YMMV / Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

• Accidental Innuendo: The opening scene:
  Spider: Wakey wakey, motherfucker! Ops says there's a delay in the feed, they need to recalibrate your ass!
  Rex: Me?
  Spider: Well it ain't me 'cause I'm goddamn near perfect. Men want to be me...
  Rex: And you want to be with men. Yeah, I got it.
• Ass Pull: The reveal in Trial of the Blood Dragon that Dr. Elizabeth Darling was a Blood Dragon all along.
• Awesome Music: The game's entire soundtrack is a magnificent tribute to the 80's.
  • Power Glove's original score is a fantastic homage to the film soundtracks and style of the era. A prominent Synthwave soundtrack which serves as a gateway drug for many to the fledgling genre.
  • "Hold On To The Vision", borrowed from No Retreat, No Surrender, which plays during the Training Montage sequence.
  • "War" from Rocky IV, which plays when you get to ride the dragon.
  • "Friends (Forever)", borrowed from Miami Connection.
  • If you accept the WMG which states that Blood Dragon is an 80s action movie series and Trials of the Blood Dragon is it's 90s Saturday Morning Cartoon series spinoff, the soundtrack for the latter supports this. Power Glove scored the sequel again, but this time manage to achieve a blend between the 80s Synthwave stylings of the original game and a newer, 90s House Music/rave influence, suggesting one possible route for musicians of the genre to go down to emulate the 80s/90s transition period. It makes for some excellent tracks, and also features even more use of epic panpipes for that unique jungle geurilla warfare feel!
• Broken Base: Many people who played Far Cry 3 loved this cheesy, testosterone-fueled, 80's nostalgia-fest. However, many others complained it was "extremely stupid" and even created a formal petition asking for main game story DLC. The split is largely between gamers who grew up in the '80s, and as such get the references and nostalgia better, and more modern gamers of the '90s and the 2000s, who think of it as a bit too nutty, and just can't wrap their head around how this is supposed to be connected to Far Cry 3. Though this is complicated in that there are also some from the latter era who are amused and amazed by the jokes and content, as well as indications that the side against the game are a Vocal Minority given how well the game has done.
• Complete Monster: Colonel Ike Sloan was once the leader of cybernetically-enhanced soldiers, and the ideal hero, but upon learning that America and the Communists were making a peace agreement, he went rogue with his soldiers. Enhancing himself with the blood of the Blood Dragons, Sloan considered himself the strongest and best suited to be leader. Sloan plots to use the blood to enhance nukes which he'll launch all over the world, resulting in a new apocalypse, and then he'll build a world where the strong rule over the weak, with him as supreme leader. When Sloan first encounters two of his former soldiers, Sergeant Rex "Power" Colt and Lieutenant T.T. "Spider" Brown, he kills Spider and later praises Rex for killing some of his men, as he sees it as culling the ranks of his weaker soldiers.
• Crosses the Line Twice: "Send for a medic, so I can kill him, too!"
• Franchise Original Sin: As a Mission-Pack Sequel built around recycled content from its parent game, it foreshadowed the later creation of Far Cry Primal and Far Cry: New Dawn doing the same for their respective games. Blood Dragon is held in much higher regard for a number of reasons: it only cost $15 (including at least one point where it was given away for free), it was marketed as the standalone Expansion Pack that it is, and it converted the game into a wildly different '80s sci-fi action Genre Throwback, with an entirely new map, mostly new weapons, and a new protagonist with several new abilities. Conversely, Primal and New Dawn are the exact same Far Cry formula from their parent games and recycle as much as possible from their parent games, including almost all the weapons, maps that are just the same ones from the base game with a different coat of paint to match the different time period or aesthetic, and have protagonists who play almost entirely identically to their base game counterparts. And, perhaps most notably, they were treated as full games with matching $60 price points despite this extensive recycling. Even stranger is that Far Cry 5 already had regular DLC that hewed much closer to Blood Dragon in terms of price point, tonal shifts from the base game, and new maps and weapons (including the ability to use the weapons in the base game), which just makes it even more apparent that New Dawn costs so much more for what feels like much less new content.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Kobracon with Explosive Rounds. This basically makes all its shots explosive and deal incredible damage, being able to instantly explode trucks (and everybody inside), deal very good damage to the Heavy units, and also kill Blood Dragons within a few shots to their weakpoint. Put in Semi-Auto fire, and increased magazine for even more breakage. Its only downside is that the shots tend to accidentally kill hostages via the explosions.
  • The Galleria 1991 once it's been upgraded with four barrels and incendiary rounds is hilariously overpowered. At close range, it can even chew through a blood dragon's life bar in ridiculously short order.
  • Once upgraded with laser rounds and fully-automatic fire, the Fazertron becomes an excellent close-to-medium range weapon that kills mooks in only a couple of shots. Even heavy soldiers fall quickly to it.
  • The Killstar. You don't get it till the end of the game but you are free to use it afterwards in Free Roam. It pretty much kills everything in seconds, even Blood Dragons. The downside is that it is Cast From Hitpoints. But it takes forever to go down 1 HP bar, by the time you have it you will have a lot of them as well as the ability to regain the HP bars at no cost that it doesn't make it an issue.
• Genius Bonus: "Aaah! It's an exothermic chemical reaction!" (He means fire).
• Harsher in Hindsight: The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, but done in a very campy, Black Comedy sort of manner. The series proper would eventually do its own (questionably) canonical After the End scenario in Far Cry: New Dawn.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Back during Yahtzee's review of Far Cry 3 he made a joke about how you don't unlock the "magic pussy laser" (Yahtzee uses a picture of a tiger shooting lasers out of its eyes to illustrate this idea) until the end of the game. Rex does unlock a magic laser during the end of the game, the Killstar device which allows him to fire a massive death ray from his left hand along with the Battle Armored Dragon Assault Strike System which is a dinosaur that does shoot lasers out of its eyes.
  • Michael Biehn used to fight cyborgs back in the 80s, he is now turned into one.
• Ho Yay: Rex and Spider. The opening scene between the two of them should spell it out pretty well.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The sound Rex makes when he levels up and do the horn sign with this metal hand.
• Narm Charm: It's an over-the-top parody of cheesy '80s action movies. This game wouldn't even be half as good as it is if weren't so incomprehensibly stupid.
• Nightmare Fuel: Has its own page.
• Polished Port: The console version is a massive improvement over Far Cry 3's port. The framerate is stable and usually stays over 30, and the visual problems are covered up by the art style. Hell, it arguably runs and plays smoother on 7th generation consoles than Far Cry 3 Classic Edition does on the 8th.
• Scrappy Weapon: While in any other game, it would be a pretty effective sidearm, thanks to the other guns all being upgradable to being Purposely Overpowered, the AJM-9 feels pretty underwhelming in comparison.
• Spiritual Licensee: It's one of the best Duke Nukem games ever made. Deliberately cheesy one-liners, nostalgia and lots of fun gunplay: check check check. Just trade out the ultra-macho action movie aesthetic with a techno sci-fi one.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: One of the songs has a drum beat and synthesizer melody eerily similar to that of the main theme from The Terminator.
  • Compare the track Blood Scope to the main theme from The Thing (1982)
• Tough Act to Follow: Blood Dragon 2 would most likely not happen, and the official reason for that is that Blood Dragon's ideas would only work once. They do hint about a different spin-off, though, which eventually lead to the prehistoric-set Far Cry Primal.
  • There is Trials of the Blood Dragon, however, which takes the theme and story in an entirely different direction, basically covering other aspects of the '80s while running with the general theme without retreading stuff from the first game. Thus it's more of an Affectionate Parody of the numerous children's cartoon spin-offs of said action movies. However, it doesn't escape this trope entirely though, with some Trials fans upset over its departures from the traditional Trials formula.
  • And then Far Cry 5 rolled around and brought with it the Lost on Mars DLC, which takes Blood Dragon's basic idea to provide a hilarious romp across Mars where you shoot lots of Big Creepy-Crawlies with Energy Weapons and a Robot Buddy by your side. It's not quite as awesomely silly as Blood Dragon, but it certainly gives it its best shot and does come pretty close on occasion.
• Too Cool to Live:
  • Spider is killed after the very first mission.
  • The Battle Armored Dragon Assault Strike System is alive for the span of about three minutes.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The reloading and weapon swap animations are just awesome. Not to mention the neon glow most things have, including the Blood Dragons, look incredible.
  • The completely different lightning, coloring and setting nicely covers up the graphical issues Far Cry 3 had on consoles, and as a result looks surprisingly good.