"Did I ever tell you... the definition of insanity?"
— Vaas
- Fake American: Jason and most of his friends are voiced by Canadians, including the devoutly patriotic Agent Willis. Most prominently applies to Mylene Dinh-Robinc as Liza Snow: Liza is a white American woman, whereas Mylene is of Québecois and Vietnamese descent.
- Fake Australian: Irish actor Julian Casey as Australian Bambi "Buck" Hughes.
- Fake Brit: Canadian Martin Kevan as English Doctor Alec Earhardt.
- Fake Nationality: Canadian voice actor Steve Cumyn as South African Hoyt Volker. Faye Kingslee, an Australian of Chinese and Irish parentage, as Citra Talugmai, a possibly Hispanic Jungle Princess. That said, Faye Kingslee was brought up in Malaysia. Vaas himself is voiced by Latino-Canadian Michael Mando, but his accent is purely Hispanic, not American. Averted by Callum from the Co-Op mode, whose voice actor is Scottish just like him.
- Fake Russian: English actor Nick Nevern as Russian Mafiya hitman Mikhail.
- Genre Turning Point: The basic framework of the game (burning down outposts for takeover of allies, manipulating the environment, open world mechanics, and so on) has been used for subsequent sequels, not to mention helped become the basis of many other modern Wide-Open Sandbox games (including Ubisoft's own other franchises).
- Ink-Suit Actor: Vaas is modeled after his voice actor Michael Mando. Mostly because the developers were so impressed by Mando's audition that they created the character of Vaas, and stuck him in all of the advertisements.
- Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: Michael Mando dubs Vaas in both the English and French version of the game.
- The Other Marty: Jason was originally going to be voiced by Elias Toufexis, who ended up doing two years' worth of voice work for the game. After the successful release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, where Toufexis voiced protagonist Adam Jensen, Ubisoft replaced Toufexis with Gianpaolo Venuta since, in the words of the former, "they didn't want people playing this game and thinking of another game".
- Prop Recycling: Not particularly guilty of this itself except for the occasional call-back to Far Cry 2, but this game's P416 model has been reused several times in later Ubisoft games. Amusingly, while this game averts A.K.A.-47 for it and calls it what it is, most of those later uses of the model instead call it the "Goblin", the fake name it had in the slightly earlier Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
- Star-Making Role: For Michael Mando.
- What Could Have Been:
- Early reports had only Jason and his girlfriend on the island, and in something of a variation of the first Far Cry, Jason was a journalist.
- Vaas was added very late in production, with large chunks of the script rewritten to focus on him instead of the rest of the villains. According to the developers, his voice actor Michael Mando had originally auditioned for a generic pirate NPC, but his performance impressed them so much that the character of Vaas was written specifically for him.
- The "Stranded" trailer added on Doug, who was to be a third member of the group alongside Jason and Liza, but who would have been executed early on before Jason escaped. Later on, with the group expanded to include several other characters, his role as Sacrificial Lion was given to one of Jason's two brothers, Grant, and Doug was retooled into a DJ the group befriended during their world tour and, as confirmed on the head writer's Twitter, a spotter for Vaas' pirates who suggested the group make one last stop at the Rook Islands so the pirates could kidnap them.
- Another member of Jason's group, Vincent Salas, appears in the flashbacks and club sequences but not on the island. According to lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem, he was originally involved in several key scenes on the island and even showed up during Jason's fight with Vaas, wherein Jason would have accidentally shot him, but they had difficulty integrating him into the fight and opted to cut him from the island entirely. Although Yohalem claims his status is "unknown", it's likely his fate was changed to simply being executed shortly after capture, as Vaas alludes to slicing open one of the group's friends during the introduction and he's the only actual member of the group who's unaccounted for.
- Modders in the PC version found code references suggesting that the weapon jamming mechanics of Far Cry 2 were meant to return, albeit simplified and sans the Breakable Weapons shenanigans that were present in that game.
- Jason was originally supposed to be voiced by Elias Toufexis, who provided years worth of voice work for the game. However after the success of Deus Ex Human Revolution, Ubisoft recast him a year before release to avoid drawing similarities between Jason and Adam Jensen.
