Note: This article was first written in 2014, sharing my thoughts on Grand Theft Auto V at launch. The game’s lasting popularity and cultural impact have only grown since then. This review presents my impressions and critiques from its original release.
The Table of Contents
What GTA V Gets Right
About ten hours into my playthrough, my wife said, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you giggle this much since you started playing!” She was right. Many of the things that GTA IV almost got right were beautifully
executed in GTA V.
Driving and piloting are genuinely fun. Each vehicle and terrain offers distinct handling, making movement both exciting and strategic. The number and quality of random activities to explore are impressive, usually fun, and often clever, like the No Country for Old Men encounter.
A World Worth Exploring
The world was the most detailed and rewarding of any open-world game I'd ever seen. The variety was astounding, especially compared to the more uniform environments of IV. I spent hours just exploring or taking on missions that encouraged exploration, like cleaning up nuclear waste in a submarine or finding all the underwater wrecks. I loved the animations when characters failed awkwardly at things like jumping over a ledge.
Characters That Actually Matter
For the first time, I was genuinely interested in the characters in a GTA game. Niko in GTA IV was okay, but inconsistently interesting and rarely fun. Franklin and Lamar’s early encounters had me laughing out loud, especially during the ‘get a haircut’ rant and the Employee of the Month controversy. The humor was no longer based on juvenile sexuality, but instead relied on the idiosyncratic attitudes and quirks of two flawed adults.
Trevor and Michael are similarly complex. It’s clear from the start that Trevor is not a good man. But he’s fascinating to watch and listen to because, in addition to being a psychopath, he’s intelligent, unpredictable, and multifaceted. He’s hilariously comfortable with his sexuality, a master of both understatement and bluntness, and he seems to have his own twisted code of ethics that he sometimes interestingly, conveniently, and believably chooses to ignore.
The Trevor-Michael Dynamic
I loved watching the protagonists interact. While Trevor was clearly the most dangerous of the three, Michael’s treatment of Trevor and Brad was a terrible betrayal, and his constant lies made him less sympathetic
than Trevor at many points, unsettling, since Trevor is an ultraviolent monster. But he’s a human monster, with an ongoing relationship with Patricia Madrazo that I was always thrilled to see resurface, and with a perspective on events that was consistently amusing and illuminating.
One of my favorite moments in the game is when Trevor suddenly suspects the truth about Michael’s grave and rushes to confirm it. You find yourself playing as Trevor to get him to a plane to investigate. Not much happens, just a drive to the airstrip while he and Michael talk on the phone, but it’s perfect, because my mind was racing.
I had played as Michael going into the cutscene, knowing Trevor was likely to go crazy. On the one hand, I sympathized with Michael and hoped Trevor wouldn’t find out what was happening. But there I was, driving, helping Trevor uncover the truth. And, when I thought about it, Michael was the villain in this situation, so Trevor deserved to know.
Still, Trevor was a monster, and the discovery would likely lead to disaster. But was Michael any better, even if he didn’t rampage as much? This moral tension makes karma and morality systemsin games compelling. You often can’t decide who’s right.
I had a lot to think about on the way to the airstrip, and I was loving it. Franklin’s perspective was also amusing and interesting, but my only real complaint is that after the first quarter of the game, he’s disappointingly underused. He keeps showing up in missions, but isn’t given much meaningful development once the focus shifts to the Michael-Trevor dynamic.
The Plot of GTA V is Good Enough
The plot itself was good enough. The resolution of the Michael-Trevor storyline is mediocre, Franklin is underdeveloped, and Devin Weston and Steve Haines are often implausible, as are most of the heist logistics.
But with characters I enjoyed listening to and gameplay as fun as it was, even a narrative-focused player like me didn’t really care that the plot was only passable.
Where GTA V Falls Apart
And then there are the flaws. The terrible, terrible flaws. I'm writing about GTA V because the experience of playing it left me curious about why Rockstar North excels in so many areas. In GTA V, they create compelling characters from typically unsympathetic men.
The GTA games remain so stupidly sexist and cynical, the key word being “stupidly.” Sexism and cynicism could be interesting in a game, as character flaws or well-articulated, thought-out points of view that I disagree with.
Cynicism can be nuanced and sympathetic, as Trevor is, despite being a psychopath. But the cynicism and sexism in GTA V stay stupid. They’re not well thought out, they’re not clever, they’re not amusing, like so much of the rest of the game is. (I know, humor is subjective. But the sexism and cynicism in GTA V are almost always lazily one-dimensional.)
The Women Problem
As many others have exhaustively covered, the game is riddled with treatment of and reference to women as subhuman sexual objects. The female characters, all secondary, don’t help much. The two most
prominent are Michael’s wife, Amanda, whose plotline revolves primarily around her sleeping with lots of other men, leaving Michael, and coming back to him.
We know practically nothing else about her – certainly nothing that has developed or is particularly interesting. Then there’s Michael’s daughter, Tracey, who is selling her sexuality and constantly getting into trouble and needing rescuing. There’s also Franklin’s aunt, a source of derision for her empty feminist new-age empowerment (a counterpart to Amanda’s rich wife's hobbies) and sexual promiscuity.
At the end, there’s Trevor’s mom. She used to be a prostitute and a stripper. She makes Trevor feel worthless to manipulate him into doing what she wants. This manipulation might just be a hallucination of Trevor’s, depending on how you see that mission. None of these women is characterized as sympathetic, intelligent, or involved in anything worthwhile or even interesting.
There are a few interesting female characters in GTA V (Maude, Patricia, Tanisha, Taliana, Tonya), but their roles are minuscule, even more so when compared to the volume of material in the game, the overwhelming amount of misogynistic depictions of women, and the bigger roles, which all go to male characters.
There’s no defense of the misogyny in the game. It’s not clever, it’s not thoughtful, it’s not accurate, it’s not novel, and it’s not making an interesting point about the characters or the world. It’s just an unfortunate, slimy undercurrent to a game where so much else is worth praising.
Lazy Cynicism
GTA V’s cynicism is the same way. Everything it points its lens at is “stupid.” There’s little need to update the list I made in my GTA IV post because the game has little new to say here. Liberals, rednecks, women,
the government, the middle-aged, corporations: they’re stupid and bad. I suppose we can add millennials, social media, celebrities, beachgoers, psychiatrists, gamers, conspiracy theorists, etc.
The list could go on and on, but the point is that the game’s attacks on these stereotypes are overwhelmingly dull because they target empty stereotypes. They’re easy, uninteresting targets. Middle-aged men can be sexually insecure. Millennials can be lazy. Women can be superficial and either slutty or prudish. Wake me up when you get interesting again, GTA V, please.
When Rockstar Gets It Right
Even more baffling is that occasionally, this GTA game actually does make interesting social critique, like when Franklin pushes back against a quip of Trevor’s about lazy millennials to say something like, “Actually, that whole entitled millennials thing is more of a middle-class thing. Where I’m from, hustling is still hustling.”
It’s clear from Franklin, Trevor, and Michael’s dialogue that Rockstar North is capable of writing interesting, funny characters and social commentary. So why do they leave so much of the game to crassness and misogyny that could be recycled straight from an earlier game or a high school locker room? I’m not saying the series needs to be politically correct, but when nearly everything about the gameplay, characters, and world of GTA V is so much more sophisticated than previous entries, I don’t understand why they stick with such dull, stupid, unimaginative bigotry and lazy cynicism.
The Wasted Potential
Why pander to a perceived lowest common denominator in such a boring, mindless way? I believe that if the entire game matched the main characters, it would still be a huge success. The game doesn’t need to dislike women or anything else to be enjoyable. They can be articulate, clever, and even misogynistic.
So, why didn't that happen? You can argue that easily, unthinking woman-bashing and cynicism is what makes GTA GTA, and maybe that’s what it is. The Grand Theft Auto series has always included this aspect. It’s been part of the franchise's identity from the start, for better or worse.
Rockstar North seems focused on making a game that plays to the worst stereotypes and humor. When they keep proving they're smart and creative by making great games, I feel disappointed. They build a vibrant game world and create engaging characters, like in GTA V.
Final Verdict
There is still so much stupidity to slog through to enjoy the rest of their amazing achievement. What do you think – does the background humor need to change? Is it pandering or sincere? Is it justifiable? Is it enough to ruin the game?
We rate Grand Theft Auto V an 8.8/10 — a strong ★★★★½ on our retro-modern scale.
For more gaming perspectives, check out our retro game articles & reviews.
