The Highs and Lows of GTA IV
GTA IV blew my mind in middle school.
Of course, the graphics and the scale of the world (impressive at the time) and the attention to detail Rockstar would become legendary for in the years to come played a huge part in that reaction. But at the time, it was really the story that got me. Grand Theft Auto was a series about irreverent violent fun that cribbed from pop culture and only dipped its toes into more systematic critique. A storyline about corrupt police officers here and commentary on the military industrial complex there. So I didn’t see the intensely tragic nature of the story coming, and it knocked me on my ass.
It’s a game I think about a lot, as it’s the kind of formative experience, good or bad, that leaves its mark on you. Yet in the years after it came out, I moved on to other games and consoles, and as a result, I hadn’t played GTA IV or its two DLC additions in over a decade. Naturally, it was one of the first games I picked up once I got my PC.
Despite my nostalgia, I expected this return to GTA IV to be a disaster. It is, after all, a game from two console generations ago that satirizes an America that feels like a fading memory now. On top of that, I’ve found that in recent years, I’ve turned on the Rockstar tone. Or at the very least, the Rockstar comedic sensibility. Add on older graphics, older gameplay, and older everything else and clearly, this was going to be a trainwreck.
What I got instead was much more confusing experience.
For every aspect that holds up well, there’s something that undercuts it, and for every undercut, there’s also redemption. One moment, there’ll be something that’ll make your eyes roll to the back of your head, then in the next moment, you’ll find something that’s still incredible. GTA IV is a game of peaks and valleys, and there’s very little terrain in between.
I offer the following not with any real conclusion, as to provide one would imply that I have one. I don’t, and I probably never will. GTA IV may not live on in my mind for its narrative anymore. But it definitely will just in terms of the intellectual anarchy it has wrought. So let’s get into some examples, I guess.
Narrative
Peak: The Decision to Go Heavy is Still Effective, and It’s Still an Admirable Choice
In the years since GTA IV, we’ve had many examples of downbeat stories in AAA gaming. We’ve had The Last of Us and Spec Ops: The Line and all manner of tears shed in between. (There were also plenty of examples before GTA IV, but you get what I mean.) Moreover, the indie market is practically synonymous with games that explore heavier subject matter to varying degrees of effectiveness. We’ve thankfully reached a point where more emotionally resonant storytelling is considered the norm, and if one wants to be generous, we can probably give GTA IV some flowers in bringing this era about.
Still, in going back to GTA IV, the bleak tone of the story still somehow feels novel.
The idea of telling a sad story in and of itself is not what makes it special. Rather, it’s the telling of a sad story specifically in this franchise. The first two entries in the franchise don’t really have a story so much as a series of increasingly ridiculous tasks to accomplish, and while Grand Theft Auto III, Vice City, and San Andreas have narratives and moments of emotional depth, all three are really more a series of references to the movies that inspired them. The gritty low budget crime movies that inspired Grand Theft Auto III and 90s inner-city dramas/Scorsese movies that inspired San Andreas and so on and so forth.
GTA IV certainly has pop culture references in aspects of its narrative. (There is a lot of Michael Mann and Abel Ferrara to be found.) But the references take a backseat to a more mature story about a repentant killer looking for the man who sold out his unit during the war in Yugoslavia. Though there’s plenty of absurdity to be found, the game seeks to stick to the emotional reality of that story, and as a result, it’s the most the franchise up to this point has attempted to feel like something that doesn’t rely on the tone of pre-existing media.
On top of, it isn’t striving to be as silly, or at least not in its main story beats. As a result, it feels like a drastic change of pace from everything that’s come before it. This may not be remarkable in a vacuum, but in an industry that normally doesn’t reward creative risk, it makes the move that much more admirable.
Grand Theft Auto, in many ways, is a series that puts the Hollywood criminal lifestyle on a pedestal. It’s a celebration of the men who aren’t afraid to shoot at the cops and operate outside of the law. Your Jack Carters and your Tony Montanas. The men who don’t give a fuck. In fact, they go one step further and, most of the time, reward their main characters with wealth and the life of their dreams. Or at the very least, they have a chance at happiness.
Grand Theft Auto IV is a story about a man who embraces the same values, and it completely destroys what’s left of his life. For the first time, we got a game that’s aware of the fact that Jack Carter and Tony Montana didn’t make it. It’s a real shame then that GTA V goes back to the tone of the previous games, but it also makes IV feel that much more unique.
Valley: The Plotting’s Kind of Shit
It’s an even bigger shame that the mechanisms the game uses to earn its moments of emotional weight aren’t as effective as they could’ve been.
Story is the big picture. The thing you explain to someone when they ask you what the movie is “about.” Plot is the apparatus of the story. The connective tissue that links one story beat to the next. A New Hope is a story about a boy who destroys a totalitarian space regime’s planet destroying space station. Its plot, however, is that the boy’s guardians are killed so he leaves his homeworld with a mysterious older man and a cocky pilot and so on and so forth.
The story of Grand Theft Auto IV is an intriguing one. It’s the tale of Niko Bellic, a Serbian soldier who survived an ambush during the war who comes to America in search of a new life and the man who betrayed him and his unit. It’s a set-up to a classic revenge narrative in a crime framework that I personally think has an incredibly solid foundation to build on.
The plot, however, is a meandering mess.
One of the central issues with the narrative of GTA IV is the constant shifting goalposts of Niko’s motivations. Sometimes he does what he does for money. Sometimes it’s to find whoever’s responsible for betraying his unit. Sometimes it’s to get his cousin Roman out of a jam or because he’s being blackmailed or to help out a friend or this or that. As a result, big picture wise, it frequently feels like a random series of tasks that you have to carry out until a major plot point decides to happen. It does have more order and a sense of flow than the original Grand Theft Auto, but not that much more.
On top of this, there’s a lot of outright sloppiness. Important story beats happen in the background. Plot lines are shoved in to reinforce later downloadable content. Potential storylines that seem like they’re going to play a bigger role ultimately don’t. All of these come together and give off the bigger sense that Rockstar committed to more of its ideas than it should have, and as a result, it just feels clunky and all over the place.
It’s a style of storytelling that works in a goofier framework like, say, San Andreas. Something that bounces from genre to genre with little regard to tone or emotionality, and is all the better for it. But GTA IV goes for something much more resonant and grounded, and while it’s not doing the same kind of genre play, it’s still deploying a volume-like approach to its story, and there’s a minimal throughline at most.
Many of the larger story beats work, but they work more in the moment than they do as a connected whole, and they work mostly because of the characters. (More on that later.) None of this is to suggest that the narrative is a complete failure. It’s just that it’s not as effective as it could’ve been, and as the Red Dead games demonstrate, it’s a writing kink the Rockstar team will eventually work out. But this had the potential to be one of the better stories they’ve told, and it just isn’t.
Gameplay
Valley - It’s Chunky…
I’m not going to spend too much time here. GTA IV is nearly fifteen years old, and it’s a game that introduced cover mechanics into the already jank-prone open world genre. Nobody should be surprised that gameplay wise, it doesn’t hold up to modern standards particularly well. This isn’t to say that it’s completely unplayable. I found it to be quite easy to get back into the swing of it once I shook off all my GTA V muscle memory. But it’s also far from perfect, and what I’m really talking about is how it feels.
One of the major criticisms of the game at the time, apart from the ludonarrative issues (I feel like this is the game that launched a thousand “ludonarrative dissonance” articles), was the driving. Specifically, the turning radius is too narrow, the brakes slide the car too long, it’s nearly impossible to drift to any degree of satisfaction, and driving at a high speed pretty much guarantees that you’re going to go flying out of the windshield. All in all, the driving feels like you’re dragging an anchor behind you, and unless you’re driving one of the sports cars, you move around as such.
I would argue that by modern standards, all of the movement feels this way, including the running and the fighting and the shooting and whatever element you can think of. Everything just feels slightly too slow.
There’s also some issues in the PC version. Specifically, motorcycles spin out of control too easily and there’s a part of the final mission that’s broken. But there are solutions to these problems you can find online.
But all in all, the old game plays like an old game. Some old games still feel nice to play and some don’t. GTA IV, mostly, doesn’t. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Peak - …And Yet There’s Something Oddly Satisfying About It?
As I said, everything feels slightly too slow, and as a result, a lot of the gameplay feels needlessly lethargic. However, more often than you’d think, this weirdly works in the game’s favor.
We talked about the driving and how it leads to a lot of accidental collisions, which of course happen more when you’re competing in a race or you have to do something in a specific amount of time. Yet for as many instances as there are of when you don’t want to crash, there are an equal amount of times when you do, particularly when you’re fucking around and starting chaos or you’re in a police chase. Any circumstance where chaos is actually welcome.
Because you’re moving a bit slower, there’s a probably unintended feeling of weight to your movements, and on top of this, when you hit a car, you send it flying. As a result, the car crashes in this game are really satisfying.
Early on in my replay, I was driving the game’s equivalent of an Escalade at full speed when I T-boned a cab that got in my way while I was running from the cops. The side of the cab caved in, and it went rolling into the sidewalk and into a pillar holding up the subway tracks. The part of men that will never get over crashing their toy cars lit up my brain like Christmas.
And like the driving, that odd satisfaction resonated in other areas too. Particularly in the gun battles.
Most people, including myself, probably prefer a zippier shooter. One where you can navigate the terrain with speed and ease, opening yourself up to try new strategies to get the drop on your foes. But Niko moves too slow to do that. At first, it was annoying. But at some point, it began to feel kind of badass. The shooting itself had a certain weight, and I didn’t move like someone feeling the rush of being shot at. I moved like an ice cold killer who didn’t give a shit. So instead of creating a scenario where I’m a super John Wick-like assassin, I picked my moments. I struck, cool, calm, and collected. Frequently, enemies would drop but would still writhe around on the floor in pain, so like a true sociopathic gamer boi, I’d strut over to them and put a round in their head. Blood would splatter on the floor or the wall, and leaving me with a feeling I need to discuss in therapy.
What GTA IV lacks in agility, it more than makes up for in heft. This probably wouldn’t appeal to anyone who wasn’t alive to see this era of games, particularly in a world where third person shooters and open world games move at a much quicker and tighter pace. But I don’t know. There’s just something about it that worked for me.
The Map
Peak - The Map Does a Better Job of Evoking New York Than GTA V Does Evoking Los Angeles
I’ve lived in Los Angeles for the better part of a decade, but one need only be here for an hour or two to understand that Los Angeles doesn’t make any sense.
The entity we know as Los Angeles is really a hodgepodge of mini-cities that more or less grew into one another, and as a result, much about this place defies logic and basic common sense. This is why you have to drive everywhere, why the city has struggled so heavily with public transportation, why you can drive down a dirty rundown street of pawnshops and liquor stores and then suddenly turn into an extremely wealthy neighborhood of mega mansions and luxury apartment buildings. (This is a petty and overly simple explanation, but hopefully, you get my point.)
This creates a conundrum if you’re designing Los Angeles for an open world video game. Video game maps, particularly ones of large cities, have to make a certain kind of sense. They need to accommodate the ability for players to drive how they want and accomplish tasks and do all the video game shit, which means that the logic behind the map will always be at least somewhat present. Los Angeles has no such logic.
Thus, at least to me, Los Santos does an impeccable job of looking like Los Angeles. The Beverly Center (or whatever it’s called in the game) looks like an almost photo-real insert of what the center used to look like before it was painted all white, the strip malls are carbon copies of the actual frequent Los Angeles style strip malls, the faux Italian villa houses look like the faux Italian villa houses, as do the boxy houses in the hills and the older buildings downtown. It looks like the city, but it doesn’t feel like the city because the Los Santos map, unlike Los Angeles, makes sense and you can easily navigate it.
I don’t know how you overcome this problem, other than by not setting your game in LA.
Liberty City, on the other hand, both looks and feels like New York. New York is not without its faults in terms of layout, but compared to Los Angeles it’s a miracle in design. As such, it’s a much easier city to navigate enough though it has chokepoints and areas of extreme inconvenience. This dynamic is captured brilliantly in IV’s Liberty City, and on top of that, just like New York, it frequently feels dirty, cramped, and old.
Of course, New York gives itself an advantage in its map layout by being confined to an island and built before the advantage of cars. It makes sense. Los Angeles does not. But still, it’s an aspect that stuck out to me a lot while replaying IV, mostly because I became sick with envy over the sense of order.
Valley: It’s Flat
Think GTA V. What do you think of first?
For most, it’ll probably be the main story or the graphics or the number of hours and money poured into its online mode. I’m sure for many, it’s also the moment where Rockstar stopped being “cool,” particularly because of the negativity brought about by the latter online aspect, both socially and from a business standpoint.
For me, GTA V is spawning in a dirt bike and jumping around the mountains for hours while I listen to podcasts or albums.
Those ranges are massive, and there’s much to explore. So I’d while away the hours finding big jumps and listening to music or catching up on my multitudinous podcasts. To me, this was bliss, and when I got bored of jumping off the top of Mount Chiliad and dying, I’d go back to the city and play a game of Go to Grove Street and Take Out as Many Ballers as I Can Before They End Up Killing Me.
Clearly, this is not what the game was designed for, but it kept my hands moving for hours. I’m eternally grateful for that outlet, but moreover, I liked that the map gave me those options. I could make my own chaos in the flat areas of the city or I could go vertical and catch some air.
GTA IV is just a flat city.
As I said, Liberty City does a fantastic job of evoking New York, but that accuracy comes at the expense of a more dynamic map. The only extracurricular thing you can do in its confines is get into big police chases, and it doesn’t offer much in the way of exploration or discovery. It just seeks to be New York, and that’s about it.
At the time, this was perfectly fine, and there’s still much to love about this map. But in a world where GTA V’s Los Santos exists, it doesn’t feel like enough anymore.
Characters
Valley - Many of the Characters Aren’t Developed Enough
Rockstar’s greatest writing strength, to me, is their characters.
Note that I’m not talking about their dialogue, which I increasingly find insufferable and I’m making this point because Rockstar seems to think that having characters motormouth for what seems like hours on end is the same thing as building a character or comedy or whatever they think they’re trying to accomplish. What I’m talking about is that they have a unique ability to establish characters quickly and you feel like you know what they’re about sooner rather than later. They’re good at conceiving of people with a tangible identity, and while they conceive of the same kind of characters a lot (looking at you, spoiled elitist Rockstar character who has a lot of money and does a lot of drugs), it’s an ability many games struggle to meet.
GTA IV, I’d argue, has some of their best work in this regard, and we’ll get to that in a second. However, the problem is that there’s simply too much of a good thing. GTA IV has a lot of characters, and as a result, some of them get more development than others. I’m not trying to suggest that every character needs to be fleshed out or that we should spend hours and hours getting to understand a random driver for a mobster or whatever. It’s just that a lot of narrative heft is placed on the backs of characters who aren’t as well defined as they should be, and as a result, some of the story beats aren’t as effective as they could’ve been.
The case that stands out to me the most is Dwayne Forge, an older drug dealer who’s let out of prison after a long prison sentence that you’re essentially asked to babysit by his younger protege Playboy X. (More on him later.)
Dwayne is by no means a “bad” character. In fact, I’d argue that his presence is necessary as a bit of an antidote to the other hardened criminals that occupy the game’s story. Dwayne and Niko have a lot in common in that they’re both contrite about the lives they’ve lived and the actions they carried out, but neither has a real desire to change. However, simply put, we don’t spend that much time with Dwayne, and in the time we do spend with him, he’s mostly talking about how he should kill himself and how everything around him has changed for the worst.
It’s not that these traits aren’t important or substantial. It’s more that it feels like we’re having the same conversation with him over and over again, and after a while, these interactions carry less of a punch. Furthermore, one of the major storylines in the game is one where you have to choose to kill him or Playboy X, and for me at least, I only chose Dwayne because letting Playboy live would be a harder pill to swallow.
Another example: All of the McReary brothers who aren’t Packie.
I know that the other two brothers are Gerald, Francis, and Derrick, and the only reason I remember them is that I played this game relatively recently. Derrick is the oldest sibling and a hardcore drug addict implied to have had some sort of history with the IRA, Francis is the corrupt piece of shit cop brother, and Gerald is now the head of the family but isn’t really defined by much other than his role as leader.
The downfall of the McReary family is supposed to be somewhat of a tragedy, particularly if Kate, the younger sister in the family, is killed as a result of you taking her advice and seeking revenge over money. On paper at least, it is one of the sadder notes in the narrative. The problem, however, is that Francis is only one note despicable, Derrick barely makes an impact, and I can barely remember Gerald at all. Thus Gerald’s eventual prison sentence meant little to me and I don’t even remember what happened to Derrick. Packie and Kate are our only emotional connections to the clan, but they aren’t enough to make the McReary storyline feel like anything other than a missed opportunity.
There are other characters with a similar amount of disposability. However, given that the story is essentially Niko bouncing around from character to character, there was always going to be some fat. Say what you will about GTA V’s story, but a surplus of characters isn’t one of its problems.
Peak - The Ones Who Are Developed Shine
All that said, GTA IV has plenty of characters who still hold up.
There are many characters I could talk about here. There’s the aforementioned Packie and Kate. There are many of the Russian mobsters from the beginning of the game, including Vlad or Mikhail Faustin who are good additions to the Russian/Balkans criminal canon. I have a soft spot for Brucie despite him being somewhat of a one note character, Manny Escuela is a shockingly relevant character given the rise of hucksters and scam artists in internet activist circles, and of course, there’s Niko himself, who’s still one of the better Rockstar protagonists. (If we’re including DLC, I’d also throw in Luis Lopez, who’s right up there with Niko for me.)
There are plenty of great, or at the very least, passable characters to be found in this game. Given the sheer volume of them, you’re bound to find at least one or two who’ll do it for you. But all that said, I want to talk about Playboy X, a character I think is quietly one of the most awful people to have ever occupied a Rockstar game. He’s a great character, mind you. But fuck do I hate his guts.
Playboy X is a successful drug dealer attempting to go “legit” via various shady land development deals. He presents himself as someone going through the typical machinations of American come-up stories. An ultimately honorable man who does what he has to do in order to get by. He’s achieved some degree of wealth and success, owning a luxury condo in what in real life would be priceless New York real estate, and he frequently talks of his lofty goals to start charities and give back to his community once he has the further wealth to do so. On the surface, he passes the sniff test with only a crack or two in his armor.
It’s when Dwayne gets released from prison that Playboy X shows his true colors. Dwayne is very much responsible for enabling Playboy’s success, having taught him everything he knows and setting him on the path to wealth. To Playboy, however, Dwayne is but a mere inconvenience. Playboy doesn’t want to give him a cut, but more importantly, he simply doesn’t want to deal with Dwayne on a personal level seemingly because he reminds Playboy of the life he’s trying to shake off with his new image. So Playboy orders you to keep Dwayne busy and, eventually, orders you to kill Dwayne once he starts getting in the way of the business.
It’s this storyline that reveals that Playboy isn’t motivated by anything other than image and wealth. The whiff of being someone “the community,” whoever he thinks that means, can respect. But once an actual member of that community needs his help, Playboy is a ghost.
Everything about him is a lie, and despite his stated desire to start charities, you can tell that he’s more than content to contribute to the demise of his own community. Either he doesn’t understand the larger systems at play or he does and he doesn’t care. As such, his decision to have Dwayne killed is made out of either ignorance or outright malice, and it’s hard to tell which one’s worse.
The most insidious part of Playboy X is that if you don’t understand the greater machinations at play, he’s capable of fooling you with his charm. Particularly if you’ve got a head full of mainstream 2000s hip hop and you didn’t know any better yet. The first time I ever played GTA IV, I spared Playboy and killed Dwayne. It’s one of my greatest shames when it comes to gaming.
Playboy is one of Rockstar’s most nuanced villains, and to me, he’s a signal for what’s to come when we get to the kinds of characterizations we’ll find in the Red Dead games. I hate him so so much. He’s great.
LGBTQ Representation
Peak(?) - There Is LGBTQ Representation In The First Place And Some of These Characters Even Have Agency, Therefore, a Bare Minimum is Met
Let me start off by saying that I’m the wrong guy to talk about this. I am, after all, a straight, and there are nuances and shades that my brain simply cannot fathom because I don’t have the correct filters. However, I find this game’s relationship with queerness to be fascinating in both its intent and its actual execution. In short, the goals are, arguably, lofty but the execution is… well, that’s for the next section.
First of all, GTA IV is a game that was developed during the Bush administration, and its style of comedy is very much rooted in that time. Anyone who wasn’t straight or cis was the butt of the joke, and in many instances, merely pointing that out was enough to earn a chuckle or two from the vast majority of the American audience. (“You know how I know you’re gay?” and all that.) Given that GTA IV is very much of the edgelord style of comedy, the mere fact that GTA IV has gay characters at all, some of whom we are actually meant to take seriously, is an accomplishment. It’s an exceedingly low bar for an accomplishment, and an accomplishment so slight that it barely registers as anything positive at all, but something adjacent to an accomplishment nonetheless.
The most prominent of these characters is Florian Crevic, or as he’s renamed himself, Bernie Crane.
Bernie was a fellow soldier in Niko’s squad, and one of the few who survived the ambush. At first, Niko suspects he might be the one who set the squad up, but once he finds Bernie, he finds him in the city living as an out gay man. As a character, Bernie is frequently presented as somewhat of a stereotype, behaving with an exaggerated amount of emotionality with the frequent joke that he drops this persona when he gets mad enough and reverts back to his old accent.
Bernie’s sexuality is frequently played up as a joke. However, he also grows to be one of Niko’s most trusted allies, and once Niko tracks down the actual traitor, it’s Bernie that Niko calls for emotional guidance. Despite some of Niko’s own homophobic tendencies, he views Bernie as a friend and will seemingly do anything to protect him. Niko, the character we’re designed to show the most amount of empathy and emotional projection for, values Bernie’s existence, and thus the audience should too. I might be grasping at straws here, but in 2008, that wasn’t nothing.
There is also, of course, Gay Tony, or Tony Prince, one of the lead characters in the game’s second DLC, The Ballad of Gay Tony, the owner of two of the city’s most successful nightclubs. Tony is an out gay man, but unlike Bernie, doesn’t behave like a caricature of a gay man written by a straight writer. Tony is far from a perfect person. He’s frequently shallow, reckless, impulsive, and despite his success, he frequently proves himself to be somewhat of a shitty business owner. But none of these negative traits are tied to his sexuality. He is, simply, a gay man who happens to be a flawed person.
As this is the world of GTA IV, however, there are many characters who regularly bully Tony for his sexual identity. Sometimes, they do it directly to Tony’s face, and sometimes they do it to player character Luis in a vain effort to undercut his masculinity. The distinction, however, is that all of the characters who engage in this kind of homophobia are either portrayed as intentionally ignorant and stupid or as outright villains.
On the ignorant stupid front is Armando and Henrique, two of Luis’s fellow Dominican friends. Luis has found a degree of success working with Tony, while Armando and Henrique continue to pull stupid low-level drug deals. Every time Luis visits them, they both give him a hard time about his boss and how Luis thinks he’s too good to hang out with him anymore. It’s debatable whether or not Luis really is alienated from his old neighborhood, but one thing that’s abundantly clear is that not only are Armando and Henrique dumb, but they’re never going to make it out and they’re never going to be anything other than petty drug dealers. Other than the fact that they’re idiots, their worldview is too narrow, and as a result, they’re not capable of having the same kind of opportunities Luis did. Luis wasn’t privileged, nor did he have any advantages. His worldview simply didn’t exclude gay people, and his life is better because of it.
On the villain end of the scale, there’s Rocco, a mobster in the Ancelotti crime family who regularly extorts Tony. The gay jokes from him are non-stop, and as much as you want to stomp him out, you don’t get the chance to do so. (At least not yet. That moment comes in GTA V.) Rocco is your typical homophobic straight white male of the Bush administration, and for that, the game paints him as a villain. You simply have to deal with him whether you want to or not, and there’s no hope that he’ll ever change.
I’m not saying GTA IV is progressive, and we’ll get to its problems next. But in this game, homophobia is placed on the side of villainy and evil. It may not be enough, but it’s certainly more than nothing, and it’s definitely more than what one would expect from a Bush era Grand Theft Auto game.
Valley - The Execution is Such That the Positives Almost Don’t Matter
I would argue that at its core, GTA IV does not seek to be homophobic. It knows that LGTBQ people have a right to exist, and if you were to ask the writers if they harbored any prejudices, they would probably say “no” and pass a polygraph. The problem, however, is that any signs of empathy towards the gay community are wrapped up in so much Gen X South Park style snark that you don’t really feel inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.
GTA very much comes from the “equal opportunity offender” philosophy of writing. A form of comedic nihilism many white Gen X writers use as a shield when they want to make fun of a race or culture that isn’t their own. In an ideal world, this style of comedy argues, we all respect each other and there isn’t any malice in the intent, so you can say whatever you want because anyone can get it.
The issue with this approach, of course, is that it completely removes any sort of empathy from the equation. It is an acknowledgement that the moral high ground exists, and that the purveyors of this philosophy know how to get there. But rather stepping up to it or punching up, you abuse that position and punch down for the sake of a hacky joke.
GTA IV has its heart in the right place, and again, I’d argue that it knows right from wrong. However, it’s more interested in a quick dumb joke than nuance. The appearance of satire over actually exploring homophobia in the 2000s mainstream culture. As such, not only are there many cringy gay jokes, but there’s also an unwanted air of smugness that comes with each one that makes them even more insufferable.
Because of this, nothing in the previous section mattered. Turns out that your intent isn’t as important as your execution. Who would’ve thunk it, other than many smug Gen X writers apparently.
Misc Thoughts
Both of the DLCs suffer from just about all of the issues described above. That said, I much prefer The Ballad of Gay Tony. The Lost and Damned just isn’t my aesthetic, and the emotionality it’s going for, while admirable, just wasn’t earned in the end for me.
The part of GTA IV that’s aged the worst is the Gracie Ancelotti storyline, in which you kidnap the daughter of a prominent Italian mob boss. Gracie is vapid and rich, so therefore, as the game implies, pointlessly cruel and even violent mistreatment of her is completely justified. (This, by the way, is far from the only time Rockstar has fallen into this trap. See: Max Payne 3, a game I like a lot otherwise.)
GTA IV might have my favorite soundtrack in the series. GTA V and Vice City are probably “better” overall, but between the afrobeat station, the classic hip hop station, and so many others, this one was almost tailor-made for me.
However, in keeping with the highs and lows theme, the way the stations loop guarantees that you hear certain songs way more than others. Which sucks.
In my head, the canon is that Playboy X dies and Francis dies, but to this day, I have no idea whether I think Roman or Kate dying is more effective from a story standpoint. Thematically speaking, it makes more sense for Kate to go, but emotionally speaking, despite how annoying he can be, the obvious answer is Roman. However, the fact that it’s a hard choice (once you know what the consequences are) means something about it works.
