LatinLatin America isn’t a common destination in video games. In the few instances where digital landscapes have taken place in the region, results have been mixed. Characters often fall into the trope of saying random Spanish words during conversations to remind us of their nationality. Local socio-political issues are rarely handled with the proper nuance, while cultural portrayals can be hit or miss. Far Cry 6, the latest installment in the open-world series by Ubisoft, doesn’t do much to evade these problems. But interestingly enough, it’s the first AAA game set in Latin America that gets close to putting Spanish front and center.
Taking place in the Cuba-inspired region of Yara, Far Cry 6 is set amidst a clash of conflicts. The leader in power, Antón Castillo, who is voiced by Afro-Italian actor Giancarlo Esposito, rules over the citizens with a dictatorship. As everyone below the upper class is suffering under an abusive regime, protagonist Dani Rojas is tasked with uniting guerrilla groups to fight back.
Much like Far Cry 5’s elusive attempt at tackling white supremacy in the United States, it’s difficult to digest such heavy topics at face value in the context of the Far Cry formula. The games aren’t exactly known for their seriousness, as the core gameplay tends to lean on weapon experimentation and highly flammable objects in every corner to create your own The A-Team set pieces. Sadly, the Latin American culture that the game wants to evoke is intertwined with this, making it harder to ignore the dissonance of calling “Amigos” to help you in battle while you plan the next step to take down a dictator.
None of this took me by surprise, as I had arrived at the game expecting to see this conflicting clash of ideas. But I was willing to give Yara the benefit of the doubt. We hadn’t seen an open world setting in Latin America since Ghost Recon Wildlands in 2017, also from Ubisoft, which presented such a hurtful depiction of Bolivia that led the government to issue a formal complaint to the developer. I was curious to see, then, if any lessons had been learned at all.
Right off the bat, the characters I met throughout the story did not provide me with hopeful signs. While often charismatic (if not overly cliche at times), it was hard to digest the uneven back and forth between English and Spanish during conversations. Dialogue is mostly spoken in the former, but characters are constantly replacing words without much coherence. Examples like president, dad, and revolution seem nonexistent in their vocabulary, replaced by presidente, papá, and revolución in 90 percent of the cases instead. This adds a certain welcoming touch, but when they frequently appear out of nowhere across conversations in English, it stands out.
Some cases are even more abrupt, where instead of one or two words, it’s half of a sentence. In a few rare moments, some exchanges are completely in Spanish, and the game goes as far as translating them in the captions. Now, it’s worth mentioning that Spanglish (in a lesser or higher frequency) is not uncommon. Latinx folks born in the US are a good example of a demographic that makes use of it, but each and every case varies. I’ve met people who, for a myriad of reasons, knew very little Spanish. Meanwhile, a friend of mine would constantly switch between both languages without realizing it, which felt surprisingly natural and easy to follow in person.
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