Just a quick thought in response to Sean's last post. Personally, I thought GTA4 was a step in the right direction for the franchise. I haven't played the Lost and the Damned, but I don't doubt its lack of quality, especially when compared to the veritable masterpiece of its big brother.Overall I think the series suffers from a general disconnect between the main characters and their actions. GTA3 avoided this problem by featuring a mute protagonist that that we as players could project onto whatever traits and emotions we saw fit. San Andreas suffered the most here. The protagonist, CJ, was a stand up guy looking out for his family and his hood. Yes, he was a gangster, but the majority of his 'character development' involved some sort of moral backbone. Rockstar didn't really have a choice here, as the purveyer of the first black protagonist in a major video game they would have caught hell if CJ lacked that rightousness that seperated him from his potential stereotype as a gangbanger (they caught hell anyway)...
Jumpcut to CJ beating a defenseless old woman to death with a bat because you (the player) feel like it. A guy like CJ wouldn't do that, yet the game let's you, even encourages you by making it funny; that's a major problem in my mind. Tommy Vercetti suffered less here, because he was a verified psychopath his mass murdering seemed somehow in character, but it was still a problem. Even psycho Italians still have manors.
Now Niko, oh Niko. My personal favorite anti-hero of the series. I think what Rockstar accomplished in Niko's design was to create a twisted enough past that almost anything he did was permissible. We know he's a sweet guy, usually means well, and his anger management problems are justified by his history as a child soldier, and the betrayal by his comrade. Rockstar did a great job of showing how haunted Niko was by his past, a motif made even more poignant by the juxtaposition of glitzy Manhattan, and world of facades and fairy tales. At points I really felt like Niko was the victim, of the world he lives in, rather than the other way around. That in itself is a major achievement. I think GTA4 was the first tale in the series with a clear moral: We all have a history, but it's our actions, not our past, that define who we are. Amen to that.
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2 responses:
Michael,
I think there are some old stereotypes at play here, too. There's nothing about CJ vs. Vercetti in my memory that makes one beating an old woman to death funnier than the other. In fact, Vercetti's Scarface-inspired yellow chainsaw made the slaughter of innocents more enticing, to my mind, than CJ's baseball bat.
You write that the fact that Vercetti was a confirmed psychopath justified his mass murder. But what's the difference between a gang banger like CJ and a gang banger like Vercetti? I would submit that while we (Americans) have always had a romantic itch for the Italian(Godfather)/Irish(Departed)/Jewish(Once Upon a Time in America) gangster, no equivalent has really existed for black culture. A black psychopath is fulfilling the stereotypes we developed to inspire fear of him.
There were the "blaxploitation" films which were, well, the name says it all, and since then there's been gangster rap which is still, in the mainstream, far from accepted. Hence the backlash on CJ.
The success of Niko, on the other hand, had far less to do with WHO he was than it did with WHAT he was. Which is to say, he exemplified the old hoary notion of a well-developed central character far better than the mute CJ or the derivative Vercetti ever did.
It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.
"There's nothing about CJ vs. Vercetti in my memory that makes one beating an old woman to death funnier than the other. In fact, Vercetti's Scarface-inspired yellow chainsaw made the slaughter of innocents more enticing, to my mind, than CJ's baseball bat."
Uh, scatch that. I forgot about CJ's rather large dildo as a battering device. We'll call it even in the humor department.
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