Lol, it feels really weird playing this game with all the civil unrest south of the border and having story missions where you just mow down police officers. I last played this on the ps3 and man a lot of stuff just seems in such bad taste. Like you're hanging with the boys one moment relaxing and the next youre waterboarding a guy or killing police or military. And the annoying thing is these guys just go along with it. I've had this issue since GTA4, the protagonists are always trying to go legit and get out of the criminal life, but they're so easily convinced to just murder people, like it takes no effort. Nico was a million times worse with that but michael and franklin are almost just as bad.
I guess i just dont see the satire people talk about so much.
A lot of this stuff hit differently in 2013, and the preceding years when the game was in development. Waterboarding was a much fresher issue, as were Iraq-era references like Merrywater Security working with the IAA to basically loot government funds. Michael is a Tony Soprano spoof, Franklin is not far off Ice Cube's character in Friday... not sure if Trevor is supposed to be someone specific but I bet he was. Those references have lost a lot of their punch by now.
In general the game really plays off of the post-Iraq, Recession-era ethos. A lot of cynicism about the purpose of the military, the role of corporations, mental health, the role of the police, vapid mass-media distractions, the death of any pretense of an American Dream.
The storyline revolves around characters who exist in that world, who are nominally "trying" to go legitimate, but who by their very nature are unable to exist outside an ecosystem of violence and exploitation. They can't escape the system because they were never good guys to begin with. They were created by violence and exploitation... in trying to escape that dynamic, they end up re-immersing themselves right back in it again. Kind of like people wanting to invade a country in order to stop terrorism, or shoring up the economy by giving billions in free public funding to robber-baron CEOs.
And yes, it was
very tasteless. That was mostly deliberate... the product of a time when the world outside your window was just as tasteless.
