The Right Trigger: "Grand Theft Auto V" Review

I am not the kind of guy who goes to strip clubs, drives erratically, or murders indiscriminately in video games. Why is it, then, that I enjoyed Grand Theft Auto V so much? Well, for one thing, everything that GTA has a bad rap for depends on the player. There is only as much sex and indiscriminate murder as you want, which means that I had a pretty vanilla experience. There is a lot to talk about with GTA V, so let's get to it.
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Gameplay is fast-paced and more of a narrative tool.

The first thing I'd like to discuss is the gameplay. If you have ever played a game by Rockstar, then you should know what to expect. There is heavy auto-aim, and your aiming reticle is a small white dot. Really, combat is just a way to get from one thing to another, which isn't a problem, because it feels powerful. You have a variety of weapons at your disposal, none of which are incredibly special, but that doesn't matter much. You are sometimes faced with hundreds upon hundreds of enemies, but it is always manageable. Grand Theft Auto V is not meant to be a challenging game, so the combat is mostly there to move the plot forward, but it is still fun.
There is a lot to do in Los Santos. There are many hobbies and pastimes such as golf, movie screenings, races, amusement park rides, etc. In addition to the main missions, there are also side missions specific to each character, and each of these side missions introduces a side character and serves to flesh out the world of GTA V even more than usual. Whether it is Franklin's junkie relative, one of Michael's old flames, or one of Trevor's trailer park neighbors, each of the side mission side characters sheds a little more light on what the world of GTA V is like outside of the main plot.
The main plot missions, however, stand just fine on their own.
There is a lot of variety in the main story of GTA V, so much so that it can sometimes seem overwhelming. Like any Rockstar game, this is a long, long, long game, so story missions range from the mundane to the unbelievably elaborate. At the core of GTA's story missions are the heists: giant coordinated criminal escapades that I have heard described as operating just on the edge of possibility. That is, things are sometimes a little too convenient to be realistic, but it is never quite unrealistic either. Each of the heists are long endeavors that offer a variety of ways to go. Depending on your choices, heists will play out in entirely different ways, and I definitely enjoyed feeling like my experience was entirely dependent on my choices.
Another aspect of gameplay is customization: each character has a specific style, but you can get different haircuts and beards, tattoos, and clothing to make them look different within those styles. Even though GTA V does not depend much on customization, I appreciated having the opportunity to take the game's visuals into my own hands at times.
There is, however, one problem that I have with this giant, vibrant world. It suffers from that classic Rockstar emptiness. Yes, there is a lot of life in Los Santos. There are lots of people and businesses and radio stations to make this world feel living and fleshed out. But the entire time I was playing GTA V, I couldn't shake the feeling of scriptedness (this problem was also present in Red Dead Redemption and LA Noir). That is to say, even though this is very much a living world, the only ways you can really, really engage with the city are through specific hobbies and pastimes that are available at specific points. The only buildings you can enter are gas stations, clothing stores, and maybe one other type of place, but I was never able to go anywhere other than gas stations and clothing stores. I definitely understand that it would be difficult beyond my wildest dreams to actually program an entire city with lots of different areas to walk in, but I would have at least liked to have explored some of the many, many, many different, cool-looking businesses that are in Los Santos. The lack of interactivity made most of Los Santos feel like it was there just for the sake of being there, and I know for a fact that this game is better than that. There were so many places to go to and all of them were unique and looked like they took a lot of thought to create, but once I got to them, there was nothing to do. Here's the bottom line: Some people make their own fun in GTA V by gunning people down, some people make their own fun in GTA V by trying to skydive onto skyscrapers. The way that I wanted to make my own fun in GTA V was by exploring this painstakingly created world that Rockstar has made, but I was very disappointed in that regard. Other than this complaint about the map however, the map and gameplay aspects of GTA V were pretty solid.
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Driving feels too flimsy and too stiff at different times.

Of course, gameplay for a game with the word "Auto" in the title would be nothing without driving, and unfortunately, GTA V is a little flimsy here. I've heard that GTA V's driving is better than past GTA games, but I think that there is still plenty of room for improvement. Driving feels too flimsy and at the same time too stiff. Most of the time, your turns are almost impossible to make because the cars simply do not turn reliably, but at the same time, the slightest swerve sends you into a spinning frenzy. As the game progressed, I found this less distracting, but it was ever present.
As bad as the car driving sometimes is, it is nothing compared to how flying planes and helicopters is. I understand that in real life, these things are hard to operate, but what is the point of building up your flying skill to 100% if planes and helicopters are still going to act like scared deer strapped to bottle rockets? Like the cars, the air transportation is too flimsy and at the same time too swift. In a helicopter, it feels like you are making no progress at all, ever. But at the same time, when you need to pick something up or hover directly over something, the slightest touch of the thumbstick practically puts your helicopter on the other end of the map. Likewise, in a plane, turning feels like just about the slowest thing in the world, but if you turn the thumbstick then it is almost impossible to balance the darn thing out.
One positive aspect of the cars in GTA V is the customization. There are hundreds upon hundreds of different ways to customize cars that you steal...I mean have. Everything from color to engine type to license plate type to one of the thousands of tire types is available for you to choose from. In my playthrough of GTA V, I spent thousands of dollars customizing every car I could find...which leads me to the negative side of this.
There are garages for you to save cars in, but I could never quite make it work the way I wanted it to. What I was expecting was that you could leave the car out in the world but come back to it in the garage, but that never happened in my playthrough. Maybe my copy is bugged, because that doesn't really make any sense, but regardless, it was very hard to keep ahold of the cars that I had spent so much money customizing. Especially given the fact that most of the story missions involve you having to get into a different car at some point, the lack of a convenient way to save your cars really took away from my personal experience.
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Left: Michael, Middle: Franklin, Right: Trevor.

Now for the story. Grand Theft Auto V revolves around three characters. The first character is Michael DeSanta, a retired criminal who is going through an early midlife crisis. Michael lives with his family: His wife, Amanda, his son, Jimmy, and his daughter, Tracy. His entire family is about as debauched as it gets, and he finds himself struggling to remain in control. I will talk a little bit more about the DeSanta family later on, because it ties directly into what this game is really about. The second is Franklin Clinton, a younger man from the hood who is trying to break out of the gang lifestyle and aspires to greater things. Franklin works as a "repo" man who works with a scheming car salesman. Everybody around him takes pride in being a gang banger doing gang banger things, but Franklin wants to be something greater than that. I will also talk a little more about this later. The third is Trevor Philips, the face of this game. Trevor is unpredictable and psychotic. He is a Canadian who thinks that people are being racist when they even remotely bring up Canada. There is a lot to Trevor's character, but I won't get into that because it will spoil some of the story. Ultimately, there is a lot to each of the three protagonists, as we should have come to expect from Rockstar at this point. I was pleasantly surprised by how well the three protagonist system worked. My expectation was that having three different protagonists to switch between in such an open, customizable world would be too much to handle and would take away focus from the game, but Rockstar proved me wrong there. Yes, it is sometimes hard to keep track of each character's skills, cars, weapons, and articles of clothing, but most of the time, the story remains focused even though you play as three different characters.
The story itself is one that I can't say much about, but as we have come to expect from Rockstar, it is a story that is well thought-out and that relies heavily on characters and the relationships between them. The entire story was pretty much based on the connections between Franklin, Michael, and Trevor, as well as the connections between these characters and other characters. Because it is such a well done character-driven story, it is a darn strong story. Like I've said, there isn't much I can say without spoiling, so you're just going to have to take my word for it here.
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You'll notice the skanky clothing, the picture on the wall, the bong in the corner, the unbelievably violent game this guy is playing, the magazine at the bottom of the picture, and the middle finger this guy is giving his sister. This is how Rockstar calls out the millennial generation.

The thing that I love about Rockstar games is that every game they make is really about something. Red Dead Redemption was about America's struggle to bring order to a wild frontier. L.A. Noir was about how horribly America treats its veterans. Grand Theft Auto IV (which I didn't play) was about the myth of the American dream. No matter what game it is, there is always some sort of theme of the dark sides of this country. Grand Theft Auto V is no exception. GTA V is about the blatant materialism and moral degradation that the millennial generation is known for, as well as the strong and damaging sense of isolated identity that is present in gang culture.
The first half of the message, the millennial culture message, is delivered primarily in Michael's story. His two children, Jimmy and Tracy, sum up the entirety of the dark sides of my generation. Jimmy is a wannabe gangster who hasn't worked a day in his life. He plays supremely violent video games, is heavily invested in porn, constantly smokes weed, and does nothing but sit, eat, and call people he plays against in his game "hermaphrodudes." Tracy is a starry-eyed, fame-obsessed girl with nothing between her ears and who is as impressionable as they come. A few missions have you retrieving Tracy from a yacht that porn is being videoed in, retrieving her from a "destroy America's self esteem" talent TV show audition, all of which end with Tracy telling her father that he has ruined her life. Both Tracy and Jimmy are just about the most disrespectful, materialistic brats you can imagine. Michael is not the best father in the world by any stretch of the imagination, though. In fact, he is meant to be a statement about modern parenting techniques. When Tracy is being objectified and is putting herself out in front of cameras for fame, somebody asks Michael, "How can you sleep at night knowing your daughter is being treated this way?" Michael responds with, "When you raise a daughter in this day and age, you just have to expect it." That is millennial parenting (meaning, by those who raised a lot of millennials) at its most potent. Michael is meant to represent the ambivalence that modern parenting is loaded with as well as the "never tell a child 'no'" approach to parenting. Only when Michael starts taking control of his life again and starts to intervene more does his family show any signs of improvement.
The second half of this game's overall message, the gang culture message, is delivered in Franklin's story. At the beginning of the game, Franklin works for a car salesman named Simeon. Simeon charges outlandish interest on cars, and when the customer inevitably can no longer pay, Franklin and his best friend, Lamar, go out and steal back the cars. Franklin, having grown up in the ghettos of Los Santos, has been a criminal all his life to keep from starving, but he wants to aspire to greater things. Everybody around him, however, is so caught up in being part of the hood and reliving the glory days of gang culture that they don't share his ambition. They are all content to continue to live in the hood and be gang bangers. Franklin is threatened with violence on a number of occasions because his fellow hoodlums believe that he is going "soft" on them, that he is putting the Rockford hills kind of culture ahead of his hood family. The gang culture that Rockstar presents us with in Franklin's story is one that pretty much resembles real life: it is a cycle of "us and them." There are two worlds in this kind of mindset: The hood and the rest of the world. Many of those involved in gang culture could probably escape the constant threat of suddenly being killed, but the sense of family is stronger than the fear of death. This is the kind of cycle that Rockstar is criticizing in Franklin's story. There are a number of conversations that Franklin has with Lamar that bring this theme up. There is a mission in which you, playing as Franklin, rescue Lamar from a group of Ballers who have kidnapped him and are planning on killing him. Upon rescuing him, Lamar doesn't even offer a note of thanks. Instead, when asked about this near-death experience, Lamar says that, "this is the hood. This is what happens, and I'm the kind of person it happens to." Franklin is constantly offering Lamar options in his own higher escapades, options that would help Lamar get out of the ghetto and out of the life of violence, but Lamar constantly refuses. Truly, Rockstar made a grand statement when they wrote Franklin's story. Instead of thanking Franklin for rescuing him, Lamar berates him for leaving the hood behind, and it is a brilliant criticism of modern gang culture.
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The achievement for choosing to use the water torture is called, "its legal." Makes you think.

Now I'd like to take some time to talk about the portion of GTA V that really, really put it under fire: the torture sequence. This sequence plays into the overarching theme of pretty much all of Rockstar's games: The government is evil. In Red Dead Redemption, they kidnap protagonist John Marston's wife and child and threaten to kill them if he doesn't commit a few murders on their behalf. In L.A. Noir, they let known killers and child rapists walk free because of the connections they have. And in Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar points a finger at all the dumb Americans who think that torture is ever justified and tells them, "ok, you do it, then!" In this scene, one of the game's villains, a charismatic white guy who wears a purple polo shirt and khakis and works for the government, tells you to torture an innocent man who just so happens to know things about a person who the government believes is a threat to national security. Here's the kicker though: the guy never actually needs any convincing to talk. He is willing to talk right from the get go. The government guy, however, withholds certain details of what he wants to know, thus making you torture him for a little while. After a bit of torture is applied, the government guy adds an important detail to what he wants to know in and acts like he has been asking that question from the beginning. ("Now, are you going to tell me about X, or do we have to go again?" "Why didn't you just say so? I know about X!") You torture this American citizen four times in total, and every single time, you have to go over to a table and choose a method of torture: water torture, pulling a tooth, breaking a limb with a wrench, or electric clips to the nipples. You. Have. No. Choice. In order to proceed, you have no choice but to choose a method and deliver it, all the while with the guy begging you to stop and saying that he is an American citizen. After you have finished torturing him for the fourth time, the smiling purple polo white guy leaves and tells you to kill him. Instead, you untie him and send him on a plane to a faraway country to be a torture advocate.
Grand Theft Auto is no stranger to controversy, but this section really pushed the boundaries. The countless people who try to get bills into the senate to ban violent video games see this section at a surface level and say, "oh, GTA is promoting torture." But all it takes is a little bit of thought to see what this section actually is. With the torture section, Rockstar games opens up a discussion of an evil that is very much present in modern America. America has been torturing for years, and very few people (and zero presidents, democrats and republicans alike) have done anything to stop it. This section has you use some of the methods that our government uses (the achievement for using the water torture is called, "its legal"). It really shows how full of it a lot of people really are, because while they look down on this section as promoting torture, these same people are the kind of people who see the released C.I.A. torture reports and cheer them on. As a Libertarian, I am a half conservative, and in general I lean more to that side of things, but the utter hypocrisy of a lot of conservative politicians really astounds me sometimes. They'll go out of their way to try and erase simulated violence no matter what the message of it is, but when this kind of senseless torture is actually happening in our country, these same politicians raise the American flag, perform a boy scout salute, and say that we do what we have to do to protect ourselves from the "ragheads". This is a viscerally disturbing section that forces people such as the airheads on fox news to watch a man beg for the pain to stop, and then it asks them if they still think that "getting those ragheads" is worth the price. Yeah, this section made me really uncomfortable, and that is the point. The point of this section is to force you to look this crime in the eyes and realize that the villains of the world are not just people wearing turbans across the ocean who occasionally kill somebody. They are, in fact, villains, but the most present, harmful villains of today are the smiley charismatic white guys who claim to be protecting us while they (provenly) torture American citizens and suspected terrorists alike.
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Grand Theft Auto V is the kind of experience I've been waiting my whole gaming career for, and for the most part, it fills the role nicely.

In the end, there is a lot to love about Grand Theft Auto V. It is a gigantic game with loads to do, even if the lack of interaction does take away from that size. The gameplay does its job well, and it is just generally fun to play, so it really goes above and beyond what it is meant to do as a narrative device. The story of Grand Theft Auto V is also lovable. It can be argued that it isn't the most realistic story in the world in terms of the things that happen on a surface level, but on a psychological level it is one of the more realistic games I've played in a while. While the actual events of the game can kind of induce a "ehhh I don't know about that," the way that people interact, the way that relationships between government and citizen operate in this game are true to reality, and it is a refreshing experience. There is a lot of depth to GTA V in its statements about millennial materialism as well as the isolated identity of gang culture, but there is also a lot of depth in (as I've made a point of saying) the way it discusses the relationship between government and citizen. A constant theme throughout the game is government surveillance and personal data ownership, both of which are themes that are present in modern America. In addition, as I've said, it makes a point of discussing our country's unfortunate history of torture in a way that is absolutely gut-wrenching and thought provoking.

In other words, when I went into Grand Theft Auto V, I was expecting a good time in an open world. But what I got was an intelligently crafted dialogue about modern American society that I have been able to continuously analyze in the week or two since I completed the game. It does have its occasional weaknesses, but ultimately, Grand Theft Auto V is a game that you need to play if you want to get the most out of your life as a gamer. I believe this fervently enough that I am CHANGING MY OWN RULES in order to accommodate the score that I want to give it. The reason I need to change my own rules here is this: Grand Theft Auto V has flaws, but it is...a masterpiece.

9/10