YMMV / Far Cry 4

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The main page quote from Pagan Min is an invoked, in-universe example. Is Ajay really a constantly put-upon Accidental Hero who tried to make the best of a bad situation and honor his dead mother? Or is he just another amoral killer in a country full of them, using whatever lame excuse is on hand to indulge his selfish power fantasies? It should be noted that Pagan Min may be projecting as Ajay Gale does countless missions to protect the locals, defend the innocent, and otherwise incur good karma.
  • Ajay is swept up in the cause of the Golden Path after finding out his father and mother were legendary revolutionaries but never seems to express much enthusiasm for it. Is his seeming bored disinterest in the events because the developers wrote him poorly, because he's naturally The Stoic, or is it because Ajay recognizes the revolution's leaders are trying to manipulate him? Could Ajay be only fighting in the revolution because he doesn't have any choice (Pagan Min having made it quite clear Ajay's going to be his "guest" if he ever falls back into his hands)?
  • Pagan Min is a deliberately invoked version as he starts off as a Ax-Crazy Psychopathic Manchild Evil Overlord Bad Boss and that's only in the first scene. However, the next scene has him sit down for a No, Mister Bond, I Expect You To Dine scene where he puts on an Affably Evil air. Then he tortures someone loudly. If you decide to leave, you'll see his brutal dictatorship over Kyrat and hear plenty of horror stories about him. If you decide to stay, you find him to be an introspective man who has a desire to become a Retired Monster and leave Kyrat to someone better than himself. You'll also hear his sympathetic backstory and learn the resistance is similar or in some cases even worse. Pagan Min is undoubtedly crazy but is he a Noble Demon, an extreme sociopath who just happens to love Ajay's mother, or traumatized by his infant daughter's murder?
  • Did Sabal really believe that Darpan was beyond saving, despite being only a room away with only a handful of enemies guarding him, but having only limited time and the more important Ajay to save, or did he exploit a chance to remove extra competition to leadership of the Golden Path? Did he rescue Ajay out of loyalty to Mohan Gale's memory or because he thought Ajay would be inclined to support him against Amita? Both? Is Amita's accusation that he intends to marry the Tarun Matara true? If so, is it to secure his claim over the country or to become Mohan Ghale?
  • Is Amita a Dirty Communist Pol Pot in the making, or is she a Visionary Villain who realizes the modernization of Kyrat in the wake of a two-decade civil war isn't going to be easy? The use of Child Soldiers is a Moral Event Horizon, but is that because she's just that sadistic, or is it because with Sabal's death she needs every hand which can hold a gun to finish the war which is falling apart? Does she simply suffer Motive Decay once she achieves her goal of finishing off Pagan Min only to realize there's no real way to voluntarily change Kyrat's people to her way of thinking? And did she kill Bhadra?
    • Speaking of both resistance leaders, were they always Blood Knight Knight Templar The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized types hiding under a veneer of friendliness or were they decent human beings who, after twenty years of He Who Fights Monsters were driven to Jump Off The Slippery Slope by the nearness of victory plus guilt over killing their partner?
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Goat, assuming that is him hanging around his lair, is just an ordinary Royal Army scout that goes down like everybody else. You might even kill him on instinct before you realize who he is.
• Base-Breaking Character: Ajay. Some feel that he's a much less interesting protagonist than Jason was in the previous game as he has barely any character development by comparison, while others find him to an improvement overall due to not having Jason's more offputting characteristics.
• Broken Base:
  • Troy Baker voicing Pagan Min. While his acting skills are certainly not lacking, and his performance as Min was received extremely well by critics and players alike, some people are getting really tired of him being hired for just about every major game that's come out since BioShock Infinite, similar to Nolan North post-Uncharted.
  • The conclusion to the game, varying on who you sided with, has been seen as either clever or downright lacking. You're given the choice of siding with one Golden Path leader but the only choice that matters is the fifth and final Balance of Power mission, and ultimately you either end up with a religious reactionary who puts tradition before reason, or a drug-running nationalist who puts power before the people. Either choice can be summed up as being equally bad, but hey, you can put a bullet in both their brains if you choose to.
• Complete Monster: Yuma Lau is Pagan Min's second-in-command, but plans to usurp him, and stands out as the only one in Pagan Min's Royal Army with no moral restraints. Running the Durgesh Prison, Yuma has all her prisoners exposed to the prison's brutal conditions and climate, while also subjugating them to constant Mind Rape via hallucinogens, destroying their minds and leaving them suicidal, causing many to throw themselves off the prison's cliffs. She would also have her men poison the Golden Path's water and food sources and bring people to her prison against their will. Encountering Ajay Ghale, she drugs him with her mind raping hallucinogens and takes advantage of him sexually, before attempting to kill him, while promising to mix his mother's ashes in pig slop to spite him.
• Demonic Spiders: Royal Army Hunters, hands down. They can't be permanently tagged with the camera or by aiming at them like every other enemy. They can spot Ajay through brush cover, making stealth attacks exponentially more difficult. They don't bring up a detection meter when they spot the player. They move silently, making them even harder to spot even at close range and an even nastier surprise thanks to the aforementioned missing detection meter. They can charm animals into not attacking the soldiers and attacking Ajay instead, thus turning one of the most useful methods of distraction for raiding outposts against the player. They only use bows instead of firearms, but they're very accurate (and silent) with them and tend to inflict a crap-ton of damage at very long distances while their dozen or so comrades are busy throwing a wall of lead at Ajay without inflicting more than Scratch Damage. They can't take much punishment in return, wearing next to no armor, but they can still withstand a dismaying amount of bullets before finally biting the dirt. Even just one of those suckers can quickly turn into the biggest threat in any given encounter, and they rarely come alone. You only spotted one Hunter while scoping out that enemy camp? his buddies are out there, closing in on you.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Pagan Min is this in a lot of fan's eyes. Played with, because while the game presents Pagan Min as a psychopathic despot, the rebels he's fighting against aren't that much better and according to the ending, are even worse. Pagan Min also has some Pet the Dog moments, which show there is a human being underneath the crazy. The fact he personally likes and respects the player character helps matters. You can let him go in the end. Despite this, his sympathizers usually gloss over that he's still a brutal dictator who commits human rights abuses for his own amusement and lives in luxury while the rest of the country is destitue.
• Even Better Sequel: To Far Cry 3, with fans citing the verticality, various returning features from Far Cry 2 and less heavy-handed writing as improvements.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: Considering the secret ending of Ajay staying inside Pagan Min's house and waiting like he was asked to along with him putting his mother's ashes to rest, it can be a potential plot to expand upon with Ajay siding with Pagan Min instead of the Golden Path.
• Fanon: A great deal of fans considered the shortcut ending where you waited like a normal person for 13 minutes, then Pagan returned and took you to your sister's altar to place your mother's ashes the true ending.
• Franchise Original Sin: Among the many problems players had with the endings of Far Cry 5, one of them was with its secret ending, where if you stand around for about five minutes doing nothing, the game plays a secret ending where your group decides it's a bad idea to arrest Joseph while surrounded by his congregation and leave quietly. Far Cry 4 somewhat famously has a similar ending that can be achieved before any real gameplay: wait around for about 13 minutes when Pagan leaves you alone at dinner and he will actually come back as he said he would. Far Cry 4's secret ending was more well-received for a variety of reasons: for one, it's an actual ending - waiting around for Pagan to come back results in him actually explaining everything Ajay's mother refused to for no reason, including what would have been the big twist at the end of the regular story and accurate predictions of how the game plays out normally, and Ajay actually accomplishes his mission without any bloodshed. Conversely, refusing to arrest Joseph at the start of 5 simply has your group leave, and that's it - not even a hint that they recognized they were in over their heads and deferred the problem to the National Guard or something, they apparently just leave Hope County to its fate.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Buzzer mini-helicopter is overpowered to the point where you can use it to get past jumping puzzles on the radio towers and float untouchable above outposts as you shell them with a grenade launcher.
  • The "Buzzsaw" signature MG-42. In addition to the blistering rate of fire, it has near-maximum damage per shot, letting you massacre just about anything in a quarter of a second's worth of fire, with a huge 400-round belt, a fast reload, high accuracy even when hip-firing, an optical scope given the zoom of the marksman scope and very weak recoil. This gun truly destroys the difficulty curve. It requires liberating all 17 bell towers on the map, which can be achieved as soon as the 2nd half the map unlocks. This will turn the rest of the game into a Curb-Stomp Battle.
  • The Hunting Syringe makes the Camera redundant in many circumstances. It automatically tags every enemy and animal within a certain distance. It also disables the Hunters' main defense, as they will stay tagged for the duration of the syringe's effects, while also making animals (barring guard dogs) ignore you unless actively provoked, and with upgrades it lets you move around silently and lasts up to a minute and a half.
  • The M79 grenade launcher is nearly silent, with a long range when arc fired. It makes a better sniper rifle than any actual sniper rifles with its consistent trajectory and the explosive results, and it's not hard to clear outposts with it while never being detected. It also counts as a sidearm which means you can dump grenades on an outpost from the safety of a Buzzer flying above the enemy's detection radius as well.
  • The SA-50 is an anti-materiel Sniper Rifle that has a nice magazine, it's semi-automatic unlike the Z93 and the M-700 and a one-hit kill against all enemies, and Heavies if shot through the head. It can have a suppressor which lets you clear outposts without being caught, and as an anti-materiel rifle you can hit enemies through cover too.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Just about all of the wildlife. Honey badgers don't give a shit, demon fish will eat you, bears hate you, wolves and dholes will swarm you, eagles will swoop out of the sky to assault you, and rhinos will straight-up murder you. Elephants at least are completely docile until you attack them first, however, and with the right perk you can ride them into battle.
  • Predators in general. They're all easily dispatched, but very annoying. Scoping out an outpost? The game generates a tiger, and you're immediately spotted. Cutting cross-country? One pack of wolves generates and goes down just in time for another pack to pop up. Just walking down the road? The game decides your full health bar should be a bar lower with a random, unprovoked eagle attack.
  • Retaliation Strikes always occur at the worst possible times, mostly when you're just about to leave an outpost. Said outpost immediately gets attacked by a surgical strike. Ignoring this might end up bringing it back under enemy control, depriving you of a fast-travel spot. Fortunately, these are cut off in a given area if you take out the fortress for whoever controls that portion of the map.
  • Civilians, of all things, have become this after Far Cry 3, mostly for the fact that they've completely lost the ability to drive smart - if they're on the road, they will go full-speed at all times no matter how bumpy the terrain, how tight the road turns, or who/what is in the way. Prepare to lose a lot of wandering merchants to these random cars, if not getting killed yourself from walking on the road.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Valley of the Yetis has Ajay fight militarized cultists aside from the titular threat. Come the next mainline entry, guess who acts as the enemy faction?
• It's the Same, So It Sucks: For some of the detractors, the game is just Far Cry 3.5, right down to the primary story criticism that "The villain is the best part of the game and he rarely shows up, while the protagonists aren't that interesting."
• It Was His Sled: The secret ending triggered by staying at the table at the start of the game until Pagan Min comes back quickly became the game's Signature Scene, and media outlets couldn't resist telling you how to get it. As such, quite a few players know next to nothing about Far Cry 4 except for the events of that ending, which spoil several plot twists such as Pagan being nicer than he first appears, Lakshmana being Ishwari and Pagan's daughter, and Mohan killing Lakshmana.
• Memetic Badass: The Honey Badgers are portrayed in this game as worse than wolves, lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!). The rare one Gulo especially, who is the only Kyrat Fashion Weekly target that gives you three prompts asking if you're sure you want to fight him, and once you get to where he is discover he's managed to kill everything from a small group of Royal Army soldiers to several other predators and even a rhino.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Mohan Ghale was revealed to have crossed it in the past when he killed his wife's daughter and Ajay's half sister, Lakshmana to make an example. It does not help that the circumstances of Lakshmana's conception was sending his wife on a Honey Trap mission on Pagan Min in the first place, pretty much making Lakshmana's entire existence an act of war.
  • Pagan Min, for all that's likeable about him, is not without fault himself; in retaliation for Dr. Noore speaking out against him, he took her family hostage to make Noore work for him by running Gladiator Games. When Noore learns her family was already dead, she kills herself.
  • Noore herself had unwillingly crossed it a long time ago by hosting those gladiator games, sending innocent people to their deaths and allowing herself to be gradually brainwashed by Pagan's influence to secretly love hosting these death matches, all because Pagan took Noore's family hostage to force her to do so. These actions are considered to be beyond redemption for Noore in the eyes of Golden Path leaders Amita and Sabal, who show No Sympathy at all why Noore did it and ordered her death sentence. Even Noore thinks she's beyond saving and that it's not worth it to pull a Karma Houdini after learning her family is dead and she had been tricked to run the games For the Evulz and for nothing all along, and decides to kill herself rather than allowing herself to undeservingly (at least in her, Amita's and Sabal's eyes) live.
  • Should you choose Sabal or Amita as the new leader of the Golden Path, they both have their own crossings after the game. An earlier foreshaowing example is when whoever you sided with, asks you to kill the other, making the first step to crossing the horizon.
    • Amita runs the place by taking over Pagan's drug empire as her own, and enforces slave labor on the people, with a newfound communist leadership. What's the first thing we see her doing? Ordering children to be recruited into the Golden Path to combat the last of Pagan's soldiers. And where's Bhadra? Apparently she was "sent away", which may or may not be a euphemism.
    • Sabal becomes the fanatical leader who enforces old-time laws on the people of Kyrat, kills those who didn't follow their old religious beliefs (which during Pagan's reign was the majority of Kyrat) and executes half of the Golden Path for siding with Amita. He also announces Bhadra to be the Tarun Matara, which may or may not be a good thing.
  • Willis completely goes from likable character to a terrible person by leaving Ajay trapped in the Himalayas to be captured by Yuma’s men. All he's got going in his favor is he admits it, giving you an Ironic Echo of his earlier statement that "every patriot I know is a son of a bitch".
• Most Wonderful Sound: The drawn-out gong that announces the successful liberation of an outpost; even more so when it's accompanied by an "undetected" message for that sweet XP bonus. Double points if said outpost was a fortress, and triple points if said fortress was taken while its master was still in power.
• Narm:
  • Yuma's dramatic speech while Ajay is held prisoner at Durgesh is ruined slightly by the way she says some of its words.
  • The Finnish subtitles translate the name "The Goat" as "Pukki".^note A synonym for "Vuohi", a more direct translation of the word goat While perfectly fine by itself, the Finnish name for Santa Claus - "Joulupukki" - is often shorted to "Pukki", so one can't help but imagine a mass-murdering Santa running around Kyrat.
• Polished Port: While it never received an Xbox One X enhancement patch, on Series X and S, the game was one of the first 5 to receive an FPS Boost, allowing for a perfectly smooth 60FPS on the consoles.
• Rooting for the Empire: Judging by YouTube comments, Pagan has a lot of fans who wish that the player could join forces with him. Although he is admittedly an Ax-Crazy Evil Overlord and drug kingpin, the fact that the other options of success are a fanatical religious society where anyone who hasn't been worshipping Kyra or Banshur for the past twenty years is to be executed for high heresy (and most of Kyrat has been forced to worship a different god for the past twenty-six years) (Sabal) or another drug empire with the civilians forced to work in factories to survive (Amita), along with the fact that both of these options are built up by a group that is totally fine with murdering children and evidently doesn't even bother to learn the children's names regardless of how close they are to the group, it's hard to say that, even with Pagan as a horrible option, either of the other ones is really better. And in the Easter Egg secret ending, where he takes you to scatter your mother's ashes if you just sit still for about 13 minutes like a normal person instead of a video game character, it looks like that does indeed happen. Unfortunately for those fans, the game abruptly ends after you've done so.^note Possibly Justified, as you have already won the game without trying, and the Golden Path is even more close to extinction, with Ajay siding with Pagan It also doesn't help the game doesn't really give you a reason to help the Golden Path. After all if you just wait like Min said he takes you exactly where you wanted to go without any trouble. Ajay just seems to want to help the Golden Path without much detail as to why he is willing to take down an Evil Army after spending a few minutes with them.
• The Scrappy: Rabi Ray Rana, for his often disgusting speeches which always seem to come around to his odd fascination with shit. Alongside this, once you take over a radio tower, you're pretty much stuck with Rabi's broadcasts over any actual music. It doesn't help that he tends to repeat himself, so expect to hear his monologue about if he were a serial killer his calling card would be shitting on his victims' heads over and over again, every time you get into a car.
  • Sadly, given that either Sabal or Amita goes evil, depending on who you bring to power by the end of the game, Rabi Ray Rana appears to be the Token Good Teammate of the Golden Path. Perhaps he should be more of a sympathetic character than a Scrappy.
  • If anything, Agent Willis Huntley is the real Scrappy of Far Cry 4. He was pretty jingoistic in Far Cry 3, but he balanced it out by being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold to Jason and actually being helpful in battling Hoyt during however long they worked together. Here, however, he's brazenly rude and openly racist towards Ajay, manipulates him into killing CIA agents posted in Kyrat, and then shoves him out of the plane to be captured by the Royal Army. Oh, and he gives Ajay a silly pun for a code word, too- "Reaganomics".
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: From the oftentimes brutally difficult first game onwards, the Far Cry series has gotten progressively easier with every numbered entry. Far Cry 4 is no exception, mainly due to its sheer overabundance of easily accessible Game Breakers both universal and situational, many of which are Disc One Nukes to boot. Most ammo pouches can be upgraded comfortably to level 3 of 4 and holsters even to the maximum level within the first two hours of gameplay, making combat flexibility and ammo capacity a non-issue. Last but not least, both money and experience points are ridiculously quick and easy to come by, which leaves the game's mission-related restrictions on certain skills the only thing that's keeping players from maxing out everything before they even take over their first non-story outpost.
• Signature Scene: The hidden ending, triggered by not leaving Min's table at the start of the game, and staying put for about 15 minutes.
• So Okay, It's Average: A popular opinion among veterans of Far Cry 3, since quite a few of them believe It's the Same, So It Sucks — the gameplay's the same as it was last time, and while it's a fine shooter, the fact remains that little has changed.
• Spiritual Successor: Surprisingly enough, Far Cry 4 can be seen as this to Spec Ops: The Line. While it doesn't try to be a serious, ruthless deconstruction of military shooters and has a much lighter tone, it takes time to tear apart apart similar themes Spec Ops deconstructed along with many others, in different ways without having to resort to the You Bastard! trope Spec Ops was accused of overusing. Not to mention the game does its job arguably better, as the deconstruction of heroism doesn't really kick in until the end, or if you just wait in the dining room.
• Squick:
  • One of the first things Min does after capturing Ajay is dip a finger into the jar of Ishwari's ashes and then lick it.
  • Much like the previous games, the emergency-aid animations, which range from sticking a random stick into your arm to remove a bullet, to ripping out shrapnel from your hand. The animations are less bloody than in Far Cry 3, however.
• That One Level:
  • The second half of City of Pain. While Amita's version of City of Pain is easier (you just need to take pictures of several interrogations), Sabal's version made first-time players infuriated to no end due to rescuing slaves actually being mandatory and the guards are much harder to dispatch without raising the alarm (which fails the mission). Not to mention checkpoints are scarce. The best hint is to realize that the only prisoners you can safely rescue without setting off the alarm are the ones you're required to save - you'll just have to ignore the rest.
  • After being left for dead by Willis, you automatically begin the mission "Don't Look Down". All your equipment is removed as you've been captured by Pagan and Yuma. You need to escape Durgesh Prison. What makes this difficult is the process of finding enough stuff to make a grappling hook without being spotted by the hallucination demon. You can't kill him as you have no kukri. As you make your way down the mountain, you have limited supplies to get past the guards. You still don't have a melee weapon, but you do at least get some throwing knives. The Heavy Mooks absolutely cannot be dispatched with subtlety.
• That One Sidequest: The five Shangri La levels are the bane of many a player, mostly because they differ so extremely from how the rest of the game is usually played. You're suddenly saddled with a player character with no armor and only three health bars (if you want more, you need to find up to three hidden collectibles again and again in every single level) who only wields a knife and a pretty weak bow. The levels are absolutely crawling with lethal enemies that also spawn lots of reinforcements while you're fighting them, and since most of them charge you in packs, sniping them all is rarely an option, forcing you into dangerous close combat most of the time. Later on, Scorchers begin to show up which require tag-teaming with your quite squishy tiger ally to take down. That all of this plays out in a very unsettling Eldritch Location and is overlaid by your character's frequent, detached, pretentious narration in untranslated Hindi doesn't help the case. Fortunately, only the first level is mandatory to advance the main story, but you need to complete at least the next one as well if you want to unlock a very useful sniper skill, and if you want to enjoy the game's sole real Boss Battle, you'll have to endure the whole mission set. And to make things worse, every time you return to the real world you've lost any armor you had, plus up to 100,000+ rupees worth of ammo.
  • It doesn't help that some Shangri-La levels have a really nasty and still unpatched as of March 2021 bug that causes a crash to desktop when doing mundane activities like ziplining or looking through your magnifying glass and there are no checkpoints, forcing you to restart the level again.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • At the end of Valley of the Yetis it appears you turn into a Yeti. Sadly instead of giving some kind of mission that revolves around this where you can plow through cult members and other yetis with super strength, the game just ends.
  • There are also some fans who thought that not having a campaign at the secret ending where you side with Pagan Min and kill all the terrorists with him is this trope.
  • Durgesh prison and Yuma. The location is used in only one mission and is hardly mentioned again. Yuma is shown to be obsessed with Kalinag's journey to Shangri-la and the player had the option to relive it, though this parallel is never brought up.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Pagan Min is a tyrannical dictator who keeps order in Kyrat through fear and violence, while the Golden Path is a rebel group who claims to be fighting for freedom while using tactics just as bad as those who fight for Min. This almost immediately drew comparisons to the conflict in Syria, with Pagan Min being compared to Bashar al-Assad and the Golden Path representing various rebel groups within Syria.
  • The inclusion of women fighters in the Golden Path could possibly be inspired by the women fighters in Kurdistan.
  • The Golden Path is probably named after the real life terrorist group Shining Path.
  • Pagan Min's tyranny has many parallels to infamous acts of oppression committed by various Chinese Empires and the British Raj. The fact he's oppressing people of Indian and Tibetan backgrounds is the most obvious hint. His Half-British Half-Chinese heritage is another.
  • The methods used by his drug empire also reflect similar tactics used by the participants of the Colombian and Mexican Drug wars where the cartels indulge in wanton violence, torture and kidnapping in order to terrorize the population, much in the same way as Pagan Min's men conduct themselves when it comes to the people of Kyrat.
  • The conflict also parallels to an extent the Nepalese Civil War, with the Maoist rebels controlling the villages (Golden Path) and the Nepali Government controlling the towns (Pagan Min). This is especially blatant if you back Amita, who will establish a Communist Narcodictatorship and build a modern Kyrat off of the back of slave labor and drug money.
  • Amita also has some shades of Pol Pot. Namely the forced mass exodus of people from towns and villages in Kyrat, similar to what the Khmer Rouge did in the first week of its dictatorship. Not to mention the slavery. In Pol Pot's case, it was agricultural collectivization while Amita's version involves heroin cultivation and industrial sweat-shops.
  • And of course, the implied support of Pagan Min's drug-running empire by the United States, specifically by the CIA and Agent Willis brings to mind a whole slew of CIA-funded despotic regimes, from Augusto Pinochet's Chile to Manuel Noriega's Panama, given the power to oppress their people and commit horrible acts in the name of American security.

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