Thanks to Quarbani, I was all but immortal. It's not often that I have my life saved by a game character in what wasn't a completely scripted occurrence, and to have it happen multiple times over a few hours made me really bloody grateful to have him around. It's an experience that'll create emotional ties between men. Then he gives you a shot of morphine, a pistol, and you clear out the bad guys together. When you go down in a firefight, you black out, getting snatches of consciousness as your buddy rushes in to save you, blasting away at whoever plugged you while dragging you to safety. Quarbani was the latter kind of buddy, the one that saves your life. It's that or a guy who'll save your life a dozen times, at least. They deliver their hyperspeed dialogue about how we should all be looking out for one another here in the depths of Africa, and then you've got some prick who will ring you up before you do a mission with something borderline genocidal and most definitely approaching a war crime for you to do on top of that.

When Far Cry 2 gives you a buddy, there's not a lot of fanfare. You'll regularly threaten and blackmail unarmed men, because you're such a great guy. In a world notorious for its absurdly fast-talking, verbose residents, Quarbani was a breath of fresh air. Maybe it was just that he didn't say a whole lot, or what he did say was the bare minimum needed to convey his message. He seemed to at least have a little dignity in the depths of his mercenary psyche. Quarbani wasn't my first buddy in Far Cry 2, just the first person I'd met in Africa I didn't actively hate on sight.

Far cry 2 buddy death