So having played GTAV and GTA Online long enough, it’s time to collect and present my thoughts. First the good and then the - well, mostly meh with a bit of bad. Having played enough I’m not as bowled over by it as I was, but I’d still recommend it, especially at used prices. So:

Los Santos is beautiful. If you’ve never lived in Los Angeles, you might not appreciate what a good representation it is - individual buildings, even individual stores in individual strip malls, are lovingly crafted references to real counterparts. Parts of the city are perfectly distilled to their essence, and even in the occasional case where you realize “hey, that’s not how those two neighborhoods connect”, it’s hard to pinpoint the seams where they’ve been pasted together.

There’s a nice walkback of GTA4’s overdone realism to a better balance, both in terms of narrative and gameplay - the plot not so mopey, the driving physics not so infuriating.

Trevor in particular is a really well-crafted character. His cartoonishly violent psychopathy makes more naturalistic sense than it has any right to - he’s out of control, but *not* stupid, deluded, or incompetent - and serves as a nice balance between the exhilarating goofiness of the last-gen games and the realist pretensions of the curent-gen. Also, his Canadian inferiority complex is hilarious.

The optional objective system is well done - not revealing the objectives until you’ve completed a mission once encourages people to try their own path, and the novelty of the objectives adds a lot of replayability - going for gold turns a lot of simple drive-and-chat missions into surprisingly tough but fun challenges.

Online is much improved from 4, with lessons learned from Red Dead Redemption. The variety and ease of starting missions is nice, and leveling up unlocks new options and abilities at a satisfying pace without rendering the early levels too frustrating.

At the subtle technical level, things are nicely tweaked. You can drive pretty fast and have tons of textures blow by without noticeable popin or switches between levels of mesh detail, without even any cheating with blur effects. Cars never disappear when you turn your back on them, and enough models are kept in memory that you never see the world populated with the same vehicles (except, it seems, sometimes in online).

Music curation is wonderful as always.

The “Strangers and Freaks” side missions return from 4 and RDR as charming bite-sized chunks of absurdity, while their appearance on the map is a nice improvement.

The game’s a bit of everything. It’s not the best racing game out there, but it’s not all that far off. It’s not the best deathmatch out there, but it’s not all that far off. Ditto golf, tennis, even darts. It is the best free-roam sightseeing game out there, by far.

There are some nice little callbacks to previous games - the assassin missions delivered by payphone, Love Fist, the Lost MC and Johnny as antagonists with their “Gang Burrito” spoilered vans.

The weapon selection and autoaim availability balance foot and mounted attacks well, especially in multiplayer.

Finally, “Did Somebody Say Yoga?” is up there with AC3’s “The Braddock Expedition” and Modern Warfare’s “Aftermath” as far as plot sucker-punches go.

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Michael’s story is a little iffy - Did Somebody Say Yoga really does make you feel the loss involved in his family falling apart, but its later reunion feels completely unearned. It’s hard not to remember how much better the “bandit turned family man finds his past catching up with him, pulled back into the game by the very authorities that drove him out of it” arc was done in Red Dead Redemption (the best GTA of this generation). A little more time spent in his new(est) life as a producer could’ve helped a lot.

Franklin’s plot is the thinnest, so reheated from San Andreas that I had to look up his name because I was thinking of him as “CJ”. His frustration with the way the other characters’ expectations of him and his home environment come from mid-90s mass media riffs on a gangsta culture that’s mostly long since passed is a really interesting (and true) note that I can’t remember seeing any treatment of before, though.

The tendency to dump members of the same Online party into different free roam servers after a mission is an annoyance that returns from RDR; likewise the inability to set a GPS marker on a moving target - or rather, the fact that the marker stays static while the target doesn’t.

There’s no CTF modes in Online, even though they were a ton of fun in RDR.

It’s not that *fun* to go doing mayhem anymore. Cops are dangerous enough even at two stars that it’s only really doable at all with Trevor and his special ability, and while keeping your guns through death seems like it would make this easier, the adjustments necessary to keep balance in missions make for a weapon scarcity worse even than Vice City’s. I guess between that, durablity, and rewards they’re kinda pushing mayhem to online, which I can see an argument for.

And I have no idea what the excuse is for replacing molotovs with the much less fun tear gas.

The character of longtime series writer/producer Lazlow is self-mocking as always, but honestly it’s quite an assumption that the players even care.

All in all it feels like the plot suffered for its stab at originality, and the lack of familiar themes to rehash. GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas were all mashups of different generations of organized crime action-dramas, complete with recognizable tropes. RDR and L.A. Noire mined gold out of forgotten periods of American culture (the closing of the western frontier, and the late-40s period when America was still shell-shocked from Great Depression and WWII but hadn’t yet crafted an Atomic Age optimism to escape into). In contrast, we haven’t really decided what the current era is about yet, and it’s still too close to find a novel angle on. Terrorism’s hard to craft a rise-to-power arc out of, and 4 suffered from the same problem as DS9, that “the trauma of post-Cold War Balkan conflict” isn’t actually a thing in American culture. I caught references to Drive, Breaking Bad, Zero Dark Thirty, Sons of Anarchy, The Big Lebowski, and Trailer Park Boys, but it’s all kind of a dog’s breakfast that doesn’t cohere into anything. Maybe it’s my cultural illiteracy, but the “heist movie” theme seemed to come off without invoking any particular heist movies.

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A lot of iffiness seems to come from an excess of ambition, an attempt to stuff the game overfull.

There’s so much of the city that there’re no particular centers of interest (in fairness, this is very true to the real LA). The attempt to create a model riffing on every actual car out there doesn’t offer that much of an improvement over the days when the Banshee and Infernus were it as far as fast went (I fear this game’s so car- and racing-heavy, Online especially, for no other reason than a lot of Midnight Club veterans worked on staff).

There are too many characters - each of the three protagonists has a full suite of supporting characters, all of whom are woefully underused. Which is a shame, because some of them are great. The easily manipulated juggalo minion Wade figures in shamefully few missions and cuscenes. The dramatc triangle of crazy meth baron Trevor, Wade’s country-boy turned urban blue collar joe cousin, and his office bobo girlfriend is great, and the steady degeneration of her apartment as Trevor settles in is a hilarious running visual joke, but as soon as the drama threatens to come to the head that plot arc’s literally killed offscreen. Some of these characters recur in online, but only really as voices to mission start/completes or as popup tooltips.

At the same time, there’s *too much* characterization for the characters there are - to get the whole “story”, you’d have to listen to radio news, check the internet, call up every character as every protagonist, and hang out with every character as every protagonist AFTER EVERY SINGLE MISSION, and then replay the mission for alternate dialogue. But then if you do this you realize that there’s not much to the characters - the need to produce so much content means these duties must have been outlined and then parceled out to multiple writers, with the result that characters find multiple ways to express the very same thoughts and tendencies, a bit too on-the-nose. Secondary characters are one-dimensional, just comprehensively one-dimensional.

This thin-spread creativity extends to the secondary material. Ads for the “medical cocaine” ballot initative are pretty dead on, but the other riffs on Californian politics get tiresome and repetitive. “Impotent Rage”, the animated liberal superhero, is a pretty significant expenditure of effort and cleverness on something that’s very easy to overlook, as are all the TV and internet bits, actually. Radio ads and pedestrian dialogue are starting to show the limitations of GTA’s longstanding “have characters give deadpan voice to the most cynical and contemptuous take on their character type” approach to satire.

For all this it’s still GTA, one of the most consistently fun properties out there. They haven’t forgotten what they’re doing and it gets better all the time, it’s just — not what it could be, I guess. It’s nice that Rockstar hasn’t yoked it to a yearly release schedule like some moneymaker franchises, but I can’t help but feel that without this time pressure the project grew bloated with ambition only to end up rushed and ¾ baked anyway by the necessity to release before this console generation went obsolete.

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I have noticed that there are areas that are suspiciously well-designed given how little happens in them. The UCLA analogue, “Mirror Park” hipster district, “Barnham Canyon” Malibu-alike, Fort Zancudo, winery district of Tongva Hills, “Government Facility”, Bolingbroke Penitentiary, Vinewood Bowl, firefighter training facilities along the coast, and the green northern part of the map in general. Some of these are used for Online missions, but I’d be surprised if that was the extent of it. So my guess for single-player expansions to come:

One would be youth-oriented that would work on the themes of student debt, the Occupy movement, the fallen music industry, a Coachella-analogue, and the way that black and white youth culture are both converging on a skater-hipster-raver synthesis.

One would be themed around government employees and would take on the prison-industrial complex, public pensions, wildfires, water politics, the out-migration of the white middle class, the marijuana industry, the corruption of the small industrial towns around LA (er, “LS”), and maybe the rise of the new Armenian, Russian, and SE Asian organized crime syndicates.