Grand Theft Auto V (Part 1)

(Title card... whenever I can. Sorry about that, as I said before, stuff has been hectic.)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 – Part 6

Oh, BTW, I played all of GTA V in French. So be prepared
to read a lot of French on my screenshots.

(Disclaimer: Remember that this is only the second GTA game I’ve ever played, after GTA: Chinatown Wars on the Nintendo DS. As such, I can’t make comparisons between this GTA or any previous GTA, outside of maybe the other one I’ve played; I have no other frame of reference. If you’re a GTA fan and this is a problem to you, I apologize. Also note that due to the sheer size of this game and the amount of content it has, I WILL forget to mention some things. It’s inevitable. I don’t want this review to be 15 parts long, it’s still going to be a long one either way. Hell, if I went for an in-depth analysis, I could spend three parts speaking about the themes of this game alone.)

No UPlay review this time, I want to get rid of this one. Not that GTA V isn’t a good game, I’m sure it is; but it’s so freaking huge (what, 70 gigabytes?), it’s taking too much space on my computer, I just want to review it and be done with it.

Chinatown Wars was an impressive game. Then again, each
time Rockstar makes an astounding GTA game, and we ask
"How can they make something better?", they answer
"Hold my beer"... and MAKE AN EVEN BETTER GAME!

So… Grand Theft Auto… Quite the franchise, huh? There’s a lot I would say about it, if my sole past experience wasn’t “Chinatown Wars”, which represents the setting on a smaller scale. Hell, even as a Nintendo DS game, it was massive – dozens of plot threads, seven or eight different folks to receive missions from, and Huang Lee played for and against every group by helping his Uncle Kenny, the grand Triad Boss Hsin Jaoming, two cops, and I’m forgetting many. The plot was extremely convoluted, but as per GTA tradition, you didn’t even have to follow it all that much; it was more fun to just cause random acts of mayhem, murder and destruction, along with the easy money amassed through drug deals. The game itself was a technical marvel, fitting this giant map on the space of a DS cartridge, along with every little secret that could be found in it.

Random destruction! Fight the power young man!
Steal your plastic bags, no paying 5 cents for those!

So wait, does that mean people are aware when the
crosshair is pointed directly at them? 

However, GTA:CW was a top-down game because that made it save space on designs. Not so much for any large, full-3D GTA title, such as GTA V. This one has amazing 3D graphics as well as an even larger city to visit, and it probably has so many secrets and side-quests that I’m going to forget some. Whereas Chinatown Wars put a lot of emphasis on drug deals, this one focuses on bank heists. There’s an Online version of the game, a massive multiplayer experience with factions and whatnot – but as usual, I can hardly find any interest in that. Oh, I’ll certainly talk about it later, but for now I’d like to focus on the single-player campaign. I know, I know, not everyone plays GTA for the single-player aspect, or if they do, it’s not for the Story Mode proper. Well, let me remedy to that. I can actually see Rockstar Games putting some effort into their stories for the series, and it would be a shame to miss all of that!

Join me in Los Santos. There will be crimes, there will be heists, there will be backstabbing. And, because we aim for every crime, get ready for a lot of jaywalking. And gunfight murders. And loitering. And car-stealing. We are falling into a life of crime again!

And of course, be aware that I’m spoiling the Hell out of this entire game, from start to finish.

We're shown quite early how to switch between characters,
though we won't need that for a while.

"Won't you cops go the fuck away? I'm freezing my balls
off over here!"

The Story Mode starts… with a bank heist, immediately setting up the main draw of this game. From what I’ve understood, GTA games usually began with a simple mission in which you just drove around town. Not so much this time, huh? First, the robbers force the employees into a closet, then blow up the vault open, grab the cash, blow up another wall to leave the place… and that’s when they’re attacked by police. Aww, things were going so well! A shootout ensues between the cops and the heist crew, and they manage to kill enough cops to get to their car and get on the way towards a helicopter, driving the icy winter roads. Unfortunately, they’re hit by a train on the way, and more cops catch up to them on a farm’s grounds. One of them, Michael, is shot in the ensuing altercation, while another one, Trevor, flees. The others? All dead.

This psychiatrist will lend an ear as long as you don't come
to a satisfying epiphany. He'll end the session right there
and make you come back and pay for the next session,
if you show any signs of improvement.

Aw yeah, Los Santos has the coolest cars.
The best cars to steal, either way.

We cut to nine years later, where an older Michael is speaking to a therapist. Michael is under witness protection and has had his name changed to de Santa, and now he also has a nice house in an upscale neighborhood (similar to Beverly Hills). He’s clearly dissatisfied with his current life, laying low and unhappy with his family. After he leaves the therapist’s office, he rests on a bench outside when two young Black men ask him about an address. He tells them, and it turns out, they’re about to steal two cars in the yard, to repossess them for their boss. Now in the control of Franklin Clinton, behind the wheel of the car he stole, we’re visiting the city of Los Santos freely – well, about as freely as you can while closely following your friend Lamar, who took the other car.

First time fleeing the cops?
Don't worry - it will happen over and over again.
Get used to it. two stars is nothing.
You ain't a five-star criminal yet.

This mission would have been easier if the cars we stole weren’t fickle pieces of shit. Super-fast, sure; but they turn on a dime, which makes them hard to control. A bad choice for the first cars you get to use in the game, if you ask me. Things go well on the way to the garage – that is, until the police decides to go after them. What follows is your first sequence of many in which you must evade the cops by getting out of their sight for a moment. It’s the only way to lose your Wanted level – find a spot to hide in, and hope no cops are following you. Once safe, Franklin drives the car back to the garage. The owner, Simeon, is talking (more like scamming) a customer into buying a bigger, manlier car. This is a GTA game; nobody is a paragon of virtue here, especially not car dealers. Franklin leaves with his pal Lamar and goes home.

Oh, by the way, can I say how awesome it is to be in control of a protagonist who isn’t a white dude? That’s a nice change for once. Franklin is an ex-gang banger, so he and Lamar’s conversations are filled to the brim with street slang and the N-word. Don’t make a drinking game out of each time you’ll hear the N-word or “motherfucker”, you’ll die in 15 minutes.

Also, he smokes enough weed to be mostly unaffected by
the regular stuff.

First shootout! I'm still at that point where killing strangers
is still a lot of fun. We're not in too much danger yet.

Following this, we get our next missions. First we steal a supped-up motorcycle from a street gang – whom we decimate before chasing down the bike’s driver on the busy streets. It's only tough for now as we don't yet know the city's layout. The mission afterwards involves kidnapping a guy with the help of a tracking dog named Chop, which would be useful were it neutered. But it's not, so it humps anything it sees with a fuckable hole. As a bonus, you can see through the dog's eyes. Yep. Franklin and Lamar find the guy and capture him, but Lamar orders the ransom on his own phone and gets detected by the FIB and the enemy gang, so they have to let the guy go. Just peachy, huh? I feel this Lamar guy will be a drag...

Tonya is one of the first strangers we meet. Her missions
are about towing cars.

As those missions progress, we get to visit more of the city. This is a Grand Theft Auto game, one of the most advanced city sandbox games out there, so filled to the brim with content that you might just never see the end of it. Or, well, the 100% mark, which can be earned, but it’s gonna be long. Rockstar Games really did their best to make Los Santos feel like a complete world – as close to reality as a city like Los Angeles could be, with acceptable breaks when it comes to video game logic. Some kind of dichotomy between the obligatory video game mechanics of that world, a need to have stuff that breaks away from the real world, mixed with some very realistic situations that call to mind various problems like psychoses, drug abuse, rampant criminality, prejudice, dark hidden secrets, or having a shitty car.

It's like Facebook, except better:
It doesn't have Minion Posts.

There are random events scattered all over the damn place, every secondary character has a personality and quirks and sometimes a backstory, and we can learn interesting stuff from almost everyone we meet who has some level of importance, even if it’s for only one mission or quest. LifeInvader, the in-game parody of Facebook, updates frequently with characters' thoughts and posts, even minor ones who appear only once, and you can freely read through every single profile. It doesn’t stop there; life goes on for everyone around town, and that includes the three protagonists; go on for a few days playing Franklin and then switch to Michael de Santa, and you might see him in the middle of doing whatever he had planned on that day, sometimes with different clothes than the last time he was seen.

You know, I’m starting to see why this game was over 60 gigabytes.

Tow, tow, tow through the night...

Let’s just say Los Santos is not Santa Destroy from No More Heroes; as much as I love the NMH series, the empty sandbox map was meant to parody games that tried to be GTA, without having the content and variety to back it up, something that is also quite common nowadays. And it succeeded, because Santa Destroy was boring as fuck. GTA V actually has that content and can kick every competitor’s ass any day. Except maybe Saints Row, but I never played these, I’ve only heard that they were basically “GTA on acid”, which sounds amazing.

In fact, you can’t even envision the number of side-quests available until you start digging into them. In my first few hours, I took a tow truck and actually did some towing work; participated in a street race with my awful driving skills; took a joint of powerful shit and hallucinated that I was gunning down hordes of aliens (yes, really); foot-raced a woman and won; helped a paparazzi get his money shots for a tabloid (and now I feel horrendously dirty inside); and I did so much more.

I can think of better reasons to be held at gunpoint.

Simeon’s next job for Franklin involves taking an SUV from some Jimmy de Santa kid. To reach the car inside the garage, Franklin sneaks into the house without being spotted, gets in the SUV, and leave… but surprise! Michael de Santa was in the back, and is now threatening Franklin. Oh shit! Michael forces the robber to ram into Simeon’s store and a fistfight occurs between the repo man and Michael, which our new second protagonist wins. Well, that’s not so bad. I can even leave back in the SUV!

We rarely get to save people in this game. Mostly, it's all
about killing people. I suppose that dork Jimmy has some
plot importance...

Now we control Michael and he can do most things Franklin could, aside from many quests that are limited to certain protagonists. One day, as Michael’s resting at home, Franklin shows up and apologizes for the whole deal, now willing to hear more about the ex-criminal’s life. They go out for a beer, but have to change plans when Jimmy, Michael’s son, calls. He tried to get the family boat repossessed, but the crooks fled with it, and him still inside. So we chase the truck down, get in real close so that Franklin can jump aboard the boat, catch Jimmy into the car, and get Franklin back - but we get motor troubles, so we have to let that boat go. At the same time, we’re shown the garages around the city, and how we can customize any car we get our hands on. That’s pretty sweet. Too bad it's so damn expensive. Oh! And now that Franklin lost his job at Simeon’s, he has to find a new way to make dough, and Michael might just be the guy.

I would love to do legal stuff like customizing cars...
but I lack the money. I almost exclusively make the
money needed to do this... by doing crimes.

On a side-note, I am probably already a bad person for having so much fun stealing cars and partaking in various criminal activities in this game, but I burst into laughter from time to time when I lose a mission in such a way that a character gets killed. That may be caused by the ragdoll physics that seem to take over when it happens… I dunno, it’s still funny to me.

We join Lamar on a quest for more money in a drug deal, only to realize it’s a trap from the Ballas and their leader, D… AKA, the guy we tried to kidnap earlier. And so we have to shoot our way out and flee the cops again afterwards. Good work, Lamar. With this done, we can return to Michael for the next mission... or is it actually a mission?

As Franklin walks to the de Santa household, a near-naked guy runs out followed by an angry Michael, and Amanda de Santa in a bathroom towel. So this guy, Amanda’s tennis instructor, was fucking her. Apparently Michael wouldn’t mind that so much, his marriage is at a dead end, but the frolics happened in HIS bed. Like he says, "If I have to use a motel, she has to use a motel!" Boo-fucking-hoo. First world problem if there ever was one.

I mean, all conflicts should be resolved by utterly destroying
an upper-scale apartment. But most of the time, it just
creates more problems.

Getting my ass kicked by a "legitimate businessman" who
definitely isn't a crime lord. I can check that off the
bucket list now.

We chase the guy to a house, yell at him, then Michael decides in a fit of rage to make that upscale apartment deck fall off. Attach a steel rope to the steel girders, pull them with the car… major crash. Then, as we leave, we get a call from the tennis instructor; that was NOT his house! He just went there to hide! That place actually belonged to Martin Madrazo, the leader of a Mexican narcotics gang. Well, he isn’t, but he is. Let’s be clear, he is not the leader of a bunch of drug dealers in Los Santos. But he totally is. Y'know... "he isn't". So now, good news! We’re chased by heavily weaponized cars. And even when we flee back to Michael’s house, we see Madrazo show up with his goons, make himself known… and says Michael will have to pay for the repairs to the house he just practically destroyed. How much? Oh, 2.5 million dollars should be enough.

Well, it seems we’re not retiring from crime anytime soon. Until we can pay this back, anyway. The plot is now in motion! Join me in Part 2!