GTAV's Characters Are Just Bad

[DjinnFor]

Mr K. says several times that he doesn't know anything more and he is telling everything he knows, but then he knows and remembers more things after the torture, which is pretty clear to me that the torture was working.

You need to go rewatch the scene again, because at no point is the torture ever shown to be successful or help in any way at all, whatsoever. In fact, at no point does he ever say that he can't remember anything else; Mr. K says repeatedly that he has more information but both Mr. S and Mr. T ignore him as neither are prepared to listen. In fact, the Interrogator, instead of actually trying to find information, spends most of his time taunting, belittling, and threatening Mr. K rather than asking him for information, or distracting him with torture or threats to prevent him from actually thinking of anything. Allow me to give you a play-by-play:

Spoiler: What Actually Happens

0:00 - Initially, Mr. K has literally no idea who the fuck they're talking about. He has already given them a random address of a former Azerbaijani client of his hoping it's the right one, but it isn't.

0:30 - He still doesn't know who they're asking for. Rather than give any names or details to help narrow down the search, T just starts torturing him because somehow they expect him to know anything.

2:00 - They finally tell Mr. K the name of the man they are looking for, Tahir Javan. Mr. K shouts: "Why didn't you ask me!?" and reveals the address.

3:00 - Mr. T gets the instruction to "loosen him up" because they need a description of the target, but they don't ask any questions. Mr. K shouts: "I'll tell you whatever you want, just tell me what you want!" but to no avail: T gets right to work with the next torture instrument. By now, a pattern emerges: he keeps getting distracted by the threats of torture whilst the Interrogator and Torturer completely ignore any answers he gives.

4:35 - Finally Mr. S poses the actual question: what does he look like? His mind rattled with the recent torture, he tosses out the first things to come to mind: "average height, weight, and build, dark hair"... before he's given a chance to think of anything else, the interrogator walks away. Relieved, he takes a few short seconds to rest, and think of more details.

5:41 - He's not allowed to give a better description before the torture begins again; by now, he understands the pattern: regardless of whether he has an answer or not, they aren't prepared to listen to him, they're just going to torture him.

6:23 - He finally gets the opportunity to give the torturer the answer he's been trying to give them for the past minute and a half: he's got a large beard. Apparently that's good enough because Mr. S just gets back up and walks away instead of waiting just a little bit to see if there is any more information. The interrogator starts taunting Mr. K, implying that he's going to have him killed if they don't get better information; with such an imminent threat to his life hanging in the air, Mr. K is YET AGAIN distracted from the ACTUAL TASK AT HAND of giving a better description and, with the spectre of death looming over his head, he shouts: "No, no, no, no!"

7:30 - They keep demanding more information, but right now he can hardly think. Worse, he knows they're going to torture him right away regardless of his answer. And guess what: even though he gives them loads more information now that he's been given a half minute to think, they still torture him again for no fucking reason at all.

9:00 - He just repeats what he's already said before the latest torture, insisting that he doesn't know any more. And guess what: it's good enough.

Literally all of his answers come from when he's had a break from torture, but they always go straight back to torturing him and ignoring any answers he tries to give them.

Quite literally, the entire process could have been skipped if they had just figured out who he was and then asked him about his former clients. Instead of nine minutes of torture to get a simple description of dark hair, beard, smoker, and left handed, they could have done it in 3 or 4 with no torture.

 

[Adultism]

You know whats also bad? The playerbase cesspool that is GTA online. I've never met such horrid disgusting rude people in my life. I've been called a ****** 8 times since day once because, well obviously I am one. :|

More OT: Yeah obviously they are all bastards who don't have souls

 

[Thanatos2k]

GTA 5 is not a bad game by any stretch, but it is definitely not a 97 as metacritic claims it to be.

Give it a year or two and people will be claiming that I deserves no more than a 70, like it happened to Skyrim.

But thanks to mods Skyrim has only gotten better over time. I don't think GTA5 will.

 

[Nautical Honors Society]

Critiques like this stifle creativity.

No, they don't. I'm not stifling creativity when I say that Tomb Raider wouldf have been a better game if you killed less mooks and Yahtzee isn't stifling creativity here. We are just expressing our opinions about a product. We are giving feedback. If enough people had problems with GTA V's characters then that shows that the gaming community in general doesn't want to play with those types of characters. This is a natural part of a product's life cycle. The argument that people are smothering ideas when they critique a game is ridiculous.

You misunderstood me, not liking a story just because character's are evil stifles creativity.

But I no longer care, the game is still fun.

 

[a ginger491]

Just for the record, umbrellas actually don't sell very well in Seattle. Exposing your head to the dreary sky is a point of pride for many of us, and those who don't never forget their own umbrellas, and rarely seek new ones.
Sunglasses, on the other hand, do. Who can remember where we put our sunglasses from last year when the sun only comes out once every three months?
Stupid sun. Making us squint all the time.
Curse you life-giving ball of fire!

As a fellow member of this cloudy community I second your assertion. Although unlike you I am quite fond of the summers here. I'm that guy on rainy days who's out playing in the mud with nothing but a t-shirt and cargo pants on.
BTW did you know we sell the most sunglasses per capita in the US? That is a fact that has always confounded me.

 

[Harmor]

Eh, it's kinda like beating a dead horse after so many posts pro and con about the character and the story. The thing is - I will never be able to relate to ANY bad guy/criminal protagonist of a game because I would never ever do what these guys do. I would also like to point out that everything in GTA V has to be taken with a massive bucket full of salt because of it's sarcastic and at times cynical nature. However, it has made me laugh often enough, during the story as well as just while messing about in the game world. Does that say something about me? Perhaps, not sure and I don't really give a flying turd.

So in essence, no Yahtzee I disagree with you here. I don't think the characters are bad. I think they transport the story well enough and their motivations also seem rather clear to me - getting rich by any shady means necessary. That, at the end of the day, has been the motivation of every single GTA character in every single GTA game so far and they do that well enough. And that too is the motivation of every single Saints Row character as well - just that SR3 is already far too over the top for me to really enjoy (spent 7 hours in it - meh) and what I hear and read about Saints Row 4 is that the bonkers level has even increased, so I'll pass on that.

 

[C14N]

I think Yahtzee criticism's kind of smack of finding a criticism to justify an opinion he already has. He writes about how the characters motivations are hard to follow and they switch between personalities and he can't see much change but you could characterise a lot of stories like that and then call the characters shit. Just as an example let's replace some of what he said with The Sopranos.

"Tony Soprano switches back and forth between monster and free-spirited rogue. Relatedly, Tony can't seem to decide if Christopher is a dangerous threat to him or an protege with whom he must protect. Does Tony want to escape from organised crime and make something of his life, or does he want to stay true to his fellows?"

And let's not get started on the motivation for the characters in the Sopranos because that is a fucking minefield.

It also strikes me as ironic that a game like GTA will get shit on for its fairly weak plot even though its writing is better than the vast majority of games. You wouldn't ever have this kind of discussion about Gears of War or Sonic.

Tony only starts thinking of Christopher as a threat toward the end of the series, and deals with him pretty quickly when he does. It should also be noted that that was part of Tony's "downfall" and paranoia much like how in Scarface, Tony's downfall involves paranoia and not trusting his friends. Tony never makes any attempts to escape from organised crime either. The series shows us quite early on that he wants to be the one running the operation. He doesn't want his kids being involved at any point but he never thinks twice about his own continued career in crime. There is also the fact that Yahtzee did mention that he sees these characters are "inconsistent" rather than "conflicted". I haven't played it but I can imagine what he means (more on that at the end).

Also, motivation is less important in a TV show with many supporting characters. TV shows don't follow the same plot structure as video games or films because from the start there is no definite point at which they end so stories are episodic and there usually isn't one big over-arching plot. Stories generally involve characters just existing day-to-day rather than trying to achieve an goal.

Sonic usually doesn't get criticized as much for the story because most of the games in the last 10 years have just been bad in every way, there's no need to bring up the story. Haven't played Gears of War but Yahtzee does criticise plenty of other shooters for their stories. Not to mention that GTA just has SO MUCH story in it. It isn't a Mario kind of situation where the story is almost non existent and just a bookend in the form of "start: princess is captured", "end: princess isn't captured any more". If you have a game like that in which the story is virtually non-existent (no exposition, no dialogue, no cut scenes, no characters, no plot) then people tend not to care but GTA games generally have a lengthy 20+ hour campaign in which every mission features more talking characters and dialogue, not to mention the plentiful (and imo, generally anvilicious and ham-fisted) satire that is all over the place. So story is a pretty big part of GTA. I would disagree that the writing is better than most games though, at least most plot-based games I've played (I'm sure there are tons of barely-known games with terrible writing) or games in the general 90+ Metascore community.

The main thing I disagree with Yahtzee about is Niko Bellic being a good character. I thought he was thoroughly inconsistent as a character. From the start we're given this impression that he's someone who has done bad things in the past and that he is very regretful and traumatised about them. That's fine by me, even the idea that he kills his old buddy and he's done but that isn't what happens. The problem is that this "regret" thing is completely undone by his astounding willingness to take dozens of small jobs that involve doing more terrible things without any real reason or even bringing up the problems he was having earlier. I get that there's a certain amount of "just when I though I was out" to it, especially since Roman has already gotten himself involved with some shady characters when he arrives but that all wraps up fairly quickly and the majority of the game has him finding new petty criminals to team up with for inconsequential missions that ALWAYS involve more violence and literal mass-murder. He always tells the job-givers he just wants to make money but if that was all he wanted then why not get a job? And if he just wants money then why doesn't he just settle down after the bank heist?

 

[TheUnbeholden]

Like Yahtzee's video review of GTA V, I have to respectful disagree. I've always been on his side for 99% but this is that 1%.

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.

snip

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.

snip

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.

The main thing I disagree with Yahtzee about is Niko Bellic being a good character. I thought he was thoroughly inconsistent as a character. From the start we're given this impression that he's someone who has done bad things in the past and that he is very regretful and traumatised about them. That's fine by me, even the idea that he kills his old buddy and he's done but that isn't what happens. The problem is that this "regret" thing is completely undone by his astounding willingness to take dozens of small jobs that involve doing more terrible things without any real reason or even bringing up the problems he was having earlier. I get that there's a certain amount of "just when I though I was out" to it, especially since Roman has already gotten himself involved with some shady characters when he arrives but that all wraps up fairly quickly and the majority of the game has him finding new petty criminals to team up with for inconsequential missions that ALWAYS involve more violence and literal mass-murder. He always tells the job-givers he just wants to make money but if that was all he wanted then why not get a job? And if he just wants money then why doesn't he just settle down after the bank heist?

Exactly, the kind of character that Yahztee wants in GTA... doesn't work in GTA.

Yahztee missed the point of the games. Your not supposed to like the protagonists. Your not actually supposed to like anyone in GTA V, its all about raising the bigger themes, getting people talking. The controversy, the satire that ramps up everything that is wrong with the real world that people don't seem to notice, like misogyny, racism, crime, torture (whether it be here or overseas by our FBI), all of which Yahtzee hand waved faster than a seagull who drank got thrown in a dryer after sucking down a redbull.

Sure I didn't like the characters but that didn't stop me from being invested in what happens to the people that get in their way who don't deserve it (or the innocent people whom are related to them that get caught up in the situation). The morals & themes explored, and how they relate to our society... its pretty big points to me. Kane and Lynch in a open world game, that feels like a tv series.

Thats how the game is like to me.