters that are stronger and tougher than any other animal or enemy in the game. It's heavily implied that the Yetis are former humans who were magically transformed into demonic apes by the powers of Yalung.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • The name of the Chal Jama Monastery means "go collect" in Hindi, which is funny because it's the location where some collectibles are first introduced to the player.
  • At the start of the game, Sabal suggests that "Lakshmana" sounds like the name of a temple. That might be the first guess of a tourist who's been to see the sex sculptures at the Lakshmana Temple in Khajuraho, India. However, anyone who's lived in South Asia would immediately guess that it's someone's name. The name Lakshmana is even pronounced differently depending on whether it's a male or female name, and the mythical Lakshmana worshipped in temples is male. At this point, the only reason it's not obviously a woman is because all the characters butcher the pronunciation to the point where one cannot determine the gender.
  • Hindi-language songs by The Bombay Royale play at pivotal moments in the story, foreshadowing later revelations.
  • The opening escape from Pagan's palace is set to You Me Bullets Love, a song about a violent love affair, mirroring Pagan's and Ishwari's.
  • The penultimate mission wherein Ajay storms the palace with the intent of killing Pagan is set to Jaan Pehechan Ho, an otherwise upbeat song about courtship that opens with the lines, "If I knew you, life would be easier." The lyrics become much more appropriate if he chooses to spare Pagan and find out about the dictator's motivations after their "do-over."
  • Many NPCs, from civilians to the Golden Path to the Royal Army (of South Kyrat) can be heard swearing in Hindi/Urdu profanity, including "kutti" (bitch) and "maderchod" (motherfucker).
  • Half the phrases spoken by Pagan's Royal Guard (of North Kyrat) in near-perfect Chinese (Cantonese) are that of cursing Ajay out during combat (typically along lines of "You piece of trash!", except harsher, along with "Fuck your mother!", which is one of the most common Cantonese profanities), while a few are of the "No!" variety when he performs stealth takedowns.
  • Kalinag's monologues during the Shangri-La missions are completely in untranslated Hindi, so unless you speak that language or enable the subtitles, you might as well turn off your speakers. Fortunately, his ramblings don't contain any relevant information whatsoever, so you're not missing out on anything anyway.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The rebels aren't very good people, with Amita believing the best way to help the people is turn their nation into a narco-state while Sabal is a reactionary conservative who wants to go back to the way things were in Kyrat, warts and all. Turns out, it's actually Evil Versus Evil, with unfortunate mooks on both sides taking shades of grey. While Pagan Min is undoubtedly a mass-murdering insane tyrant, he is a Noble Demon, stimulated the economy through drugs, and the rebel leader Mohan snapped and murdered Pagan's infant daughter, Lakshmana Min, which is what turned a Pragmatic Villain into The Caligula. If Amita takes over, she enforces child slave labor and child soldiers, and is implied to have murdered Bhadra. If Sabal takes over, he plans on killing almost everyone, in front of Bhadra no less, who followed Amita or has failed to follow his religion. Pagan Min even encourages you to murder the surviving rebel leader to keep the nation out of their hands.
  • Pagan Min also doesn't take nicely to unplanned killings. If his henchman killed someone without his knowing, they would be punished severely.
  • The rebels and Royal Army themselves. Most of the rebels are good people, if extremely violent towards the Royal Army and wild animals, but are just trying to save Kyrat. However, some of them are blindly devoted to Amita or Sabal, and will perpetrate unforgivable acts in their name. Likewise, some of the Royal Army are just Punch-Clock Villains who are devoted to Pagan Min but have families and personal lives (some of them keep virtual pets for fun, others will worry about their children with their dying words), others are just complete dicks who enslave and murder civilians.
• Black Comedy: Pretty much everything Pagan Min says or does is disturbing or even terrifying in some way due to his ruthlessness and often outright insanity. Doesn't change the fact that it's very hard to keep a straight face whenever he has any screen time, be it in person or during his frequent, incredibly jovial radio conversations with Ajay, all thanks to his choice of words and the utterly hilarious way he tends to deliver his lines. It says a lot about Far Cry 4's personnel and its atmosphere that the player's interactions with the Big Bad provide a large part of the game's funniest moments.
• Bland-Name Product: The GoBro camera Ajay uses for the Kyrati Films Racing sidequests.
• Body Horror: The player character's methods of emergency first aid are as cringe-inducing as ever, from burning out bullet wounds with a lighter to resetting dislocated fingers or the whole hand with a sickening crunch.
• Book Ends:
  • At the start of the game, Ajay is invited to a meal of crab rangoon with Pagan. He has crab rangoon once more at the end of the game.
  • In the mission "Death From Above". In the beginning, Willis lays out some information, including that Ajay's father was a patriot, and he's never met a patriot who wasn't a sonofabitch. At the end, when he reveals that he was merely using Ajay and betrayed him to Yuma, he repeats that every patriot he knows is a sonofabitch as he pushes Ajay out of the plane.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Rare animal variations encountered in the Fashion Week sidequests play this straight, but regular rhinoceros will do a good number on you. Even with 4 bars of health, you can still be reduced to barely any health if one hits you head on. And they topple cars too, which can instantly kill you. And they take A LOT of bullets. And their attacks have a very high chance of knocking human-sized targets to the ground, so getting hit once not only hurts like hell but usually results in a stun-lock that's next to impossible to escape from. And of course there is a rare rhino named Karkadann, which has even more health, deals even more damage, is encountered on a narrow bridge full of cars to throw at you, and needs to be killed with a shotgun of all things. Happy hunting. The boss part is played especially, painfully straight if you compete in Shanath Arena where one combat mode pits you against a rhino as the final wave, which is a lot nastier than it sounds because you almost never face it with particularly good weapons, tend to be low on ammo, and have little room to outmanoeuvre the relentlessly charging behemoth. About the only convenient way to kill any rhino is with a missile launcher...which renders its skin unusable for crafting. Oops.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: The game's expanded arsenal includes a few much older guns, including an MG 42 machine gun from World War II, a Steyr MP34 and versions of the Webley revolver and Mauser C96 that predate the war, as well as replacing the contemporary Orion flare gun of the previous game with a Japanese model from the early 1920s.
• Broken Pedestal: Whoever among Amita or Sabal that Ajay didn't side with at the end of the game views him as this. If he spares them in the end, they'll leave with one last biting remark — "You may be sparing me, but you're killing Kyrat" for Amita, and "Gone, brother. Gone" for Sabal.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Pagan Min has obnoxiously loud taste in outfits and quirks. Many, many quirks. Oddly enough, he's the Only Sane Man in many other respects given he sees clearly many of the problems with the Golden Path as well as the nation. There's also the fact he's a drug lord who went on to become a king, so he probably has an idea as to what he's doing and how to do it effectively.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Heavily implied on the part of the Golden Path. The group's leader, Mohan, murdered Pagan Min's daughter with Ishwari, Lakshmana, to make a point to Pagan, causing Ishwari to flee Kyrat with Ajay after killing Mohan herself in revenge. However, when Ajay asks the members, especially Sabal, about where he can find "Lakshmana", something he only knows as a name, he is treated as if the Golden Path have absolutely no idea what he is talking about, and they believe that "Lakshmana" is some kind of shrine. The implication is that either the Golden Path's members are deliberately lying to Ajay to further their cause, or they are actually ignorant to the identity of Pagan Min's daughter. Of course, this happened at least a couple of decades ago with Sabal being a child during Mohan Ghale's leadership.
• But Not Too Foreign: Pagan Min rose to power as a son of Chinese Triad leader, but he is also partially European (makes sense, given he comes from Hong Kong), so he doesn't stick out like a sore thumb in an Indian/Nepalese environment and can relate better to the protagonist of the game. Ajay also qualifies, as a Kyrati brought up in America. And both Pagan and Ajay's voice actors are Caucasians.
• But Thou Must!: Whether or not Noore's demise happens at your hand or not, she will die. Also, Yogi and Reggie's missions tend to be like this. Even though Ajay clearly objects to the things they do, such as drugging him against his will multiple times, going along with their repeated injections of foreign substances into Ajay's body is the only way to complete these missions. You can choose not to do the missions, but where's the fun in that?
• Calling Card: One of the many categories of collectibles in the game are the "Masks of Yalung", demonic masks left by a Serial Killer at the scenes of their grisly murders. Radio DJ Rabi-Ray-Rana wonders on-air what his Calling Card would be if he were a serial killer: Playing cards are too overdone, masks are already taken... so maybe he would just take a shit on his victims. This is something of a theme with him.
• Camp Gay: Mumu Chiffon, if the name weren't a big enough hint. Played with a bit in that he's well-dressed and somewhat mincing, but has no sort of lisp, and clearly has at least some survival skills.
• Camp Straight: Despite dressing flamboyantly and his unique personality, Pagan Min makes it clear he is straight.
• Catchphrase: The propaganda broadcaster's is "May Pagan's light shine upon you all".
• Central Theme: There is no "good" or "evil" in war, and trying to fight evil can lead to you becoming just as evil, or at least make you forget what you were fighting for in the first place.
• Chainsaw-Grip BFG: The MG-42 machine gun and its Signature variant, the Buzzsaw, are held with a chainsaw grip that's bolted onto their sides. The Harpoon Gun from the "Hurk's Redemption" DLC also qualifies.
• Character Blog: For marketing, Ubisoft made one. It belongs to an Indian journalist who goes to Kyrat before the events of the game and in the end meets Pagan Min.
• Civil War: Ajay quickly becomes embroiled in a civil war between the people and Pagan Min's despotic regime. It started over thirty years before the story with a conflict between the monarchy and La Résistance, and continued when Pagan Min usurped the throne. By the beginning of the game proper, Pagan Min has reduced the rebels to nothing more than an annoyance - Ajay changes that.
• Climax Boss: Yuma. She takes on the avatar of Kalinag by drugging you. The result is that you have to fight her while she commands an army of elite mooks and a tiger, all while using a bow. Also, when you're the one playing as Kalinag, the final boss is a giant demon raven that can summon enemies and shoot fireballs out of its mouth.
• Co-Op Multiplayer: Hurk from Far Cry 3 returns as a secondary character who a second player can play as to assist you after a point.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Pagan Min's Royal Army do this to dissident citizens on a regular basis. Pagan Min's second in command, Paul "De Pleur" Harmon, is fond of electric wire beds.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Kyrat's warring factions. The Golden Path mainly wears blue on their uniforms and vehicles while Pagan's forces are easily discernible by their dark-red attire - which makes for an utterly hilarious design choice in case of the latter. The in-game minimap adopts the same color coding for friend-foe identification purposes. The human teams in Shanath Arena battles also wear various colors to tell them apart, but since all of them shoot Ajay on sight anyway, it doesn't make much of a difference except for whether or not they'll be distracted enough for a melee finishing kill.
• Color Motif: Bright blue and orange, representing the elephant and tiger respectively.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard:
  • The skill screen claims that you only need to complete one quest for Yogi & Reggie to unlock the duration boosts for the hunting syringe. It's a lie by omission at best; it specifically needs to be an optional sidequest for them to unlock the skill, which means you actually need to complete three quests for them because the first two are required as part of the campaign. What's odd about this is the second required one also introduces the thangka Collection Sidequest, and the thangka you collect during that mission does count towards the requirements to unlock another skill.
  • Longinus is mostly in the same boat, as there is both another skill and a weapon unlocked by doing a certain number of missions for him, but you have to do two as part of the campaign before the game actually starts counting. It's a little less apparent than Yogi & Reggie's case, since the first one of those two only marginally involves him, spending just enough time to introduce him before completely changing gears to pushing back an attack on Banapur.
• Concealment Equals Cover: While most of the enemies play the trope straight, the snipers, who can take about half your life meter per shot through almost any object in the game, are a rather jarring subversion. The player can only shoot through very thin cover with most weapons - the exceptions being the games' three .50-cal sniper rifles, all of which can penetrate a ridiculous amount of cover.
• Continuity Nod: Longinus was a warlord from a war-torn African country and was saved by a priest named Maliya, who helped in hiding him in a church in Pala and baptized him at Goka Falls. His missions even involve you seeking out caches of diamonds, one of them using a tracker that is almost identical to the GPS you used in Far Cry 2.
  • Several sellable items qualify as continuity nods as well: A butchered wahine (with Vaas' head), conflict diamonds from Bowa-Seko, a knockoff GPS with a map of Rook Island, and malaria pills, to name a few.
    • There's also a gamebook that mentions Jack Carver and Dr. Krieger.
• Country Matters: Pagan Min calls Ajay's father a cunt in the secret ending.
• Covert Distress Code: During his introductory mission, Willis takes part in a sit-down with some soldiers from the Royal Army. Before heading in to meet them, he tells Ajay to watch over him with a sniper rifle and listen for the code word "Reaganomics", which is his signal for Ajay to start shooting because the meeting is going south.
• Crossover: With Childish Gambino in the Far Cry 4 and Childish Gambino: The Collaboration trailer.
• Crow's Nest Cartography: Bell towers reveal portions of the map, liberate weapons, and reveal objectives.
• Cutscene Incompetence: When Ajay first goes to his old family home in Kyrat, he somehow manages to let himself get drugged and captured by Yogi and Reggie, two petty criminals who are both unarmed.
• Cypher Language: The shops in Banapur and other towns have signboards with text which is supposedly either in Hindi or a fictional "Kyrati" language. In reality, it is an English cypher, with each English letter replaced by a character from the Devanagari script. This is very different from how English words are normally written in languages that use Devanagari, because it completely butchers the pronunciation.
• Deconstruction:
  • The game attacks the idea of Freudian Excuse and Morality Pet as an enabler and/or self-justification for doing terrible actions. Amita and Sabal both fall into self-justifications when they decide to turn on each other in your respective branch of choices. De Pleur likewise uses his genuine love for his daughter as a ground of sanity while working as a brutal Torture Technician; so long as he can concentrate on her as an innocent in his life, he can completely bury his wrongdoings psychologically and honestly call himself "the good guy" while he's torturing someone. Pagan Min himself lampshades this, stating At Least I Admit It regarding his brutal crackdown of the Golden Path and the villagers who support them by noting that his daughter Lakshmana was killed by Mohan, the leader of the Golden Path.
  • In the end, Ajay Ghale has to consider this as well. His entire quest to return his mother's ashes to Lakshmana gets sidetracked by the Golden Path where he gets pulled into becoming an Icon of Rebellion, but as Pagan Min points out he was always the heir of Kyrat and had he stayed with him and become his heir, he could perhaps have done more good by bringing peace from the top rather than becoming "one of the monkeys who throws their shit at each other". He also points out that once he brings the ashes to Lakshmana he would lose all connection with the pre-Kyrat Ajay, the one his mother wanted to keep out of the conflict. Though to be fair, this may be a bad idea: by becoming Pagan Min's student and heir, Ajay would effectively be hated by Kyrat, whereas by massacring the army and saving innocents along the way, he becomes a heroic dictator. And yet, being called a "hero" for murdering punch-clock villains really puts the "double standard" to mind.
  • The game explores The Messiah trope and how it does more harm than good. Throughout the game quite a few characters including the main protagonist, his father, Bhadra and Pagan Min take or get elevated to this status. Far Cry 4 shows how it can be used, abused and downright manipulated to cause others to commit horrible atrocities in the name of whoever achieves such a status. A prime example is the post-credit sequence with Sabal.
  • Far Cry 4 also takes time to savage the idea of clearly defined Black-and-White Morality in war. While Pagan Min runs a authoritarian narco-state and violently oppresses the population of Kyrat, he tried to bring some order (although such efforts were intended to eliminate those hampering the development of his heroin fields) to a country which had suffered an 80-year civil war before he even arrived and was allegedly on the verge of phasing out the violence his army utilized and negotiating a peace settlement with the forces opposed to him at the gradual prompting of Ishwari Ghale, his lover. The Golden Path on the other hand claim to fight for a free Kyrat but their two leaders bicker constantly and ultimately try convince the player to murder their rival for control of the group, their founder was fine with murdering the infant daughter of Pagan Min and whatever vision ultimately wins out in the faction fight is no better or a whole lot worse than the current situation.
  • With its secret ending, the game makes a massive dig at the inevitable power fantasy of a traditional melodramatic video game conflict by letting the main character achieve what he wants without firing a single shot. The last line of the secret ending also deconstructs the entire idea of providing a secret pacifist deconstruction ending to a game whose appeal is all about gratiutious violence, with Pagan Min quipping "Oh, good. You feel better now? Get it out of your system? Perfect. Maybe now we can finally shoot some goddamn guns!"
  • Far Cry 4 smashes the idea that any sort of group styling itself as La Résistance should immediately be considered heroic and should be supported regardless of context through showing us the horrific results of the Golden Path taking power in Kyrat and to a lesser extent the story behind Mohan Ghale and how his resistance group was in fact a bunch of religious extremists who were more concerned with archaic religious traditions rather than the well-being of the people as a whole and how their leader was fine with murdering the innocent infant daughter of his arch-enemy.
  • Adding onto the above, the game takes the time to ridicule the Evil Overlord trope and the idea that such characters who fulfill the role are always irredeemable with no good reasons for their actions by allowing Pagan Min to show the side of the story behind the conflict which the leaders of La Résistance don't tell the main character.
  • Finally, the game uses the ultimate result of its balance of power missions to ruthlessly parody the concept of a moral choice system in video gaming. Ultimately, neither rival vision for Kyrat benefits the people, especially considering one is a nation consumed by religious fanaticism and purges, while the other had Kyrat becoming a narco-state akin to Pol Pot's Cambodia. The third option really isn't any better: If Ajay takes over (by killing Amita and Sabal), nothing changes. He doesn't become king, the Royal Army doesn't surrender or leave, and you still keep fighting as though Pagan was still alive. It's implied that Ajay's only plan is to keep using the Royal Army as an excuse plot and target practice. Did you ever have a plan to better Kyrat, or were you just there to keep killing people to make money to buy guns to kill people in bigger, more badass ways? The secret ending plays into this as well: when all of the choices are equally bad as each other, what's the point of choosing any of them? Might as well finish what you need to do and get the hell out of the country.
• Department of Redundancy Department: During several Yogi and Reggie missions, the instruction says "Missing things are missing - find them."
• Deus ex 'Scuse Me: At the beginning of the game, Ajay is asked by Pagan Min to stay in a room and enjoy the plate of Crab Rangoon before him while he goes and tortures a Golden Path terrorist, giving Ajay an opportunity to escape and continue his quest.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • At the beginning of the game, Ajay is asked by Pagan Min to stay in a room and enjoy the plate of Crab Rangoon before him while he goes and tortures a Golden Path terrorist. Instead of exploring the mansion and eventually escaping, as the game suggests the player should, they can simply have Ajay wait and do as Pagan Min instructed. After about 13 minutes, Pagan Min will return, and explain to Ajay what happened to his mother, before taking with helicopter to Lakshmana, the place Ajay was supposed to go, without any problems, creating a secret ending. By simply being patient, the player can skip over the rest of the plot without any trouble.
  • The player can also kill Pagan even if they pick the "good" ending. If Ajay has an RPG or another sufficiently big gun on him, the player can shoot down Pagan's chopper before it flies off, and then find his body down the mountain where it can be looted for quite a bit of cash.
  • Zig-zagged during "Truth and Justice", where the player is intended to chase Pagan down and kill him using a gyrocopter. If the player has the right perks, they can leap from the copter and shank him, getting a unique animation where Ajay rips off Eric's wig. On the other hand, the radio conversation with Pagan revealing the body-double ploy doesn't change to account for the fact that Ajay already discovered for himself that it was a body double.
  • Choosing to spare Sabal or Amita near the end when making the final Balance of Power choice allows you to find them in specific locations in the game world, if you've had a change of heart and decide that a bullet needs to be placed in their heads.
• Difficult, but Awesome: The LK1018 rocket launcher has a scope which guides the rocket to where the crosshair is pointing, so long as the player is aiming through it. Undoubtedly useful, but it comes with the risk of leaving yourself exposed and unable to retaliate to enemy fire as the player directs the rocket to its target. One needs to secure a well-hidden vantage point before using it. It also has a second mod that turns the missile into a makeshift mortar, powerful enough to wipe out a convoy or small outpost with a single shot, but has even more risk than the standard scope. Successfully mastering this weapon will trivialize most of the more dangerous encounters in the game.
• Disc-One Nuke: It is possible to acquire many top-tier weapons before they are unlocked in shops just by looting them off slain enemies. Also, if the player is willing to grind the appropriate sidequests, they can unlock some of the best Signature Weapons fairly early into the game.
  • Doing Himalayas missions (such as the DLC missions or Hurk's missions) will pit the player against the Royal Guard much earlier in the game than you're normally supposed to encounter them, and subsequently lets you loot their endgame-level weaponry (most notably the .50 BMG sniper rifle) within the first couple hours of the game; alternately, you can get the P416 rifle early by simply going to liberate the northeastern-most bell tower in the south, since it's guarded by Royal Guard rather than the regular army. Even better, unlike Far Cry 3, they're properly added to your inventory and allow you to buy attachments for them as soon as you pick them up, rather than having to wait until they're "officially" unlocked by reaching the second half of the map.
  • The Bushman assault rifle exemplifies this best. The player gets the chance to unlock it barely a third into the storyline, long before its stock version, the P416 is officially introduced. It has an excellent fire rate, solid damage, a silencer, and a decent scope for mid-range sniping, making it a very versatile weapon. It's somewhat balanced out by the fact that Ajay has to reach rank 10 in the Shanath Arena just to get it; fortunately, it's easier to rank to 10 if you link your Uplay account with the free "arena companion" mobile game, and your Arena progress carries over to a new game, so if you ever restart the game, you just need to unlock access to the Arena and play a single round to get the Bushman again.
    • Capturing two cargo trucks is very easy to do very early in the game and unlocks the Warrior, the AK's signature version that's basically the poor man's Bushman. Most of its stats are inferior to the Bushman's, but it boasts the same per-shot damage and comes with a red-dot sight and a silencer to boot. Stealth-centric players probably won't be using anything else for taking out enemy infantry at short to mid range until the Bushman becomes available.
  • The player can get the M79 grenade launcher after liberating a mere eight bell towers. It can take out many vehicles in one hit and Heavies in just a couple. Unlike all other grenade/rocket launchers in the game, it fits in the sidearm slot, making it possible to use in vehicles (devastatingly effective for road chases and general mayhem) while keeping a beginner's single primary slot free for a longarm. Plus it reloads more quickly than the other launchers and the player can carry a lot more 40mm grenades than rockets. One of these versatile devices is available for free in the very first real fashion mission at what is probably going to be the second outpost the player liberates, or via an Armored Escort mission, where they always provide this weapon free of charge.
  • If the player know where to look you can score a Z-93 sniper rifle within five minutes of unlocking the first outpost. It requires a long hike via Buzzer and Ajay dispatching a handful of dangerous enemies but the Z-93 is more than worth it. It is only slightly less powerful than the signature Anti-Materiel Rifle but can be outfitted with a suppressor, making it much more useful to a stealth-focused player - and, as already mentioned, you can slap a suppressor on it as soon as you can afford one, instead of having to wait until you reach the second half of the game world like in Far Cry 3.
  • The Recurve Bow can be obtained as soon as you can afford it, and is a superb early game weapon. It can kill unarmoured enemies in one shot anywhere on the body. It is silent, which is always useful. It can fire explosive arrows and Arrows on Fire, which also count as silent. If you attach a sight, it has better Accuracy, Range and Damage stats than early sniper rifles. Arrows have a flat trajectory, so it's easy to aim. It loses the One-Hit Kill ability in North Kyrat, but you should have an adequate sniper rifle by then.
  • The Sandman Pistol, Driller Machine Gun, and Elephant Gun are all immediately available if the player purchased the Season Pass. To make a long story short, these Signature Weapons immediately outperform their regular counterparts in the early game, and the Sandman Pistol remains a viable stealth weapon even later in the game.
• Dreaming of Times Gone By: Supposing Shangri-La is a real place in the game's universe, then the Shangri-La episodes fall under this trope. The player assumes control of the episodes' protagonist, Kalinag, and follows his mythical journey when the primary protagonist, Ajay, falls into a deep dream while searching for the paintings that depict it.
• Drives Like Crazy: While Royal Army and Golden Path drivers are very good drivers with only the occasional mishap, this trope is the order of the day for civilians, whose driving AI seems to be "go at top speed" and "don't react to anything that gets in your way". Bad enough for you if you're unfortunate enough to be on or near a road one of them is traveling down, and all but guaranteed death for any Golden Path allies or Sherpa merchants on that road, since they have an unfortunate tendency to only react to a car barreling down on them once it's only a foot away.
• Dull Surprise: A common complaint about Ajay is that he reacts to some genuinely crazy things with less enthusiasm than even Jason Brody's understated reactions.
• Dungeon Bypass: You can skip the Le Parkour part of most bell towers by simply flying to the top with a Buzzer chopper, deactivating all of them in about twenty minutes per region (south and north, respectively) and thus unlocking the Buzzsaw signature machine gun with laughable effort.
  • If you sit down and enjoy the crab rangoon for 13 minutes at the start of the game, you can skip the entire game, going straight to an alternate ending where things actually get explained.
• Easter Egg: If you can find Pagan's corpse at the end, you can loot it and get the pen he stabbed the guard with at the start of the game, along with a large sum of money.
• Easy Exp: Invoked in full force - pretty much everything the player can do out in the open world will yield Experience Points, from discovering new locations over tearing down propaganda posters to, naturally, killing enemies (but not animals, strangely, despite most of them being much more dangerous than Pagan's soldiers). It's incredibly common to max out one's level well before even half of all missions and collectibles are accounted for. In a strange twist for a first-person shooter but consistent with its predecessor, most ways of gaining XP for the game's RPG elements amount to a heavy aversion of RPGs Equal Combat since massacring the Royal Army is actually the least effective source of experience unless you're in a situation where you're given several dozen people to kill all at once, with even some of the fancier takedowns barely adding much of a multiplier to the experience per kill.
• Eldritch Location:
  • Much like Rook Island, Kyrat is heavily implied to be one the further you get into the game and the more collectibles you dig out. To say nothing of what happens to Ajay when he's experimenting with the local plant life.
  • Shangri La is most definitely one as well, both by definition and by how it's portrayed in the game - a war-torn former paradise invaded by armies of omnicidal demons, its rivers and oceans running red with blood, its skies overcast with red clouds, its wildlife gruesomely slaughtered, and what's left of its previous ruler's power kept in check by massive enchanted chains. Plus, its waterfalls flow up.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: The SA50 is the game's top-tier sniper rifle that doesn't become available until the main story is almost over, but it combines the Z93's massive damage, penetration capabilities and attachment options with the Dragunov's semi-auto rate of fire. You can still make copious use of it for completing any leftover side activities after the credits have rolled, though.
• Elite Mooks: The Hunters. These guys are the real deal - unlike the rest of the army, they respect the traditions and culture of Kyrat, and then use those traditions and culture to murder everyone in their way. These guys have brains - they perform stealth (basically, they are resistant to the game-breaking tagging system, and have their own detection system which you won't be warned about), keep their distance and use bows to deal high damage without tracing themselves, shoot at anything close to Ajay that explodes, and can use traditional Kyrat drugs (with some hallucinogens in the mix) to become beastmasters and instantly convert powerful wild animals to their side, forcing Ajay to fight both the animals and army instead of having them fight each other like they usually do. It's implied that using bows in a world of guns has honed their skills and brains... or that all the dumb archers were naturally selected already. These guys become player characters in the multiplayer, they're that good with bows and hunting.
  • Interestingly, there are elite Hunters encountered during the fight against Yuma. The only difference between them and their regular counterparts is that the elite Hunters are wearing body armor, allowing them to take an extra arrow shot (headshots still level the playing field, though, not to mention the time dilation while aiming).
  • A more mundane variety appears later in the game. Unlike the Kyrati-based Royal Army, the elite Royal Guard consists almost exclusively of Chinese mercenaries fighting for Pagan Min. They are first encountered when the player gets access to Northern Kyrat. They use superior tactics, utilize heavier body armor, utilize Heavy troopers of both the flamethrower and machine gun varieties more often, drive around in more heavily armed vehicles, carry more powerful weapons compared to the Royal Army and generally carry themselves with more professionalism. Essentially they're the equivalent of Hoyt's Privateers from Far Cry 3.
• Establishing Character Moment: Pagan Min arrives in his crazy outfit, corrects one of his subordinates on failing to carry out his orders, executes him, and then takes a blood-splattered selfie with Ajay.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Pagan Min claims to have felt this for Ajay's mother. He did. There's hints in the game he feels something similar to Ajay due to the possibility he's his son. He's actually just fond of Ajay due to the fact he's the son of his lover and half-brother to his daughter.
• Evil All Along: Mohan Ghale murdered Pagan Min's infant daughter. Likewise, the resistance he established was a reactionary religious terrorist group if Sabal is to be believed. The modern incarnation isn't much better. Interestingly, some of Mohan's notes indicate that the exact opposite was true at one point, and he writes about how he wants to make the country less introverted and backwards. Then he sends his girlfriend to seduce Pagan Min...
• Evil Brit: Pagan Min is extravagantly British. This makes complete sense given he's from Hong Kong, grew up there when it was still a colony and is half British on his mother's side.
• Exact Words: Pagan Min may be a madman but he makes damn sure to be precise with his orders. This character tic of his is subtle Foreshadowing of how the secret ending is achieved, and in the standard ending he calls out the player character on not heeding his instructions to stay put and enjoy the food.
• Fanservice Extra: Since there's no mentally unhinged but sexy villainess to be boinked from the protagonist's POV in this entry to the franchise, we get a very busty, very topless beauty instead whose sole job is it to stand around and snark at Ajay whenever he shows up to fight in Shanath Arena... or just to ogle her assets. Yuma may also count as a darker example.
• Fantasy Pantheon: The native religion of Kyrat, which is (rather loosely) based on other Dharmic religions of South Asia, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, but features a very unique mythology. Deities include Banashur (the creator god who made the world), Kyra (Banashur's daughter, the goddess from whom Kyrat takes its name from), and Yalung (a devil who once battled Banashur over the fate of the world). There's also a famous story about Kalinag, a warrior-hero who visited Shangri-La to fight off an invasion by the Rakshasa.
• Feathered Fiend: The infamous Black Eagles again. You'll learn to hate them the moment the first one swoops down on you out of nowhere and takes off 60% of your un-upgraded health pool in a single hit without giving a damn about your armor (which he'll have damaged as well). Most NPCs fare even worse. It's not uncommon to witness entire Royal Army or Golden Path patrols getting wiped out by just one dive-bombing eagle. If you hear that awful screech, you better hope you can spot and kill the beast before it ruins your day. You won't.
• Fiendish Fish: The Demon Fish, based on goliath tigerfish.
• Firing in the Air a Lot: The Golden Path rebels' preferred method of celebrating anything, from the safe arrival of a supply truck (for whose defense they didn't lift a finger) to such heroic accomplishments as shooting down a lone dhole with automatic weapons and only three out of five members of their squad dying in the process. One can't help but wonder how those ultra-aggressive Kyrati eagles haven't gone extinct already with so much lead being thrown skyward at even the slightest opportunity. Perhaps it's the very reason why they're so hell-bent on cracking the skull of everything and everyone on the ground. What makes the rebels' favourite pastime even more egregious is their otherwise constant whining about their lack of supplies, especially guns and ammo to fight Pagan's armies. Might be linked to their revolution not getting anywhere despite decades of civil war, you say? No way.
• Flamethrower Backfire: Naturally, you can shoot the fuel tanks of flamethrower-wielding enemies.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: Rhinos and elephants can send vehicles flying in a charge. A human who's unfortunate enough to get struck by one will be violently hurled across the screen.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Ajay first met Hurk, the latter initially believes that the Golden Path are the bad guys. He is not wrong though as near the end of the game, whoever leads the group becomes another corrupted and power hungry individual who abuses their power just like Pagan.
  • During the drug-trips caused by Yuma, you'll see the end result of the person you side with. This gives you a chance to side with someone else, if you didn't like the foreshadowing. Although both of the choices end in catastrophe….
  • Pagan Min's seemingly throwaway comment regarding his kingdom's currency ("That's me...although I'm not so sure anymore.") is a subtle hint about his body double, Eric, from Australia whom Ajay murders at one point in the game. And if that was too subtle for you, one of the soldiers in the first village Ajay encounters talks about the prospect.
  • In Valley of the Yetis, the Yetis have prominent root-like lesions on their backs which foreshadows the fact they're apparently humans transformed by contact with a large tree-like organism that the cult worships as a relic of Yalung.
• Frankenstein's Monster: There's a small cave in southern Kyrat called Hariyo Ghupa. Inside you find a long-dead soldier on a table, hooked up to a car battery and all kinds of unidentified beakers and electrodes. There's also a note written by the soldier's friend, who read Mary Shelley's book but misunderstood it as an actual guide to human resurrection.
• Full-Boar Action: Wild boars appear in the game and are hostile to Ajay.
• Full-Circle Revolution: Zig-zagged. Ajay really is making a difference by putting someone else in power, but Pagan Min is basically hated for three different traits: slavery, mass executions, and whimsical violent rampages. Each of the three possible leaders will exaggerate one of these traits to a logical extreme. Amita will turn Kyrat into an opium-driven agrarian communist state, Sabal will go Knight Templar on the good atheist people of Kyrat, and Ajay will take over as king and keep doing what he has been doing for the past sixty hours - killing random people and animals on the roads and in the forests for fun and profit. There is a fourth option, but that involves becoming the heir without bloodshed, at the cost of becoming Pagan Min's student.
• Full-Frontal Assault: At one point Ajay is stripped naked and forced to fight in an arena. His penis is even visible at some points, although censored in the European version.
• Freudian Excuse: Defied in the game as Pagan Min's past is clearly established as irrelevant to his current crimes. Played with at the end when Pagan Min reveals the majority of the violence and bloodshed he committed was because the Golden Path murdered his infant daughter. Subverted, because Pagan Min admits he wanted to do it and was using her death as an excuse.
• Game-Breaking Bug: There's a long-standing issue with Pagan's Wrath convoys not spawning although all prerequisites are met. While not having to contend with heavily armed and armored convoys roaming the countryside is not a bad thing per se, it prevents players from acquiring one signature weapon and, more importantly, the very useful Heavy Takedown skill, both of which require the destruction of one to two convoys. Completionists will also be pissed because 100% Completion becomes impossible to attain as well, naturally. There are hints that the problem is linked to starting a new game without manually deleting the previous save files before (Far Cry 4 only has one savegame slot), although other players have reported their convoys spawning just fine regardless. Since the game is several years old by the time of writing and no patches have been released anymore for quite a while, it's unlikely this bug will ever be fixed.
• Game Hunting Mechanic: The player can hunt animals to get pelts and baits.
• Gladiator Games: Noore's Shanath Arena spectacles are dreaded both In-Universe and out, the former due to everyone who displeases her ending up there as a participant, the latter because it's a prime example of That One Sidequest. Only one successful fight is mandatory to advance the story, but if you want to unlock the very useful Bushman assault rifle and don't have the option of linking external software to your Ubisoft account, you have no choice but to grind dozens upon dozens of increasingly punishing battles in the arena until you reach rank 10 (of 20). While low-level rounds pit you against fairly basic human fighters and animals (but still lots of them), the opposition quickly escalates to include elite troops, whole squads of Heavies, and even the very lethal unique animals Ajay can hunt in Mumu Chiffon's Fashion Week quests. Thankfully, this must only be endured once since the arena rank carries over into any subsequent game.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Hunters can wreck you... but they've got no body armor and will drop just like any other unarmored mook when you shoot them.
  • Ajay can use Overdose syringes, which allow him to deal double damage at the cost of taking double damage.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: A brief, modern variation of the trope occurs in the game's opening cinematic. After brutally murdering one of his own soldiers, Pagan Min stops to take a selfie with Ajay. Ajay looks appropriately confused and terrified.
• Gorn: The Shangri La levels - aside from the Unexpected Gameplay Change - are most notable for one thing: very graphic dismemberment galore. It's all the more shocking because the rest of the game, and in fact the whole franchise so far, completely averts this despite offering so many ways of accomplishing it. That every single river, lake and ocean in this setting is running red with blood is just the icing on the cake.
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: While the overall conflict between the Golden Path and Pagan Min's rule is Black-and-Grey Morality, the overall conflict between Amita and Sabal is a lot more complicated. Amita is a psuedo-Marxist who believes in turning Kyrat into a narco-state to help bring education and gender equality to the people, while Sabal believes in the Good Old Ways and upholding the tradition of the next Tarun Matara. Amita's pragmatism and "greater-good" mentality serves as a stark contrast to Sabal's conservatism and Honor Before Reason mentality, and neither are shown to be explicitly in the right. Completely and utterly subverted after the surviving leader takes control of Kyrat. Without the other mind behind the Golden Path to balance the survivor out, Amita and Sabal delve into extremism: Amita forcibly conscripts children to serve as soldiers and workers, and it's heavily implied that she murdered Bhadra. Sabal, meanwhile, becomes an outright Knight Templar and slaughters numerous supporters of Amita for betraying the gods, all while Bhadra is Forced to Watch. Needless to say, how Sabal or Amita come to rule Kyrat serves as a good lesson what happens when one Oni dies and the survivor has nobody else to balance them out.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Forget suppressed sniper rifles; you can blow someone up with an RPG without getting caught if you hide before your detection meter fills up.
• Hard Truth Aesop: Rebellions against oppressive regimes are not always a good thing: without foresight or competent leadership, they can result in another dictatorship.
• Hawaiian-Shirted Tourist: Yogi and Reggie, and then some. They're completely ignorant of the local culture and think everyone is there for their amusement or to give them drugs.
• Heavily Armored Mook/Giant Mook: Heavily armored machine gunners and flamethrower users similar to those seen in Far Cry 3 appear regularly throughout the game, which is unsurprising given that the human enemies in Far Cry 4 are largely palette-swapped versions of the human enemies from Far Cry 3.
• Hell Is That Noise: All the animal roars can be this if the player is not looking for a fight, but there's just something awful about the honey badger's screech. It's almost as bad as the eagle's, especially when you can't see the sky behind the treetops and thus have no idea where the bugger will be coming from...
• He Who Fights Monsters: This is actually a recurring theme in Kyrat, where the leaders of different factions are either sociopaths from the start or go crazy from fighting against/alongside sociopaths for years.
  • Mohan Ghale started out as an honorable member of the King's Guard, but years of witnessing constant failure, betrayal, and sacrilege turned him into the same monster that he was fighting. He justified it by saying that he wanted the monsters to kill each other so that his son would be safe from the monsters... and then he went and killed Pagan Min's baby daughter, which ruined Kyrat.
  • Willis started out in Far Cry 3 as a superspy for the CIA. For twenty years. By Far Cry 4, he's insulting Jason, killing his own team members, and was involved in a conspiracy to collaborate with tyrants, much like Hoyt was (Hoyt in Far Cry 3 had connections to human trafficking markets in "Rio, Hong Kong, New York"). He pretty much betrays Ajay at the end of his sub-plot.
  • And finally, Amita or Sabal will become a Well-Intentioned Extremist once one of them is taken out of the picture, which results in the now-unbalanced one to become an extremist after years of escalated but balanced arguing. A foreshadowing trance reveals Amita's future if given rein of the Golden Path, throwing away her dreams of democracy and becoming an in-interim dictator who oppresses civilians into fueling the industrial sweatshops. Sabal's future involves killing everyone, Golden Path or not, who ever committed any sacrilege against his religion — which is a LOT of people after years of Pagan Min's cult of personality.
• Heroic Fantasy: The Shangri-La episodes dip into this. They follow the journey of Kalinag the Seeker as he liberates the kingdom of Shangri-La from the evil Rakshasa's influence. Kalinag mentions his allegiance to the game's Fantasy Pantheon as part of his motivation, but outside of the Rakshasa, none of them play any direct part in the action.
• High-Speed Hijack: A new ability is to leap from your vehicle and onto another, taking out the driver and commandeering their ride for yourself. This can even be done from a Buzzer mini-chopper in mid-flight. The audacity of Ajay pulling that stunt without getting his head chopped off in the process gets lampshaded by Hurk during one of the latter's missions.
• Idiot Ball: Amita or Sabal will take over the Golden Path, create their own dystopia right in front of Ajay, and torture/kill Bahdra.
• Illegal Religion: As part of his attempt to have himself worshiped as a God-Emperor, Pagan Min outlaws the old religions of Kyrat, as well as social gatherings at sites of religious significance. Pagan Min orders his army to destroy any secret temples and shrines they come across, and of course massacre any worshipers there. If Sabal is allowed to take over Kyrat, he'll take this to the exact opposite direction by punishing anyone who doesn't follow the old Kyrati religion with death.
• Improvised Weapon: Pagan Min's pen. To be fair, it's made of steel and is very thick, which allowed him to stab the soldier who let things get out of control.
  • Looting it after the credits will reveal that it's actually a custom built dagger, effectively a spike which allowed Pagan to pull off his Establishing Character Moment.
  • If an enemy is trying to attack you while you are using a blowtorch to fix a vehicle, you can use the blowtorch to fry them.
• Infinity -1 Sword: The Warrior is a signature AK-47 with a reflex sight, silencer, extended magazines and slightly superior hitting power. Though inferior to the Bushman (the best assault rifle in the game), the Warrior at least doesn't need you to reach Rank 10 in the Shanath Arena - all you need to do is capture two Royal Army ammo lorries. It's a solid all-rounder weapon that'll see a stealthy player through most of the game.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Most characters are modeled after their actors. Sabal, Yuma, Willis and many others.
• Instant-Win Condition: The first four Shangri La missions end the moment you interact with the Bell of Enlightenment. It doesn't matter how many dozens of enemies are bearing down on you at that moment, which makes a mad dash past the defending armies actually a viable (and often even the easiest) method of finishing the mission.
• Ironic Echo:
  • In a humorous manner at the end of the game. Before you confront Pagan at the Royal Palace, he tells you that all choices have consequences. Given what you had to do before this, the statement carries some heavy weight. If you choose not to shoot Pagan, he wraps up the remaining loose ends and gets away in his helicopter, shouting "All choices have consequences, Ajay! I've given you Kyrat, but I'm keeping the helicopter!"
  • In an early cutscene, Pagan Min says that he is very particular with his words. In a late cutscene, Amita says much the same thing.
• It's Personal: Pagan Min for the Golden Path. They killed his infant daughter. A fact you only learn at the end of the main campaign and in a secret ending.
• Just a Stupid Accent: Local Kyratis speak English in North Indian/Nepali accents. Though the accents are Truth in Television.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Pagan Min, potentially if Ajay spares his life. Given the circumstances, it may also be a case of Redemption Equals Life. Played with as Pagan Min hasn't changed in the slightest. He's just making the same offer he did to you earlier: to take you to your sister's mausoleum, which you've been looking for the entire time. And then give you Kyrat.
  • Ajay attempts (if the player doesn't shoot her) to enforce this with Noore, after revealing her family was murdered years ago by Paul Harmon. She quickly dismisses why she doesn't want to be a karma houdini, and offs herself, due to her guilt of years of crossing the Moral Event Horizon by pitting people against increasingly high odds to survive for a quick buck, with it being all for naught.
  • Willis manipulates Ajay into murdering the CIA informer network in Kyrat and flies to safety after shoving Ajay out of his plane.
  • Yogi and Reggie never get any comeuppance for turning Ajay over to Noore, or for all the times they drug Ajay without his consent. The former at least has the excuse that Noore asks Ajay to go easy on them, and when he comes back they give him their earnings from betting on him in the Arena with an actually-kept promise to move out and let him have his family homstead back.
• Killer Rabbit:
  • Gulo the Honey Badger. The rumors are that he's unkillable, but your hunting contact shrugs it off as a series of memetic mutations with no truth whatsoever. He's wrong. When you get to the hunting area, there's multiple Royal Army soldiers dead with their throats ripped out along with several other predator animals, including several tigers and a rhino. Gulo can deal at least four bars' worth of damage in a single bite, and is so high in HP that you need an LMG to pump three times his weight in bullets into his hide to kill him. The game makes a joke of this by tampering with the mission selection screen for Gulo, warning the player multiple times that they must have a death wish.
  • To a lesser extent, normal honey badgers can be this too, due to their speed and surprisingly high health.
  • There's a sidequest where you have to kill honey badgers, coming from a guy who claims his wife was killed by them. Ajay's response is to burst out laughing at his claim, until he realises the man was being serious, awkwardly backs up and agrees to help.
  • Dholes, too. Quite similar to foxes, they don't look that imposing. But underestimate them at your own risk. A pack of them can do a surprising amount of damage to an unaware player.
• Kukris Are Kool: Ajay wields a kukri for use in close combat and the Golden Path's logo (and the loading screen icon) utilizes a pair of kukri under a golden sun.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Hunters turn all of your tricks against you. They can see you in bushes, so stealth doesn't work so well. They can charm animals, even the ones you lure against them. They don't show up on radar, disappear from tagging and are virtually silent. You go from being the hunter to the hunted very quickly when they're about.
• Lampshade Hanging: The subjects of Pagan's rants to Ajay through his radio are often these regarding various things found around Kyrat, such as one that has him asking who's going around and lighting all of those hundreds of candles you find all over the place (and then he declares all candles illegal!).
  • His Good Counterpart is the DJ of Radio Free Kyrat, Rabi Ray Rana. For instance, one of the Rabi's rants expresses annoyance that the brutal tyrant he is risking his life to oppose is a bizarrely dressed weirdo with a bad haircut.
• Large Ham: The gun-dealing preacher Longinus, always ready to give Ajay a couple of bombastic Bible quotes before sending him on his way.
• Last Request: This is the very reason Ajay went to Kyrat in the first place. Before her death, his mother requests Ajay via a note to:
  "Take me back to Lakshmana"
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In one easter egg, namely, the secret ending the player gets for having Ajay wait at the dinner table at the beginning of the game, Pagan Min returns after some time, takes Ajay to Lakshmana via helicopter and the player gets all of the plot reveals dumped on them very quickly and casually: Lakshmana was Ajay's infant half-sister, daughter of Pagan Min, who was killed by the Golden Path, and now Ajay is there to deposit his mother's ashes at her resting place. Ajay is allowed to fulfill this objective without issue, before Pagan Min takes him back to the chopper and his last words before the game Fades to Black are "Maybe now we can finally shoot some goddamn guns!" (Implying that Ajay might be teaming up with him in that timeline, but more importantly, the game resets and the player is encouraged to play normally, where you shoot a lot of guns.)
  • Then there is the standard ending of the game where he states that if Ajay had just listened to him and stayed put at the beginning the entire conflict could have been avoided. The player can do just that on a new game and it unlocks the secret ending.
  • The item descriptions, just like the the last game in the series seem to be directing both the protagonist and the player themselves.
• Leeroy Jenkins: The developers have admitted that the reason Hurk is Ajay's co-op partner is so that it doesn't feel out of character when one of the players inevitably Leeroys the other's carefully crafted outpost takeover plan.
• Level Grinding: Can be done very easily by grabbing a Buzzer and flying from one collectible to the next, especially if the player did some prior investments and bought the respective maps from the shop to reveal the locations of collectibles on the map. Even the most ubiquitous of those, the propaganda posters, yield 250 XP apiece. For comparison: killing a regular, non-heavy mook gets you a measly 10 XP (25 if it was a headshot kill), and twice that amount for Elite Mooks, with the added benefit of posters, letters and journals usually not shooting back.
  • One of the game's many side activities has the player capture the Royal Army's roaming cargo trucks and deliver them to the nearest liberated outpost. Doing so not only completely refills Ajay's ammo for free and yields a nice amount of cash, it also rewards the player with between 800 and 1200 Experience Points, which is roughly on par with finishing a main story mission or capturing an outpost undetected. These trucks spawn in enemy territory very frequently and are completely defenseless aside from running Ajay over. Since leveling up requires a maximum of 2000 XP (much less on lower levels) and the trucks tend to spawn over and over again at roughly the same locations, patient players can accumulate ridiculous amounts of skill points and money very quickly by taking over only one outpost and then going truck-hunting in the surrounding areas. Oh, and as an added bonus: capturing two trucks unlocks the Warrior, a silenced assault rifle with a red-dot sight and very decent stats that's extremely useful for stealth-centric players during the early and mid game stages.
• Lighter and Softer: Sure, the game itself isn't exactly sunshine and lollipops, but in comparison to Far Cry 3's lovely mix of torture, rape, and slavery, it's certainly lighter and softer than its spiritual predecessor, especially since it embraces sociopathic humor more.
• Lightning Bruiser: Yetis in The Valley of the Yetis are tough enough that even a direct rocket launcher hit won't down them (it takes almost 200 assault rifle rounds to kill one without using takedowns), are fast enough to outpace some vehicles, and can knock out more than 5 health bars in one punch (you max out at 6 health bars with a fully upgraded character).
• Love Triangle: A particularly tragic and vicious one. The participants are Pagan Min, Mohan Ghale and Ishwari Ghale who became increasingly estranged from her husband and had a daughter with Pagan.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: It's implied that this is Pagan's motivation — he had a brief fling with Ajay's mother, and is stated to be terrified of Dying Alone with no heir. Whether he's aware of her other lover, the founder of the resistance, who most everyone believes to be Ajay's real father, is yet to be seen. Subverted. Pagan Min and Ajay's mother, Ishwari, had a daughter named Lakshmana, who Mohan, Ajay's father, murdered. The objective Ishwari gives her son to "take her to Lakshmana" means to actually place her ashes next to Lakshmana's.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • Willis. With a few well placed lies and vague promises, he manages to make Ajay dispose of an Agency informer network for him.
  • Amita and Sabal, while Well Intentioned Extremists, compete with each other on who can guilt-trip, cajole, browbeat, and just plain bully Ajay into doing what they want. In particular, Sabal's blunt insistence that Ajay is doing his father proud by doing exactly what Sabal wants and pissing on his father's memory when doing the opposite is enough to make even the most sympathetic players to his cause switch their allegiance to Amita.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Ajay has numerous visions of an ancient Kyrati warrior he may or may not be a reincarnation of. He's usually tripping balls during them, though.
• The Messiah: All over the place as there's numerous characters who either see themselves as one or have been elevated to such a role by the people. Ajay's dad is a militant variation of one.
• Misplaced Wildlife:
  • Being based on Nepal, nearly every animal species encountered in Kyrat is one that's native to Nepal... except for the demon fish. They're based on the goliath tigerfish, a species found only in Africa. Ironically, it would have been right at home in Far Cry 2, but that game didn't have any predatory animals. A more appropriate choice for this game would have been the goonch catfish, which is just as large, just as dangerous to humans, and a native Nepalese species.
  • Another is the Malayan tapir, which is native to Southeast Asia.
  • Mugger crocodiles are native Nepal and Pakistan, as well as India. However, they almost exclusively exist in lower altitudes, not the higher altitude regions that make up the majority of Kyrat.
  • Somewhat justified when you remember Pagan Min essentially has an animal breeding program in Kyrat that successfully introduced a ton of wildlife that was on the verge of extinction to numbers in the 100s, or the fact this isn't the first time Far Cry had invasive species.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: The engine and gameplay are essentially the same as Far Cry 3, although with a new map filled with new weapons, vehicles, animals, and characters. It also incorporates elements from Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, such as the hostage rescue missions (just with four hostages at a time instead of only one), the ability to throw bait to lure predators towards enemies, one of its weapons via a uPlay reward, and certain elements of the HUD. There's also the ability to put Ajay to bed to rest and advance time, a feature returning from Far Cry 2.
• Mood Whiplash: The opening sequence goes from a high-tension attack scene (where the main character is nearly killed, and Pagan Min brutally executes the soldier who assaulted the vehicle) to Min pulling out his phone and taking a "selfie" with a bewildered Ajay and promising that they'll both "tear shit up" in Kyrat just before the title hits.
• More Dakka: Far Cry 3 featured a composite bow for silent ranged kills. Far Cry 4 has a semi-automatic crossbow in addition to that bow, and also features the Hunter Bow; a more archaic looking wooden bow that's a bit weaker than the modern composite bow.
  • Far Cry 4 sees its predecessor's MKG machine gun and raises it an MG 42, one of Nazi Germany's most dreaded weapons during WW II. Nicknamed "Hitler's Buzzsaw", the MG 42 was infamous for its blistering rate of fire at about 1200 high-caliber rounds per minute (so fast that the human ear can't distinguish the individual gunshots), a trait that's portrayed quite accurately by its in-game representation. Of course it also has an even more powerful signature version: the aptly named Buzzsaw.
• Morton's Fork: In a campaign mission, Ajay is assigned to deal with Najjar. He has the option to kill her or talk to her, but it doesn't matter since she dies no matter what option you pick.
• Motive Decay: An actual theme within the game. The violence of Kyrat results in individuals who come to the land with dreams and aspirations of changing things losing those goals as they become, instead, focused on the means they were using to achieve them. Sabal, Amita, Pagan Min, Mohan, and even Ajay may suffer this as they get swept up in the conflict to the point they forget what they're trying to achieve.
  • Shown in-game as a note from Ajay's mother: it contains some sentimental words and sum up what she wants Ajay to do in Kyrat. It's considered sell-able junk (only distinguished from other sellable junk by not taking up a spot in your loot bag or being caught up if you use the "auto-sell" function to quickly sell off all your unusable junk), and if you sell it, it's Permanently Missed, along with the words that summarize Ajay's mission.
• Multiple Endings: Depends on the choices made in key story missions. One of which is not exploring in the beginning of the game, which leads to a secret ending.
  • There are two major decisions which lead to four major endings. Choose Sabal or Amita as the final leader of the Golden Path, which eventually leads to one of them becoming an extremist. You can kill or spare Pagan Min. Sparing him allows you to take over Kyrat as the new king. Killing him means you leave questions unanswered but ensure that the old regime is finally over.
    • You can, in fact, combine the last two versions of the ending if you think to bring a rocket launcher to the confrontation against Pagan Min. You get the final bit of exposition and resolution of the ashes plot thread... and then shoot down Pagan's chopper as he's flying away. You're similarly free to shoot the Golden Path leader you chose when you meet them in the post-game, and even kill the other one if you spared them by finding them in the overworld.
• Mushroom Samba: The game continues Far Cry 3's tradition of exposing protagonists to drug-fueled hallucinations. Most notably, the Yogi and Reggie quest chain requires Ajay to endure increasingly reality-bending visions in order to get upgraded recipes for his syringes.
  • In one of the Balance of Power missions, taking Amita's side will require you to capture an opium factory from the Royal Army. Entering said factory during your siege results in another humorous hallucination, where the chemist you're supposed to kill rambles about the difference between a hypothesis and a theory and just comes back to life several times.
  • A more terrifying hallucination occurs towards the end of Act 2 when Ajay is jailed and drugged by Yuma at Durgesh Prison. Ajay believes he's being stalked by Rakshasas and must evade capture without his weapons while he tries to put together a grappling hook to escape.
  • Ajay also hallucinates several visions of Shangri-La, where he may or may not be an ancient Kyrati warrior reincarnated, after picking up portions of the ripped thangka that had been in the Ghale homestead. He later gets drugged a second time by Yuma and hallucinates himself fighting against that Kyrati warrior and the white tiger accompanying him.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Many of the Royal Guard's last words state they are proud to have died for their country.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Far Cry
    • One of the items you can get is a Gamebook that references the very first Far Cry.
    • Ajay wields a kukri as his melee weapon, much like Jack Carver.
  • Far Cry 2
    • Longinus is implied to be a warlord from Bowa Seko, mentioning that he was baptized at Goka Falls, a major location in the game (he's generally considered to be Prosper Kouassi, as he looks the most like Longinus and, if the UFLL loses in the first half of that game, he actually does get tracked down to and assassinated at Goka Falls). He also sends you on quests to go after conflict diamonds, the first of which has you utilizing the same GPS locator the player used in Far Cry 2.
    • The game keeps the same weapon-slot system as in its predecessor, but designates the second slot you unlock as specifically for sidearms like in Far Cry 2 - and as in that game, you can take an M79 or a double-barreled Sawed-Off Shotgun as a sidearm.
  • Far Cry 3
    • One of the loot items is a knockoff GPS which has its map stuck on the Rook Islands.
    • Another one of the loot items is a bobble head with the body of a hula girl and a head that looks suspiciously similar to Vaas Montenegro's. Which was a physical object included in that game's special edition.
• Nerf:
  • Tigers and bears are much less effective against enemy soldiers than they were in Far Cry 3. In Far Cry 3, a single tiger or bear was usually sufficient to clear out an entire enemy outpost, while in Far Cry 4 they usually get taken down after only managing a few kills. This is most likely to balance out the new ability to summon predators on command by throwing bait. The game also adds elephants and rhinos, four-legged tanks who can easily solo an outpost in this game.
  • The mid-range assault rifles have reduced lethality or functionality. The MS16 now deals as much damage as the entry-level STG-90, despite firing a bigger round. The F1 can no longer mount an optical sight, leaving it with the low-magnification open reflex sights. This is presumably to ensure that they won't make the new Signature Weapons redundant.
• Never Smile at a Crocodile: After all those paranoia-inducing riverside hikes you endured in the last game, you might think you're safe from crocodile attacks in the cold mountains of Kyrat. The local mugger crocodiles beg to differ. The only upshot is they're not nearly as common in Kyrat as their saltwater cousins were on the Rook Islands, but that's because it's now demon fish inhabiting every body of water.
• Noble Demon: Pagan Min is a mass-murderer, Bad Boss, and imperialist but treats Ajay like a son. The game's opening leaves it open whether or not this is a facade.^{Easter Egg ending}It's not; he genuinely thinks of you as a stepson and even offers to take you "hunting".
• No Blood for Phlebotinum: The conflict is about who controls the drug trade, and what they do with it: Pagan Min wants to keep it, Amita wants to take it over, and Sabal wants to destroy it.
• No Indoor Voice: Longinus almost always talks to Ajay like there's a baseball field separating the two of them. Except when he's reminiscing about his past while being drunk off his ass at the start of his last mission.
• No, Mister Bond, I Expect You To Dine: Pagan Min sets this up after the first scene of the game. He later repeats it. The trope is subverted, too, because Pagan Min is actually just inviting you to eat and talk both times. There's nothing sinister going on at all.
• Noodle Incident: Nearly everything that Yogi and Reggie talk about is a hazy recollection of a noodle incident. They do make it clear that they're not allowed back into India due to an incident with some cows. The loading screen information does note what they're wanted for.
• Not Even Bothering with the Accent: Naveen Andrews voices Sabal with his natural English accent. This makes his voicework stand out when compared to co-star Janina Gavankar's portrayal of Amita and the many other instances of Just a Stupid Accent in the game.
  • Also counts for Yuma, who speaks with a strong American accent, despite having been described as being adopted by Pagan Min's English-Chinese family and growing up in British Hong Kong.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: Ajay makes some rather small protestations to this effect but finds himself swiftly swept up in the Golden Path's cause. This may be due to the fact he's already killed several of Pagan Min's soldiers by the time he reaches the Golden Path's sanctuary and the dictator has already shown interest in "acquiring" Ajay. He also does admit that he owes the Golden Path for saving him in the beginning. By the time he meets Hurk, just after the opening/tutorial act, he's saying, "We're the Golden Path."
• No Woman's Land: In the backstory, Kyrat was this - an misogynistic hellhole where little girls young as six were expected to marry. Ironically, the local religion that enforced this tradition had a female deity and her representative was always a little girl. Not to mention by the time the game takes place, Pagan Min, being an Equal-Opportunity Evil despot, has his forces include female soldiers alongside the men. Amita will also be sure to remind you how much Kyrat used to suck in order to convince you to fight on her side and aim for a more egalitarian society.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: Ominous Hindi chanting begins to play every time you're near some esoterically significant artifact, like the Yalung masks in Kyrat proper or the Seeker amulets in Shangri La. Unfortunately, the trigger distance is way too short to turn it into an Anti-Frustration Feature, although it does help a bit to nail down the object's precise location once you're in the general area. The chanting also pops up at random here and there, making it even less useful to that end.
• One-Woman Wail: The game's Big Reveal near the end of the final mission or the secret ending, respectively, is set to a short but suitably emotional example of this trope.
• Optional Boss:
  • The giant Rakshasa raven that leads the other demons in Shangri La is the one and only true boss the game has, and it's both optional and sufficiently awesome to make the previous four Shangri La missions somewhat worthwhile.
  • Nobody forces you to face the named Fashion Week animals, but they enable great bonuses if you do, namely by unlocking the top tiers of your various upgrades.
• Orcus on His Throne: After Ajay flees Pagan Min, Min makes almost no effort to capture Ajay, content with talking to Ajay over the radio. He also doesn't seem to mind Ajay dismantling his country piece by piece and killing off his lieutenants. Makes sense, since he was planning on retiring and handing Kyrat over to Ajay anyway.
• Overzealous Underling: The Generalissimo Pagan Min's Establishing Character Moment has him nonchalantly kill a soldier who gets overenthusiastic and opens fire on a bus full of people he was supposed to detain.
  Pagan: I distinctly remember saying, "Stop the bus". Not "shoot the bus", "stop the bus". I'm very particular with my words. "Stop". "Shoot". "Stop". "Shoot". Do those words sound the same?
  Soldier: But it got out of control.
  Pagan: I'm sorry I didn't hear you. What did you say?
  Soldier: It got out of control.
  Pagan: Got out of control... I hate when things get out of control. [Stabs him in the throat] You had one fucking job and you couldn't fucking do that!
• Panthera Awesome: Kyrat has tigers, snow leopards, and clouded leopards.
• Papa Wolf: Despite being a crazed nutcase, Pagan has clearly demonstrated that he is this. As this is why he stabbed the soldier to death that open fired on the bus since the guy disobeyed orders and could have accidentally killed his (possible) son. In fact, he knows Ajay isn't his son. Ajay is, however, the son of the woman he loved and that's worth protecting as well. We also find out his hatred of the rebels is fueled by the fact they murdered his infant daughter.
• Pass Through the Rings: There are several race missions where you have to pass through rings within a time limit.
• Path of Inspiration: Two of them. The first one is a Buddhist-Christian hybrid religion that revolves around the teachings of the "Daughter of God", Kyra. It seems like a traditional, long-standing religion that has led Kyrat into a religious state with a natural flow between pacifism and zealotry. But as you progress through the game, you find hints that the religion of Kyra may be as fucked up and insanity-inducing as the Rakyat from Far Cry 3. The second is Pagan Min's cult of personality, in which Pagan Min sets himself up as the divine ruler of Kyrat, and that anyone who questions this will be ripped to shreds by wild animals that are supposedly bent to serve his will. They're not lying about the animals; the regime has been mass-breeding dangerous endangered species with aggressive consequences, and some of these animals have been drugged and trained by Pagan's rangers to kill anything that isn't wearing red.
  • As it turns out, most of the worshipers are nice people... who have no problem with arranged marriages of very young girls to older men. Or mass slaughter of blasphemers in Sabal's ending^note though this could be something Sabal's followers are unique in doing. And, as it turns out, the priesthood was hoarding enough wealth to buy their way out of Pagan's regime, but didn't dare sell any of it to outsiders, even as their people were suffering for eighty years. Pagan Min lampshades this, claiming that before he stole Kyrat, the temple stole its wealth.^note Two members of the Golden Path prove they're better than this by selling relics to archaeologists for much-needed supplies.
• Pineapple Surprise: The Grenade Takedown skill lets Ajay kill an unsuspecting soldier with his kukri, pull the pin on one of the grenades that soldier is carrying on his body, then kick the poor bastard towards his nearest buddies. Some consequences are guaranteed to happen, others not, unfortunately, both due to the grenade's small area of effect and its long, very audible fuse. It's more of a For the Lulz skill than something that's actually useful in a fight, but damn if it isn't fun in the rare case the explosion actually manages to ruin some luckless mook's day.
• Playable Epilogue: After you have decided the fate of Pagan Min, the credits roll, you get a cutscene, and then you return to the game world to clear up any outposts, missions or collectibles that are still outstanding.
• Poirot Speak: Most people in Kyrat are essentially English speakers with an Indian accent who occasionally use Hindi swear words like "behenchod" (sister-fucker). This is not completely unbelievable if we assume that Kyrat has been strongly influenced by the West under Pagan Min's rule.
• Poor Communication Kills: Pagan Min loathes this with a passion and tries to avert it with his Exact Words schtick. Yet it still happens and he usually ends up doing the killing.
  Pagan: I distinctly remember saying, "Stop the bus". Not "shoot the bus", "stop the bus". I'm very particular with my words. "Stop". "Shoot". "Stop". "Shoot". Do those words sound the same?
  • Ishwari could have saved her son a ton of trouble if she had been more detailed in her instructions, something like: "Ajay, I had a daughter named Lakshmana with Pagan Min, the ruler of Kyrat. Please place my ashes with hers, they should be at the palace. Be careful around Pagan, he's a little unstable." Instead she chooses to be deliberately vague, simply saying "the journey will tell you more than I ever could" and allowing for the entire game to happen.
• Possession Implies Mastery: Continuing the trend from the previous game, the main character is an expert with every weapon he finds, from compound bows and handguns to massive machine guns and automatic grenade launchers that shouldn't even be able to be fired from a standing position, despite not having any prior weapons training.
• Power Up Let Down:
  • The Warrior is a silenced assault rifle with good stats and a red-dot sight that's very easy to unlock very early in the game. The Bushman is a silenced assault rifle with slightly better stats and a tactical holo-scope that requires a crazy amount of grinding levels in That One Sidequest to acquire, and when you finally have it, you probably won't be too happy to notice it isn't that much better than the Warrior, at least not good enough to justify the countless annoying Shanath Arena battles you had to fight to unlock it. All it has over the Warrior is a better optical attachment for use at range and the fact that your Arena rank carries over between saves.
  • Among the game's many collectibles are the Yalung masks, fifty of which are (often quite well) hidden all over Kyrat. Finding and removing them all awards you... unlimited Guns for Hire tokens, which are not only dirt-cheap to buy and easy to acquire through karma events, grabbing a Yalung mask yields three tokens notwithstanding, but also utterly useless because the rebel fighters they call in, even if you buy all the upgrades for them, are about as competent in battle as a five-year old that got his hands on a knock-off assault rifle. Most players don't use a single token after the first one during the entire game, or at the very least, just spend them to get a free ride, when they aren't restricted by missions. The much more helpful and also immediate reward for tracking the masks down are rather the very decent 500 experience points you get for each of them.
• Predators Are Mean: Even worse than in Far Cry 3. Eagles manage to become a serious threat when climbing radio towers. Tigers and bears will hunt humans aggressively. And don't think swimming is any safer now that there are no sharks, because they've been replaced by demon fish.
• Promoted to Playable: Hurk, the subject of Far Cry 3's "Monkey Business" DLC, returns as the second Player Character of the Co-Op Multiplayer.
• Qurac: Kyrat is this, being a fictional South Asian country under the control of a dictator and his army and full of rampant militancy, with it also being heavily misogynystic in its backstory.
• Race Lift: In-universe, Pagan Min's body double, a man named Eric.
  Pagan: He wasn't even Asian, for Christ's sakes! He was from... Melbourne, I think.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The co-leaders of the Golden Path, Amita and Sabal, come off as this, and regularly switch which Oni they are. On one hand, Amita believes the way to victory is to create a brighter future for Kyrat while Sabal wants to preserve the traditions and legends of the Kyrati people. On the other hand, Sabal can be rather cold and harsh, while Amita is more passionate about helping the citizens of Kyrat.
  • Unfortunately, they don't realize that they need each other to balance their extremist views. At the end, the one who becomes the official leader of the Golden Path will start showing traits of extremism. This is further reinforced by a foreshadowing trace (like in Far Cry 3) which shows the dystopia that will happen if the current leader of the Golden Path becomes the only leader. Basically, there's a reason why the blue oni and red oni don't split up.
• Refuge in Audacity: This is implied to be Pagan Min's hat. After all, he's a drug lord who takes over a nation. Which, by itself, isn't all that audacious as he was wealthy enough to buy the men and firepower to do so. He then declares himself king by divine right.
  • The mere fact that the game allows players to pull up to a jeep or truck going flat-out with a mini-helicopter, then jump from that chopper into the ground vehicle's driver cabin, kill the drivers and commandeer the ride in one fell swoop certainly counts as well. Or, alternatively, stay in that mini-helicopter and pepper the vehicle and eveything nearby with rounds from a grenade launcher that should require both hands to aim and fire.
• Religion of Evil: Some people follow the cult of Yalung, and are basically Kyrat's equivalent of devil-worshipers.
  • The Goat has been going around the country and murdering people as offerings to Yalung, while placing Masks of Yalung around the crime scenes.
  • These guys serve as the antagonists of the Valley of the Yetis DLC campaign. A rogue unit of the Royal Army (led by Master Sandesh) was sent by Yuma Lau to find a mythical Relic with allegedly magical powers way up in the Himalayas, however they went mad and became a terrorist cult dedicated to Yalung. They occasionally kidnap unlucky travelers, and feed them to the monstrous Yeti beasts in the name of Yalung.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: The Golden Path's leaders run on this trope. Sabal aims to conduct a religious purge at the end of the civil war while Amita takes a leaf out of Pol Pot's book and begins a mass forced exodus of civilians from towns and villages in order to gain forced labor for heroin cultivation and industrial sweatshops. And then you can shoot them (and your former allies) in the face, thereby taking over through betrayal and violence. Though, at this point, they probably deserve it.
• Rhino Rampage: Kyrat has Indian rhinoceroses, and it takes as little as simply walking or driving near one to set them off on smashing everyone and everything they can catch. Occasionally the only clue that there is even one in the area is when it smashes into you out of nowhere.
• Rule of Three: Killing three friendly civilians in a short period will instantly knock Ajay out and the game automatically reload the latest save data.
• Running Gag: Radio DJ Rabi Ray Rana really likes to talk about poop. He talks about the possibility of Pagan Min having a golden toilet; he talks about how he can't just shit in the woods, he needs a bowl (and a bidet); he muses that if he were a Serial Killer, his Calling Card would be shitting on or near his victims, etc.
• Sacred Hospitality: Pagan attempts to get Ajay to relax and talk with him over a meal at his home. Twice. Ajay, however, completely misses it the first time in a normal playthrough. It's up to the player whether he chooses to let Pagan Min's "do-over" work like this.
• Scary Stinging Swarm: Once in a while, you may find a Himalayan honey bee hive hanging from a tree or awning. If you shoot the hive, needless to say they'll be a little pissed off. Which you can use to your advantage if there are enemies around the hive, provided you don't get too close.
• Scenery Porn: The mountains of Kyrat are breathtaking.
• Second Hour Superpower: You can get a wingsuit much earlier in the game than in Far Cry 3, which is very useful in navigating Kyrat's mountainous terrain.
• Self-Deprecation: A developer case.
  • Willis, who shows up here again, really didn't like Jason Brody.
  • One of the loot items you can find are malaria pills. Their description states that "starting a firefight with untreated symptoms can be as dangerous as a jammed weapon", poking fun at two of the most-maligned features from Far Cry 2.
• Serial Escalation: Far Cry 4 takes just about everything from Far Cry 3 and gives it this treatment.
  • Signature weapons are one of the most visible instances. Far Cry 3 only had one per category, with any further than that being outside additions through uPlay (the "Cannon" Model 629) or pre-ordering (the "Predator" M-700). Now there's closer to twenty of them, so many that some of them have ridiculously-easy unlock requirements (the Stormer requires tearing down a single propaganda poster) and that some of them really aren't much of an upgrade (even the in-game store menu can't find much to talk up about the Sixer, which is unlocked simply by visiting the store for the first time). Where some underwhelm, however, there are others that are even more ridiculous than the old ones - the Buzzsaw, the Signature MG 42, pretty much breaks what remains of the game at that point in half.
  • Animal attacks are much more common because of how many types of animals there are now. Forget the old tigers or bears, now depending on where you are you may get ambushed by a pack of dholes or wolves, or have to deal with a honey badger or two varieties of leopard, or get trampled by a couple yaks or a rhino, to say nothing of the omnipresence of eagles - and any one of these can and will easily lead into any other.
  • In Far Cry 3, once an outpost is captured it's yours forever, unless you hit a menu option after beating the game to reset all outposts. Far Cry 4 allows for outposts to be randomly attacked by the Royal Army, forcing you to head back to defend them lest they fall back into the enemy's hands, also allowing you to replay their initial capture as a score-attack mode, and even caps off outposts with Fortresses, much larger and more elaborate outposts that affect entire regions of the map.
  • Side activities now include random "Karma Events", supply trucks you can either destroy to deny them to the Royal Army or hijack to aid the Golden Path, and "Pagan's Wrath" convoys which consist of three trucks blaring propaganda. Except for the latter, which follow preset paths that usually require you to intentionally seek them out, it's perfectly possible to get hit by a constant stream of all of these. Find a karma event to rescue a hostage from a single Royal Army grunt, fifteen feet later a supply truck will try to run you down, fifteen feet past which another karma event to interdict a Royal Army courier carrying some variety of plans, fifteen feet past which yet another event will ask you to assist a Golden Path squad in putting down a similarly-sized squad of Royal Army soldiers, fifteen feet past which another supply truck or Royal Army courier will drive past. Any of these can also be interrupted by another animal attack, as well. Fortunately, taking out one of the four Fortresses causes its area of influence to stop spawning supply trucks and dramatically slow down the rate of karma events, finally giving you time to breathe between them.
• Serial Killer: The collectible "Masks of Yalung" items are the Calling Card of a serial killer called The Goat.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The ending of the "Kyrat Fashion Week" missions. Once you hunt and kill all the rare animals, Mumu tells you to head to his workshop and start the event up. Unfortunatly, when you do arrive, the workshop is trashed and a note left by Mumu explains that Pagan found out about the event and had the army destroy the workshop. Mumu was able to escape, but the event has been called off, leaving everything you did for Mumu pointless. What's even more confusing is that one of the missions is only obtainable after taking over Pagan's fortress, opening up a Plot Hole unless you take it over before dealing with Pagan.
• Shout-Out:
  • Ajay hallucinating Yuma crawling along the ceiling with her head twisted around is from Trainspotting.
  • Sometimes at the end of a round in the arena, the announcer will ask "Are you not entertained?" This is a direct quote from Gladiator.
  • The name of the mission "Free Willis" is an obvious take on Free Willy.
  • One of the many pieces of Shop Fodder Ajay can loot is a syringe filled with glowing liquid, with its item description quipping "if this were a failed underwater utopia, you wouldn't think twice about jamming this in your arm" — a clear reference to Bioshock and its infamous plasmid injections.
  • The Tenuously Connected Flavor Text for the Switchblade refers to West Side Story:
    Your dreams of re-enacting a 1950s New York City street gang dance fight are dashed when this turns out to be a comb instead of a knife.
  • "Oculus Spiff" and "Go Bro" are a reference to and bland name versions of the Oculus Rift and GoPro.
  • One of the insults the Heavy Machine Gun troopers will throw out at you is "cry some more!"
  • A U-Play reward weapon is the A.J.M. 9 pistol from Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon — itself a shout-out to RoboCop.
  • The signature M712, called the HS77 (For reference, A New Hope came out in 1977), is designed to resemble Han Solo's pistol, and its store description has the obligatory reference:
    An M712 enhanced with a silencer, extended magazine, and optics for quicker handling to ensure you always shoot first.
  • Similar to a previous easter egg from Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, one of the sites containing a Mask of Yalung also contains a dead body with a bucket on its head and an arrow shot through its knee.
  • One of the now-dead British Colonial soldiers carrying the Lost Letters is found on an operating table hooked up to a car battery, with a note explaining how to replicate Dr. Frankenstein's experiment.
  • Yet another of the aforementioned dead soldiers is found clutching a grail next to altar covered with similar-looking chalices, recalling the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
  • Hurk gets heavy on movie references in the last of his DLC missions; for starters, he's stuck in the back of a moving truck with a bomb set on it that will explode if it dips under a certain speed. Ajay outright starts to ask "isn't that the plot to...?" before Hurk cuts him off by asking him to "be my Keanu". He then suggests grabbing a Buzzer to catch up to the truck, finishing with an obligatory "get to da choppa!"
  • Master Sandesh, the villain of The Valley of the Yetis, looks exactly like Mola Ram from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
  • One of the random items you can acquire from slain enemies or crates to sell off is The Monkey's Paw.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Honey badgers can indeed be found in the Himalayan foothills, as can Indian rhinoceroses. In fact most of the animals in the game are native to the region.
  • There's also how modern Kyrat is, with the developers admitting they were originally just going to depict how they thought the place would look before they actually looked at photographs of Nepal and India.
• Simultaneous Warning and Action: Just after you are "rescued" by the Golden Path you have to get past a small army of Pagan's troops. They will state they are only here to bring you back and there has been a misunderstanding, but as soon as they see you they start shooting.
• Sky Cell: Durgesh Prison has a few of these. Ajay gets stuck in one and escapes by assembling a makeshift grappling hook.
• Story Branching: The Balance of Power missions each feature two different methods of approach: one suggested by Amita, the other by Sabal. The approach you take affects how succeeding missions will play out, and in the case of the final one, determines which of the two becomes the sole leader of the Golden Path.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Despite his Bad Boss tendencies Pagan really does have some incompetent staff.
  Pagan Min: (While removing a cell phone from a prisoner) Really, guys? We're not checking for these anymore?
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Want to take Noore's fortress before confronting her, but don't want to mount a frontal assault? No problem. Just sneak in through the totally unguarded back passageway carved into the mountainside and fight the enemies on your terms.
  • This holds true for all four fortresses in some way. Pagan's HQ has an almost identical back entry that's unguarded save for a couple of very obvious landmines, and it's laughably easy to snipe all but two of the guards inside of the walls from the surrounding hills (and the remaining couple from inside the secret tunnel). De Pleur's fortress can be infiltrated through an underwater tunnel from the nearby boat dock, but it's way easier to just snipe everything with a pulse from the plateau to the north. Last but not least, Yuma's fortress is the only one without a back entry but can also be cleared by a reasonably skilled sniper with no trouble whatsoever, again thanks to the surrounding hills. All of this can easily be accomplished without ever being detected, especially because fortress guards are far less inclined to leave the "safety" of their walls to go looking for attackers than regular outpost garrisons are.
  • These regular outposts still have no effective countermeasures in place to defend against tourists with a camera, a sniper rifle and some patience squatting in the surrounding brush.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Essentially every villain in the game. Pagan Min was driven insane when Mohan murdered his infant daughter and caused his lover to flee, Yuma was trying to save Kyrat by tearing the temples apart to find an artifact that would transform her into an avatar of Kyrat's champion, and Noore was made the mistress of the Arena to save her family only to find out her family was killed years ago and commits suicide.
  • You also get to hear one of the Golden Path members call the other out on the things they plan on doing. You can kill them or spare their life.
• Take That!: In-universe: Dr Noore intends for her suicide to be this towards the audience of her arena.
  • The "Safety Whistle" description.
    "This orange plastic whistle produces an ear-piercing noise that sounds exactly like a certain French-Canadian pop diva."
  • (Doubly funny since the game was developed by Ubisoft Montreal).
• Take That, Audience!: The Lost Letters tell the story of Robert Barclay, a colonial British Army officer, and his wife Charlotte. Their correspondences chronicle Robert's descent into madness as he experiences Kalinag's journey much like Ajay does in the Shangri-La episodes. Between Robert rambling about Kyrati mythology and Charlotte leaving him for another man, the letters read like a cautionary tale about video game addiction.
• The Triads and the Tongs: Before heading to Kyrat, Pagan Min initially started in this world, running his father's heroin growing business and attempting to make a failed power grab for leadership of the Hong Kong underworld.
• This Cannot Be!: After Pagan's death, the woman who does the propaganda announcements on the radio is in full denial mode.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Willis. He's no longer the eccentric, helpful CIA agent from Far Cry 3. Highly abrasive, he manipulates Ajay to do his dirty work in silencing the CIA informer network in Kyrat, and later shoves Ajay out of his plane as it takes off, knowing that Yuma's guards will capture Ajay almost immediately.
• Translation Convention: The game's lore seems to suggest that the people of Kyrat speak a fictional language called Kyrati. However, it is unclear if any fictional language is ever used in the game.
  • Almost all present-day characters speak in English, though some of them occasionally swear or exclaim in Hindi. The only exceptions are the soldiers in the opening cutscene, who speak to each other in Hindi, and a pair of unnamed characters outside the Shanath Arena who speak to each other in some other language (possibly Nepali?).
  • Kalinag's narration is in modern formal Hindi, which may be anachronistic since formal Hindi is the result of 19th century efforts to distinguish Hindi from Urdu, and neither Hindi nor Urdu were used in formal contexts before the British era. Yuma says that Kalinag's written accounts were in Sanskrit, so the narration is probably a translation of his writings into modern Hindi.
  • The names of the Kyrati main characters appear to be from Hindi and Nepali, but pronounced as if by an American reading the English spelling. Rabhi "Ray" Rana even insists that this is the correct "Kyrati" way to pronounce Ajay's name in a hilarious radio rant.
  • The writings in Shangri-La appear to be gibberish, and not an actual language.
  • Signs above shops are an English cypher.
• Unbroken First-Person Perspective: Much the same as with 3, the game never breaks from Ajay's perspective - we only see what Ajay looks like in-game because one of the first things that happens to him on entering the country is getting posed for a selfie with Pagan Min.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: Shangri-La episodes change the game formula from shoot-em-up RPG to action adventure. Your only ranged weapon is a bow, but it gets bullet time and multi-shot upgrades. Instead of throwables, you command an unkillable homicidal stealthy sand tiger and in one episode, an elephant with an umbrella on its back. You are expected to rush enemies and use melee attacks. You will fly across valleys all Superman-style. And unlike the regular game, there is an epic boss fight against a giant enemy: The Rakshasa Raven, which can magically summon enemies and shoot fireballs. Aim for the mouth with EVERYTHING you've got.
  • After Yuma drugs you for the first time in the mountains, you end up in a prison cell and have to escape the mountain prison. And then the game goes all Survival Horror on your ass; without any weapons or gadgets, you have to stealth and evade a homicidal Shangri-La demon who roams the labyrinthine caves. Later, you have to get past a small army without your melee or takedown abilities. This is harder than it sounds, as you have to make your knife throws count.
• The Usurper: Pagan Min is this, being king because, well, he had an army and the locals didn't. That changes.
  • Malaria Pills, a callback to Far Cry 2's malaria system, with its description also making light of the gun-jamming.
  • Knock-off GPS, which is stated in its description to be pointing "somewhere to the Rook Islands".
  • Maimed Wahine, which is obviously the Vaas bobblehead that was available for Far Cry 3 pre-orders in real life.
  • After you kill Pagan Min, he has two of the most valuable items in the game on his person: Lapel Pin #2, which is a collector's item in a set of five, the one that shows his face, and one of the only copies still intact; and Pagan's Golden Pen, the knife-pen that he used to stab the officer at the beginning of the game. They're both worth a small fortune now that he's dead.
• Villains Never Lie: Everyone in the game, Ajay included, seems to be under layers of self-delusion about their true nature and identity. The only one who doesn't lie, to himself or to others, is Pagan Min, perhaps his only real virtue. Although, while Pagan never outright lies, he conveniently 'forgets' to explain crucial information to Ajay.
• Videogame Flamethrowers Suck: Nope! Far Cry 4 is one of the rare First-Person Shooters that not only doesn't have its flamethrower suck, but it's extremely useful. On top of having a surprisingly good range, flamethrowers utterly destroy anyone unlucky enough to be in range, and to make matters even better, fire spreads rapidly and makes a stupidly-good AOE effect. Even more awesome than that is that for the Southern part of Kyrat at least, flamethrowers are one of the handful of weapons that can reliably defeat Heavy Soldiers, which serve as Demonic Spiders in the game's Early Game Hell. The gun's only real downside is that it demands the user to be within range for the gun's devastating damage to take effect, but at that point, you only have to worry about the target itself, given how fast it brings down opponents.
  • Unfortunately, while an extremely useful weapon and some of the best anti-personnel guns in the game, Northern Kyrat's Heavy Soldiers are immune to fire, and given the bigger buff to defenses as opposed to the Southern Kyrat Heavy, it makes them even more dangerous.
• Violation of Common Sense: The events of the game kick off when the player decides to go investigate the horrific screams coming from Pagan Min's basement. Hilariously, doing the more sensible thing and staying at the dinner table, away from said horrific screaming, gets you the secret ending, and finishes the game in about fifteen minutes.
  • Played for laughs, with Ajay's continued visit to Yogi and Reggie, getting him into the weirdest drug-trips. Ajay even questions why he allows it.
• Violence is the Only Option: Whenever you encounter animals that aren't tapirs, pigs, macaques, bharals, sambars, turtles or elephants, your only truly safe option to proceed is to preemptively kill them all from as far away as possible, mainly because of their completely unpredictable movement patterns and their tendency to sneak up on and attack you the moment you take your eyes off them.
• Waiting Puzzle: The now-infamous secret ending hinges on one. To get it, Ajay must do as Pagan Min asks and wait for 15 minutes at the dining table during the start of the game.
• War Elephants: Kyrat features wild elephants. They can be manipulated into trampling enemies, attacking enemy fortresses or even be ridden by Ajay with the right skill. Oddly they seem to have picked a side in the civil war, as they will attack Royal Army soldiers on sight even when not ridden but will not bother Ajay, civilians, or Golden Path members unless provoked.
• We ARE Struggling Together: A major reason the resistance is a paper tiger in Kyrat. Its two leaders hate each other with every fiber of their being.
  • Ironically, the bureaucrats of the Golden Path end up creating the best compromises for Kyrat's future, like selling temple statues as a way of spreading their heritage and funding the war. Or donating a wide variety of religious/scientific books to the impoverished communities. Or smuggling condoms to brothels.
• Welcome to Corneria:
  • A glaring example is Rabi-Ray-Rana's radio broadcasts, which either provide background exposition or comment (and hang lampshades) on the player's actions and accomplishments. His spiels are usually hilarious the first or even second time. They get old after the third or fourth or fifth or sixth or seventh time the player has to listen to him ramble about how clean his asshole is due to his owning a bidet.
  • There's also the usual suspects with both enemy and friendly dialogue, but Golden Path members summoned as Guns For Hire definitely take the cake, as they'll repeat exactly one line of dialogue every few seconds while following you.
• Wham Line: Two related to the same event:
  • Mohan Ghale's journal entry for Ashwin 1990 is addressed to Ishwari Ghale and contains a significant revelation. If you are a keen journal collector you can pick it up not long after getting into North Kyrat, but if you don't, then you won't learn this until the end of the game.
  Your mission was simple: collect intelligence. Not sleep with the enemy. Not fuck their commander. Not bear the false king a daughter.
  • The revelation made at the end of the game:
    Pagan: ...Well, I suppose you could do what I did after Mohan killed Lakshmana. Oh, you didn't know that did you? Huh. Yes, your father killed your half sister, and then your mother killed him in return.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Many side missions require you to kill lower ranking enemy commanders, but when Ajay confronts Pagan Min at the end of the game, you have the option to spare his life. Doing this gives you an extended cutscene, but has no other effect on the game.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Ajay receives quite a few of these reactions throughout his stay in Kyrat:
  • No matter who you side with during the first Balance of Power mission, the Golden Path leader you didn't support will viciously chew Ajay out afterwards.
  • It happens again in the penultimate mission when Ajay confronts the unchosen leader while under orders to kill them.
  • Pagan repeatedly chides Ajay via radio call for a variety of actions, like killing Pagan's body double, destroying his golden statue during the final story mission, or his bloody rampage through Kyrat in general during their final meeting. Much of it can be interpreted as a dig at the player as well due to more or less subtle Lampshade Hanging on Pagan's part.
• Whole-Plot Reference: Valley Of The Yetis has the same basic premise as the Tomb Raider reboot; the protagonist is stranded in an isolated location occupied by a hostile cult led by a cruel and melodramatic madman, and must also battle supernatural monsters that are hostile to both him and the cult. The finale and the origins of the Yetis is also nearly identical to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, with you blowing up the Shamballah tree, which turns humans into Yetis and apparently has explosive sap.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: One of the bell towers is unguarded, but has a half dozen pit vipers surrounding it. A note inside the tower reveals the that the Golden Path released the snakes there, and the guards took off, being less afraid of the Arena than the snakes.
• Wins by Doing Absolutely Nothing: One of the endings is done by this. When Pagan Min tells you "don't move, I'll be right back", just wait fifteen minutes, and he'll come back to give Ajay a ride straight to his sister's grave.
• Worthless Currency: Pagan Min mentions changing Kyrat's official currency so that everyone's savings became worthless.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Pagan Min claims that Ajay's father killed his daughter.
  • In Amita's ending, she forces Kyrati children to work the opium fields at gunpoint, or become child soldiers. It's also strongly implied that she had Bhadra killed.
• You Have Failed Me: Pagan Min stabs one of his soldiers to death with a pen. Though it is later revealed to be a Papa Wolf moment as that soldier nearly killed you with stray gunfire.

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"Oh, good. You feel better now? Get it out of your system? Perfect. Maybe now we can finally shoot some goddamn guns!"