In many ways, this game acts as an antithesis to Grand Theft Auto IV. While GTA IV aimed to be deep, this aims to be a bit goofier. While GTA IV had a gray and gritty world, this one is bright and colorful. I kinda suspect that Rockstar intentionally didn't give this game as "good" a story as their last romp, for this very reason. If anything, the game was meant to act as a massive tutorial for GTA Online, with a story there simply because it needed one. To that end, it was quite successful.
I haven't played any of the GTAs, but an outsider's perspective - it seems to be that, since Saints Row dropped any pretense of seriousness and dialed the meter all the way up to (literally) super-crazy, the natural thing for GTA to do would be to push back in the opposite direction, and really blow people away with a fantastically told serious story.
One reason I've been staying away from GTA (and why, before 3, I stayed away from Saints Row) is that I picked up kind of an undercurrent of "hah, yeah, we're joking, but actually we're not", like the creepier moments of Family Guy. That's quite possibly unfair, but I'm getting really strong vibes of it from what I'm reading about GTA5.
Y'know, while I admit that GTA V's characters are "inconsistent" for the reasons Yahtzee stated, I still somehow find the thing as compelling as all the other GTA games (maybe not as much as GTA IV and it's DLC episodes, but at least on par with Vice City and San Andreas).
It's certainly a lot better than most of the "spunkgargleweewee" crap where you play an emotionless soldier gunning down foreigners/alien monsters (with frankly little difference in characterization between the opposing forces) and committing "gritty" war crimes (such as the part where you shove a glass shard into a victims mouth, and punching it around the inside of his gums), and still told you're the good guy because you "fight for the good guys", or "all the guys you're shooting are EEEEEE-VILLLLL!!!", without giving legitimate motivations for why you're good, and why they're evil, apart from stock political talking points.
In a sense, I think Rockstar was deliberately trying to badly motivate the GTA V characters, as a sort of hipster-ish "ironic" jab at how other Triple-A games have main characters with even worse motivations - the difference being that the GTA V heroes, for how badly they're motivated, at least consistently admit they're badly motivated.
I personally think the actual plot is better digested as a "TV serial" kind of deal rather than a single, cohesive story. The episodic stories are brief, the main characters stay largely the same, but the situations they face and enemies they fight are radically different for each episode. The main draw isn't how the characters evolve over the series, and more on how they'll pull off this next job, and/or fight this new set of bad guys.
For example, the "Prologue" mission would have been the pilot episode for the GTA V TV Series, or perhaps the grand finale of a previous season of the GTA show. The first "episode" of the GTA V TV show is Franklin and Lamar doing repo jobs for Simeon. The second episode would be around when Franklin tries to repo Jimmy's car, and is ordered at gunpoint by Michael to smash up Simeon's dealership. The next few episodes would revolve around Franklin doing favors for Michael, hoping he could pass on some expertise to him, before culminating with when he helps Michael tear down the house of a guy sleeping with Michael's wife - and both of them end up owing $2.5 million to a ruthless drug cartel lord. The final episode of this "arc" would have been planning and executing the Jewelry Store Job, and paying off the drug cartel lord... only to "reveal" Michael's old partner Trevor is still alive in Blaine County, and now knows that Michael is back in the game.
Then we have the episodes of Trevor wrapping up his business in Blaine County before going to Los Santos, then the arc where Trevor forces Michael to work with him as repayment for the job gone wrong in the Prologue, and then the arc where the FIB men that gave Michael witness protection see he's getting out of line, and force him to do dirty work for them 'lest they expose him to the world at large, and so on and so on until the last mission, which is the "Grand Finale" of the whole game/TV season.
True, TV has proven there are shows that can have consistent and conclusive character arcs over the course of the show, and there are shows that suffer from not having consistent motivations for their characters, but GTA V is kind of in that sweet spot of having characters that are interesting enough to bounce all kinds of crazy scenarios off of for a game about as long as a TV show season.
I blame more of that "realism" that's stinking up the place. Rock Star tried making GTA, a series meant to be a cartoonish power-fantasy of crime, more "gritty and realistic", and forgetting that crime in the real world is far from enjoyable. It's gruesome and horrific. It's like they can't decide if they want to make us feel bad about the stuff they make us do in their game, or indulge in our inner guilt-free maniac.
It's certainly a lot better than most of the "spunkgargleweewee" crap where you play an emotionless soldier gunning down foreigners/alien monsters (with frankly little difference in characterization between the opposing forces) and committing "gritty" war crimes (such as the part where you shove a glass shard into a victims mouth, and punching it around the inside of his gums), and still told you're the good guy because you "fight for the good guys", or "all the guys you're shooting are EEEEEE-VILLLLL!!!", without giving legitimate motivations for why you're good, and why they're evil, apart from stock political talking points.
Not sure if you've played the CoD game where that torture scene takes place, but that's an incredible oversimplification of what goes on in it. The game doesn't paint clear good/evil lines (the entire game revolves around a character who's the victim of some fairly horrible brainwashing), and there's no suggestion at all that the characters performing the torture are good guys. They are trying to prevent a nerve gas attack on civilians, so the stakes are high, but it's left to the player to decide if the stakes can ever possibly be high enough to justify it.
People complain a lot about Call of Duty but that post seemed like really unfair criticism of a story that was a lot better than people give it credit for.
Frankly I'm enjoying the version of GTA. It's actually the first that has held my attention long enough to make me want to finish it. I can see the inconsistencies that Yahtzee mentions. It's pretty obvious. But the story in itself is pretty interesting. I agree with gambler's assessment. '
So, in reference to the torture scene. Before that mission popped up, I switched to Trevor and his "intro" scene was him in the middle of the road in only his underwear. I got in his truck and took the call for that mission. So my first thought was ... "Need clothes". Well, when I got out of my truck to buy some, it switched me to the scene for the mission.
So that whole mission, Trevor was going through the motions in just his tighty whities. Talk about surreal. But in all honesty, It reminded me of the scene in Payback, with Gibson's character getting his toes bashed in.. *shiver*.
The "intros" when you switch characters (specifically Trevor's) became one of the highlights of the game for me. I was quite surprised to see that the "trying to flush a leg down the toilet" scene wasn't from a cutscene but just something random for Trevor to be doing when you cut back to him. My favourite had him throwing the member of the Lost off the bridge though.
I guess it's just a matter of taste, but I really liked the trio of characters in GTAV. Oh, and this article? Never read it. If GTA IV is anything to go buy, the "critique" of GTA V will probably continue on for many months yet, so there will plenty of stuff upcoming that I can also choose not to read.
Because i found Tommy Vercetti to be such a sweet loveable guy, odd how people say they don't like gta4 but they bring it up, Gta vice city had you going around killing people, doing drug deals and random jobs for mob bosses, how is it so different
Michael, as clearly stated, isn't in it for the money, he's in it because he hates retirement and only really feels alive when he's doing what he's good at. That's not an inconsistent motive, it's just clearly one you can't personally relate to.
Franklin has known his hood buddies most of his life. I'm pretty sure everybody here can honestly say that if they were faced with the opportunity to leave their childhood friends behind for any sum of money, they'd be hesitant to do so. Yeah, Franklin wants out of the hood life and he thinks his friends are childish gangbanging idiots. But they're still his damn friends and he's still loyal to them.
Trevor is...well...Trevor. Michael and Brad were the only friends he ever had, on account of him being too reprehensible to like, and you wrote that Michael can't seem to decide whether to kill Trevor or be friends with him - What if he tried to kill Trevor and failed? Do you think that Michael or any of his family would survive Trevor's retaliation? Just shooting Trevor clearly doesn't work, Debra had him at gunpoint and he was unarmed and somehow he was entirely unharmed, and I'll bet Michael's seen Trevor face worse.
It's a mix of absolute terror and the vague relics of loyalty between Trevor and Michael.
It's certainly a lot better than most of the "spunkgargleweewee" crap where you play an emotionless soldier gunning down foreigners/alien monsters (with frankly little difference in characterization between the opposing forces) and committing "gritty" war crimes (such as the part where you shove a glass shard into a victims mouth, and punching it around the inside of his gums), and still told you're the good guy because you "fight for the good guys", or "all the guys you're shooting are EEEEEE-VILLLLL!!!", without giving legitimate motivations for why you're good, and why they're evil, apart from stock political talking points.
Not sure if you've played the CoD game where that torture scene takes place, but that's an incredible oversimplification of what goes on in it. The game doesn't paint clear good/evil lines (the entire game revolves around a character who's the victim of some fairly horrible brainwashing), and there's no suggestion at all that the characters performing the torture are good guys. They are trying to prevent a nerve gas attack on civilians, so the stakes are high, but it's left to the player to decide if the stakes can ever possibly be high enough to justify it.
People complain a lot about Call of Duty but that post seemed like really unfair criticism of a story that was a lot better than people give it credit for.
I was making a more general observation with Triple-A action games in general (Call of Duty, Battlefield, Gears of War, Medal of Honor, a bunch of no-name generic titles that fall through the cracks, etc.), in that the only motivation for the characters is basically parroting political talking points rather than form actual character arcs. Also, while you're right in saying the characters in Black Ops aren't exactly defined as classically "good", it's not the same way as the characters in GTA V - in the Black Ops torture scene (which is done by the character who WAS NOT brainwashed, FYI), they justify it with the "ticking timebomb" scenario that Jack Bauer used time and time again, to the point the dean of West Point told the producers of the show to knock it off because it was giving recruits the absolute wrong idea of how interrogation works. When Trevor does it, it's purely, unapologetically for the opportunity to inflict pain on somebody, and even tells the victim to be an advocate for torture as entertainment, not torture as a way to consistently get information.
The characters of CoD and other "spunkgargleweewee" games are bad people in being, supposedly, "well-intentioned extremists", who need to do bad things to stop worse things from happening to good people.
The characters of GTA V are bad people either to make a lot of money, or to get rid of somebody trying to kill/arrest them (either by doing favors for them or, well, just killing them).
Not that the "well-intentioned extremist" character can't be done right (Price and Soap in the original Modern Warfare are probably the ones who do it the best out of all the CoD games), but a lot of "spunkgargleweewee" games don't get it right because their actions are either disproportionate to the problem, or completely unnecessary (going back to the Black Ops example, the guy you were torturing doesn't help you because you punched glass around his jaw, but because his Russian paymasters were sending a KGB force to kill him, and he wasn't going to let them kill him if he had the opportunity to fight his way out), and it's not for the point of highlighting the real problems so much as it is looking "faux-dark and gritty" in the hopes it looks smarter than it really is.
GTA V, in stark comparison, hits the ultimately selfish motivations of their characters right on the head, by admitting that they're bad people with no real reason to commit half the things they do. Not much of an improvement compared to a character that is legitimately compelling in his own right, but it beats the low-bar standards the industry has set themselves to.
Edit:
All that said, I do admit that Black Ops is definitely one of the more intriguing and better written COD stories, and certainly heads and shoulders over the sub-par crap riding the War on Terror/Neo-Cold War sentiments. But the problem is that, in spite of being some of the better writing in the genre, it's still not good writing overall, especially where characters are concerned. Sure, Mason and his squadmates are at least tolerably amusing as "just-entertaining-enough-not-to-be-completely-generic-marines", but we get even less of a character development arc out of any of them than the most basic interpretations of the GTA V protagonists (and Yahtzee's summary of them in his video review is as base as basic can get, not to mention skewed and glossing over lots of fine points).
Well while we can argue semantics, and plot devices, and character arcs, motivation, immersion, and so forth, I think the actual glaring issue is that GTA V's writers just AREN'T VERY GOOD.
Caricatures rather than characters, inconsistent behavior, contradictory behavior, cliches and stereotypes rather than idiosyncrasies. It feels to me like they just threw a bunch of story ideas in a blender and then pasted the bits back together willy-nilly.
And if that was the intention, it bloody well worked for me, but I don't think it was, not fully. I've heard a lot of other people make the case that Trevor is intended to be a representation of the behaviour an average player shows when set loose in a sandbox game. A depiction that makes sense when he's being portrayed more as a sort of amoral free-spirited rogue, but not in the moments when he is merely nasty. A player, released in the sandbox and free of consequences, is reckless and whimsical, not cruel. They might kill someone if they're in the way or because they fly off in a hilarious manner, but prolonged and calculated torture isn't the same. It's just not as funny. The protagonist of Saint's Row IV better represents a sandbox player to my mind, because they have charisma; the satire works because they are an idealized self to match the idealized morals of the sandbox, whereas Trevor is an ugly monster.
GREAT ARTICLE ......... AND THANKS ESPECIALLY FOR THIS TREVOR BIT !
I personally was a huge fan of Trevor, in the same way as I'm a huge fan of George Costanza, the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Gang, Vegeta, and Kratos. There's something hugely satisfying about a totally amoral bastard with no redeeming qualities that the medium actually plays up to properly rather than constantly trying to justify what a prick they are. It's why every sensible person loves shows like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and shows like Anger Management makes people want to lock Charlie Sheen in a room with Trevor and a box of plumbing equipment.
That said, people who are trying to justify the torture level are just being fucking idiots. Sure, Trevor went on this big spiel about how torture doesn't work and it's solely for the torturer, but if that was the case, why the hell did the writers make it so that Trevor got the exact information that Ryan Reynolds lookalike was after, and never bring up the existence of Mr. K again?
It's because the satire in GTA games has always been thick as brickshit, like those stupid Republican Space Rangers vignettes. Every satirical character and vignette in the game's in on their own joke, but act's like a dumbass anyway. It'd be like if Randy Marsh bought shares in Bernie Madoff's next investment firm while saying "boy I'm sure a dumbass for pumping Stan and Shelly's college education money into this old Jew's company."
Or basically every episode of Family Guy.
I like GTA for it's Three Stooges style approach to black humor and crime operations, engaging missions, numerous ways you can fuck things up for yourself, equally numerous ways to come out on top, and assuming you play without auto targeting, a reason to use everything in the game. The satire was never any good, and started getting Family Guy esque with San Andreas.
I still can't believe GTA V had two of the same three writers as Red Dead Redemption. That game had spectacular writing. Was Christian Cantamessa just that spectacular enough to make up for what shitty writers Dan Houser and Michael Unsworth are?
Maybe I've just gotten too old, but I don't feel anything but revulsion for the line-up in GTA V. I haven't derived any pleasure from watching the "story-arcs" of these three horses-asses as they flip-flop throughout the oozing plot. The loss of free-agent in the torture scene did nothing to really propel the story forward and only made me wince in discomfort. If it was intended to be satire, well it failed on me. That isn't necessarily wrong of them to fail at humoring and entertaining, but it does give me license to object to the poor construction of characters and plot. Though despicable, I felt that Vercetti, CJ and Niko were still characters one could relate too on a very base-level. Each had scores of antagonistic showdowns that I felt, continued to up the ante. That kept driving the descent into a despairing pit of utter corruption.
Also, nobody buys umbrellas up here. It's nothing but a waste, and the umbrella vendor would be broke within one week into the winter rainy season.
I agree, especially with Franklin. It especially bothered me at the end of the game
when they're doing their "people we need to kill to get out of the shit we stuck ourselves in" list, they come up with:
Steve Haines, which makes sense because he wants to kill Trevor and keep using Michael and Franklin.
Mr Cheng, which makes sense because he wants to kill Trevor and almost killed Michael, and now probably wants to kill Franklin too because Franklin saved Michael.
Devin Weston, which makes sense because he wants to kill Michael and ripped Franklin off on the car stealing deal.
Stretch, some random gang banger who hasn't done anything directly to the main characters and only seems to want to kill Lamar, a character that Franklin repeatedly talks down about and doesn't seem to care about at all. He only got Franklin in the shit twice and Trevor in the shit once not because he was trying to, but because Lamar dragged Franklin along and Trevor tagged along too that one time. Other than that, he hasn't tried to do a goddamn thing to Trevor, Franklin, or Michael. And yet he gets picked to die because... I never figured that out. After they said that and when I had to play that part of the mission, I just kept saying to myself "Why exactly do I need to kill this guy again? He's Lamar's problem and none of the main characters give a fuck about Lamar."
I guess the best justification they have for it is Franklin's ex-girlfriend wants him to look after Lamar and Franklin can't seem to move on so he does it for her. I would care more about that if they'd spent more time developing this relationship between Franklin and Tanisha throughout the game, though. There's an e-mail on Franklin's phone when you start the game, one time I switched to Franklin and he was arguing with her, he calls her once after the first heist, and then that's it until way later in the game when she tells you to save Lamar. I don't really care about Tanisha, what she wants, and that Franklin can't get over her. The game falls into that tired old trap of assigning her a position of a person you might care about in real life and thinks that's enough to make me care about this person in the game. It isn't.
Ultimately I feel like they spent too much time on the gimmick of having 3 playable characters and not enough time making those 3 characters any good. Like it says in the article, none of them can hold a game up on their own and I agree. Or at the very least it would have to be a bite sized story like The Lost and Damned or The Ballad of Gay Tony. But they couldn't hold up a full length game.
Well while we can argue semantics, and plot devices, and character arcs, motivation, immersion, and so forth, I think the actual glaring issue is that GTA V's writers just AREN'T VERY GOOD.
Caricatures rather than characters, inconsistent behavior, contradictory behavior, cliches and stereotypes rather than idiosyncrasies. It feels to me like they just threw a bunch of story ideas in a blender and then pasted the bits back together willy-nilly.
Nico Belic and John Marston are both solid characters. Yeah, they aren't unique in their qualities and dive into cliché quite often, but for easily consumable fiction they work really well. We're not talking about masters or literature here, but competent writers.
The problem isn't the writers. It's how the entire production ties the game with the narrative. I can only speak for the older games, since I haven't played GTAV. GTAIV and Nico Belic started the trending problem with the series.
After GTA III, where you play as a blank slate one size fits all thug, Vice City where you play as a 80's criminal fiction all-in-one and San Andreas where you play as "da boy from da ghetto" following the common rags to riches trope, we suddenly had a character with relevant history, family, motivation and aspirations. But it was packaged in the same game as those that came before.
Nico arrives in LC under the illusion that he was looking for a fresh start. In reality we find that he had tracked 2 "friends" from his years in the military who betrayed him and turned his life (and his family) into hell. It becomes a vendetta story which conflicts with his attempts to form some semblance of a normal life as man with no skill beyond killing.
The entire narrative juxtaposes Nicos life with other characters and their lives. Family and bonds are major themes, from the literal Family by blood (Nico and his cousin), to bonds through strife (Faust and Dmitri) to the figurative family by association (The Mafia). It contrasts this with themes of betrayal and how people deal with it. There are many instances in the story where Nicos interactions with other characters shines more light on himself and forces him to reflect on his life and shows us more of what makes Nico who he is.
Nico can actually make friends in the game. Jacob, Dwayne, Patrick and Brucie, who offer support when shit hits the fan, but narratively and in gameplay sense (Jacob offers you weapons in a pinch, Dwayne gives you some Thugs to help you out). This does wonders for giving Nico a life of his own and the impression that his presence is making an impact even if it's just a façade.
At then end Nico is punished, regardless of his choices, because of his actions that got him there (which, for the most part, are not under player control). He either gives up fighting and tries to walk away from his past but loses his cousin, or he indulges his lust for revenge and loses his love interest.
It's not the Godfather yet there is a lot going for GTAIV's story, but the systems and mechanics used to convey it diminish it considerably. It required a 2nd attempt at the game nearly 5 years later for me to reassess its qualities and they come out favourably this time round.
As for Red Dead. Here is another story that uses juxtaposition really well again. We learn more about Marston from the people he meets then from what we are told directly about him.
Again, the Narrative suffers for the systems and mechanics used to convey it.
It's not a writers problem. It's an issue of cohesion. The writers did a good job, better then many other games out there, and the gameplay and design themselves were pretty top notch too. But combined left them scrambled and inconsistent.
So no, GTAV's writers aren't bad by any stretch of the imagination (they are same guys who worked on IV, Red Dead and one even worked on LA Noir), but it's become obvious that the studio refuses to compromise the game to fit a narrative, so that nerfed the narrative to fit the game... that's what V sounds like.
Well I ain't no literary genius, nor do I care much about my characters progressing into a better person, especially in a GTA game, but I found these characters had much more believable motivations to work together than RDR, which I also loved.
In RDR I found it really hard to believe John Marston would have put up with the snake oil salesman for 2 seconds, nor maybe the irish dude. The rest of the story picked up a bit, I suppose, it was just the first act I had a problem with.
Now I'm not going to come here and try to say that the story is far better than what was described in the article...it's a GTA game, after all. The entire appeal of it isn't meant to be the story (to use the "defense" that Yahtzee specifically brought up ) but it's true. I ask you what GTA game has had a superb story? IV came close but was way too interrupted by constant calls from all your boyfriends and girlfriends to go on dates with them. San Andres was your typical stock GTA story (just like V), and Vice City (the first one that I played) was meant to be a blatant rip-off of the movie Scar Face.
This game is about picking up prostitutes and then bashing them in a head with a baseball bat to get your money back. It's about sneaking onto military bases to steal fighter jets and do airstrikes on unsuspecting small towns along the highways. It's about throwing sticky-bombs onto random cars and blowing them up in the middle of traffic to see how big of a chain reaction explosion you can cause. The fact that they even try to put a story in there is just icing on the cake.
All that said, however, I do think you're a bit off in your assessment of the characters, particularly this bit:
Trevor switches back and forth between monster and free-spirited rogue. Relatedly, Michael can't seem to decide if Trevor is a dangerous threat to him or an old friend with whom he must bury the hatchet. Does Franklin want to escape from the dead end that is 'tha hood' and make something of his life, or does he want to stay true to his fellows? And while being conflicted isn't the same as being inconsistent, there's still the problem of motivation.
Motivation is central to a protagonist's character. As long as we, the audience, can in some way share the personal goal of our protagonists, whether it be to strike it rich or watch pedestrians sail hilariously through the air, then engagement can follow. And the question that keeps coming to mind when I think of the protagonists of GTAV is this: What could possibly happen to these characters that could finally make them happy and satisfied with their lives?
I've heard a number of people claim that the characters aren't very consistent...and I honestly don't see where they're coming from with that statement.
Franklin is a 2-bit gangster who doesn't necessarily want to leave his life of crime - as his ex-girlfriend points out numerous times - but rather he wants to become a big time hustler. He's tired of stealing cars and selling drugs for very little money, he wants to get into the big game. That's why he latches onto Michael: he sees that as his chance to get out and do some REAL crime. I'd imagine at first it's because he's trying to impress his ex-girlfriend with money, but in the end it's kinda like how you described Niko: he can't escape his past because it's a part of him. Franklin might be the most level-headed of the bunch, but he's none the less a criminal, and just as his ex tells him: no matter how much money he has, no matter how many cars or apartments he gets, he's always going to be the same. His story arc is him going from being a 2-bit street thug to becoming part of the "next generation" of "real" criminals like Michael and Trevor. What would finally make Franklin happy would probably be to get rich doing high-paying crimes and retire, following in Michael's footsteps of retiring early, and then just live as a Mr. Big for the rest of his life.
Michael is a man with issues. After the opening sequence, the first thing you see of him is him talking to his therapist about how much of a psycho he is. It's established that he clearly has heavy anger issues. He doesn't want to be a criminal anymore, having made it out of the game with plenty of cash and a family. But again, he can't escape the issues of his past (as represented by Trevor).
Everything is going fine and dandy with Michael until his anger issues drive him to rip a house down a cliff. That house happens to belong to a friend of a Mexican crime lord, and that crime lord wants money to repay the damages. Michael didn't WANT to get back into the game, he was forced to or else Martin would likely kill him and his family. So he pulls off the jewelry heist and that was all that was all that was supposed to happen, just a one-and-done job to repay his debt. Well Trevor finds out that Michael robbed the place because he used the same cheesy line on the guard that Trevor heard him use 10 years ago and the FIB superiors start getting nosy around Michael's files while investigating the robbery. All of a sudden Michael's past is literally catching up with him and will be coming to confront him.
As for how Michael acts towards Trevor, it's pure placation. He knows that Trevor is a complete psychopath, he's terrified of the man. There's a REASON he didn't tell Trevor where he was for 10 years...he didn't want to have anything to do with the guy. As such, when Trevor just suddenly shows up on his doorstep, he's scared shitless. During the torture mission while Michael and Dave are driving up to assassinate the terrorist, they're talking about the situation with Trevor. They comment that Trevor doesn't seem to know the truth about the fact that Brad is actually buried in Michael's grave, and as such Trevor doesn't know that Michael completely betrayed him and Brad. So if Trevor thinks that they can start up their partnership in crime again and go back to how things used to be, Michael would be wise to play along. The only reason he acts all chummy with Trevor is because he has too in order to protect himself. That's why he does everything he can to keep Trevor from going back to the graveyard to dig up his grave: he knows that Trevor will uncover the truth. In short: as long as Trevor is happy, Michael is safe.
Again, Michael is another character "haunted by his past" and completely unable to escape from it. His anger issues keep getting him in trouble, something that his family is keen to speak on numerous times. Those anger issues are what gets him in trouble the first time, and from there things spiral out of control to the point where half the city wants Michael dead, the other half wants to use him to do his dirty work, so he's really just pulling his ass out of one fire and into the next as the game progresses. He doesn't WANT that life, but he has to live it just to survive the situations that he gets himself into.
In fact, he does indeed just want to retire and live with his family. Why? Because like you said: they're a bunch of tossers. But that's fine because Michael's a frickin' tosser to. They're one big dysfunctional family of tossers, but that works for them. That's the conclusion that they reach at the end of that family therapy session they go to. They're perfect for each other because no one else could possibly accept them for who they are. So yeah, that's what would make him happy: finally being able to quit his life of crime and settle down for real with his family.
Which is part of the reason he's so excited to be in the movie business, he feels like he's finally doing something legit with his life by helping to make the movie...even though really he's just being used as a goon. Still, he thinks it's something and that's all that matters to him.
And last but not least, we have Trevor. You already pegged his motivation pretty easily: he just wants to expand his criminal empire...to grow the profit margin of Trevor Philips, Inc. That's what the rampage is all about when you first get to play as him: take out the bikers which were dealing meth and cutting into his business and then take out the Mexicans that were running guns and cutting into his business. He wants to make sure that his business is established as the dominant trade in the region before going to Los Santos to hunt down his supposedly dead best friend. There really is no "free-spirited rogue" about him, at least not that I could see. To me his motivations were actually the least complex of the group: keep committing crimes and make more money because - as he describes to Wade in the story he tells on the way to Los Santos - that's all he's ever really been good at. If Michael is still alive and robbing jewelry stores, well Trevor wants in on the action...and to find out why Michael has been hiding for 10 years. But beyond that, he's just a criminal, nothing more. That's why one of the first things he does upon getting to Los Santos is immediately getting to work on pulling off a heist of his own.
Another thing to keep in mind about Trevor's behavior is the fact that he's high on meth...like, constantly. You never get to see him smoke it, but it's implied numerous times that when you're not playing as him, he's probably smoking meth. This partially explains his wild and ranting behavior. Soooo yeah, I really don't see why you'd consider him a "free-spirited rogue" when really he's just a meth-dealing, gun-running criminal "mastermind" (for lack of a better term). What would make him finally happy in life is to simply keep running Trevor Philips, Inc. as the most profitable crime organization in the state.
Again, I'm not saying these are the best characters in the world or that they have the best story arcs ever written, just saying that I think they deserve a wee bit more credit than you're giving them. I still say that the majority of GTA players are indeed not playing it for the story, just as the majority of CoD players don't play it for the single player. As such you really shouldn't expect a soul-moving, thought-provoking story out of a GTA game. As I mentioned above, the story is pretty much the stock GTA story, just split in three perspectives. And while taking three luke-warm showers don't add up to a hot shower, I ask again: when has a GTA game's story ever equated to anything more than a luke-warm shower?
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) but it's true. I ask you what GTA game has had a superb story? IV came close but was way too interrupted by constant calls from all your boyfriends and girlfriends to go on dates with them. San Andres was your typical stock GTA story (just like V), and Vice City (the first one that I played) was meant to be a blatant rip-off of the movie Scar Face.