Say what you will about the sense of humour of GTA, it has a clear and sincere satirical point of view – it takes the most cynical point of view on every subject, but it reasons out why everything is shit. The basic gameplay was objectively better, but it felt like it lacked personality. The first game was a generic-if-slick ripoff of GTA:SA, of which there had been dozens in the two years since that game had been released. You have to accept that there are low lows next to the high highs. Some of them are bad because they’re genuinely bad ideas that don’t fit with the point of the game. Some of them are bad because they’re poorly designed, depending more on luck than player skill. There are also a lot of really frustrating individual missions scattered throughout all the games. Something you fundamentally have to accept about the series is that the gameplay is pretty shitty – there’s a whole lot of sloppy design (ranging from awkward controls to bad AI) that averages out into an entertaining experience, in which you are just barely stronger than the meatbags you’re mowing down.
The flipside of this inventiveness is sloppiness. The result is a one hundred+ hour behemoth in a genre that rarely cracked twenty hours that covers a massive range of tones, styles, emotions, and ideas. Gang warfare! Bicycles! RPG elements! More complex melee fighting! You could get hungry, fat, thin, muscular! Near infinite combinations of clothes! The story followed through on this the beginning ten hours or so is a compelling riff on Boyz N The Hood, but it throws in everything from the Italian Mafia to redneck country racing the Yakuza to fucking Area 51 jokes. This reached its extreme in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which threw in everything and the kitchen sink on top of the well-established gameplay principles. Like many things that got famous for popularising something, it’s somewhat fashionable to point out that none of the individual elements of GTA is completely original to it – Driver 2 had a wide open sandbox driving game with limited walking available in it, for example – but the first game synthesised these elements into something compelling and distinct, and each subsequent game added something exciting and novel it was the third game that shot the series into the stratosphere when it moved from a top-down sprite-based perspective to a fully 3D environment. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is the pioneer.
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