Grand Theft Auto: Episodes From Liberty City Review

"I'm the only man in history to have the hottest gay and straight club at the same time, and I'm about to lose everything!"

If Grand Theft Auto 4 was the game that I forgot about (so totally that I couldn't even remember Niko's most bare basic character motivation until I played it again) Episodes from Liberty City is the game replaced it totally in my mind. I played GTA 4 a lot back in the day, but I played Episodes a simply obscene amount of time, to the point where there were certain beginning cutscenes I could recite by heart like I was playing Skyrim. It was eerie how deeply I ingrained these two campaigns in my heart over years of playing and replaying them, all the while never quite acknowledging the fact that these were, indeed, smaller slices of game than the main chuck. I always thought back in the day that together these games were about the length of GTA 4, but today I can see that was nowhere near the case. These were spin-offs there to supplement and complete the open spaces intentionally built into the GTA 4 campaign, not replace GTA 4 in it's entirety.

After the release of GTA 4, Rockstar had a plan to do something they had never done before and don't seem willing to do again anytime soon (but we'll see what those greedy Sony execs do) they bought an exclusivity deal. Now back in the day we weren't as familiar with how these deals work as we are today, so when news came out that 'Episodes From Liberty City' was going to be an Xbox 360 exclusive, it was like a seismic wave had rocked the world; people couldn't believe the reality of living in a world where half of GTA's fans, or more, would be barred from the franchise. Of course, in hindsight that was obviously going to just be a timed exclusivity, GTA was too grand to be limited to one platform. Keeping it off the PS3 would simply be theft. Honestly, a port might well have been automatically in development. But even with that expectation, the manufacturers went so far to print that ratty 'only on Xbox' tag on the front of the packaging. Can you blame little-me for being fooled?

It felt like my duty to pick up 'the GTA game that went too far for Playstation', and maybe that sense of compunction was what encouraged me to live with the disc as a permanent feature of my console's disk tray for the next few years. I believe that may have been one of the first occasions wherein I allowed myself to be truly swept by the hype train. I watched and rewatched the trailers, memorised the dialogue, counted off the days on my calendar; I devoted myself to the coming GTA game knowing that I was going to love it. And coming back to it after all those years it's inevitable that some of that residual love is going to reside, like leftover mucus in an emptied wind-pipe; clogging up my precious objectivity! But I've held my head as straight as I can and think I can approximate a non-biased judge just long enough to write this blog.

Episodes from Liberty City is a game of two halves, following the story of the other two protagonists who make up the first Trio of  the HD era. (It's going to be weird going to only two protagonists for GTA VI... maybe they'll throw us a solo DLC; give the fans what they crave.) Our criminal tales are told adjacent to the events of GTA 4 proper and feature plenty of cross-over between characters, and mission locations; and even some missions themselves. 'The Lost and Damned' follows Johnny Klebitz, temporary road captain for the Lost Motorcycle gang and 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' features Luis Lopez, business partner and official full-time bodyguard and maid for the 'queen' of the Liberty City club circuit; Tony 'Gay Tony' Prince. Narratively 'The Lost and Damned' should be played first, but for some reason 'The Ballad of Gay Tony' contains all of the basic control tutorials when you first start it up. The biker one doesn't. (Strange little oddity, that.)

The Lost and Damned is, and I mean this without sarcasm, Red Dead Redemption 2 with bikers. Honest to god, if you take the bare basic elements of Red Dead Redemption 2's narrative and squeeze it into as tight a campaign as it can possibly get, replace the horses with horse power and shave Arthur bald; you've got 'The Lost and Damned'. (So there's the solution for folk who say Red Dead Redemption 2 is too long; you get the worst GTA HD game to enjoy. Lucky you!) Okay that's being a little mean, but I don't retract it. Grand Theft Auto has a high enough quality bar for each of it's games that calling this the worst of the HD era is by no means a brutal condemnation of it's quality to total crap tier, but I don't think anyone would disagree that for some reason, this tale of bikers and betrayal just isn't compelling in the slightest. So much so that in GTA V- actually, we'll get to that in my GTA V review, I have a theory about that scenes significance.

The Lost and Damned is no great revolution on the basic elements of your typical GTA experience, you wander the open world of Rockstar's highly detailed New York clone, Liberty City, and accept missions between bouts of, typically chaotic, freeroam fun. But there is a twist. In the Lost and Damned you have the might of the Lost motorcycle gang a mere phone call away and most conflicts in the game are specifically designed to be fought with an entire posse of AI bikers at your side. You can even summon them out of mission to help you fight off the police if you so desire, making them better buddies than the GTA V crew, who don't even bother answer their phones if you call them doing a police assault! So how are these AI companions? Rough. They can't drive those bikes they love more than life itself very well and for some reason they seem to jump in front of live-fire exchanges believing themselves to be bullet proof. (They are, in fact, not.) The game has an in-universe memoriam board that mourns the loss of any gang member you lose in the line of duty. I had that wall filled up before I was mid-way through this campaign; there's no saving these chumps.

But I suppose their impending doom fits alongside the decidedly distinct cinematically appealing thematic choice that fundamentally shifts The Lost and Damned away from GTA 4's realism. Stylistic flourishes and fonts have been baked into the UI with a scratched aesthetic on top to play up the rebel rider concept and the colour saturation has been tweaked in a manner to make the world feel like it's being played on an old tape. An aesthetic completed by one of my least favourite graphical tricks: (one which thankfully has a toggle in the options menu) screen noise to make the visuals look like a literal mess... What it all says is pretty clear, the art is no longer interested in making you feel part of a world that feels real, this story is going to be about the melodramatic tragedy of a biker club doomed to blow itself up in a blaze of glory.

Alongside the general aesthetic there are actually in-game mechanics which lean towards a style I would describe as 'arcade like'. GTA 4 changed pickups to no longer be floating icons but items actually placed into the world with a slight orange glow so you can make them out, probably figuring that the floating item icons break the illusion of the faux physical world. The Lost and Damned (and TBoGT, for that matter) veers away from this with the whole 'ride formation' system when you follow behind the Road Captain and have to line yourself up with a giant emblem that magically appears behind him in order to get an inexplicable boost to your health and/or armour. We also see this shift in the new 'Gang Wars' and 'Bike Races' job system which, rather than requiring the player to call up a potential job giver on the phone and risk them not being there, presents a steady string of dynamically spawned missions all over the map like Ubisoft mission markers that constantly replenish themselves allowing the player to grind them over and over. (For a pretty underwhelming reward, mind you. Weapon spawns in your apartment aren't worth the 50-mission minimum.)

This presentation of quick and constantly accessible action is in line, again, with the more explosive sort of gameplay that these spin-offs play to. Every mission tends to result in heavy gunfights with dozens of participants aided by a couple of new powerful fun weapons like a sawn off shotgun that can be used on bike-back and a grenade launcher which always seems to launch it's payload under and then behind cars you want to blow up. (It does explode on impact but good luck nailing that trajectory.) It all fits closer in line with the bombastic campaigns of GTA past with the added bonus that, since this is supposed to played after GTA 4, you don't have to sit through the relatively tame intro chapters before you get to the chaotically charged 'kill a whole gang' missions. This abundance of action does, however, prove GTA 4's point with it's decidedly more tame presentation. Restrained and relatively rarer bouts of action tend to be more impactful than sustained explosive content that desensitises the user. 

Honestly, there were only a handful of The Lost and Damned fights I enjoyed as much as GTA 4's and think that's a testament to the strength of 4's slower but more enduring structure. The other part of equation is however, the stupidly large battles you'll fight both in missions and gang warfare during which the progression of battle is decided by your swarming and stupid AI companions rather than the pace of the player. Trying to keep up with their mindless wanderings can too easily land you in the middle of a killing floor of gunmen whilst you end up firing wildly everywhere. Exciting perhaps in a very base sense, but lacking in the insightful structure that can benefit from clever escalation and spikes in tension. Everything just sort of stays at the same violent base-line, and that can make the action stale quicker. But we're talking about the higher theories and concepts of game design here, stuff that most games don't ever consider anyway; let's narrow our scope to a much more universal aspect of games; the narrative.

Much as I said before, The Lost and Damned is a Red Dead Redemption 2 predecessor, telling of the downfall of the The Lost's Road Captain, Billy, and how he brings the gang down with him, peppered with an ass-kissing side character who you hate, a man versus mentor split and a 'Wild Bunch' finale at the end. Bikers are often considered the modern day cowboys, so the parallels are fairly strong. Johnny Klebitz is a much more active antagonist than Niko was, with actual compunctions and choices he makes for himself, and moral boundaries he chooses to uphold. Niko's descent into the underworld perhaps necessitated his somewhat inactive observation of the narrative that unfolded around him, wherein he simply grumbled about jobs and then did them anyway; but I prefer the sense that my protagonist has a direction he's going so that even when the thrust of the narrative isn't present in the immediate, I still feel like we're progressing in some fashion. Sure, Johnny is still a belligerent arse in a manner that is meant to reflect the wider Biker culture, but he also posses protective leadership principals and some jaded, but still potent, solution of loyalty and duty that sets him apart from the likes of Billy.

My problem with The Lost and Damned actually comes from its tiny campaign, in which the ideas and characters that Rockstar are explored struggle to fit themselves in. A lot of the side characters don't get so much as a single piece of meaningful development or introduction; we know that Angus is in a wheelchair but unless you call him up between missions you'll have no idea what his importance to the club even is. And Billy is a pale substitute for Dutch Van Der Linde. The man is an dickhead and self absorbed clown of a leader, and we're given absolutely no explanation of why he's like that or who the man must have once been in order to serve as an effective leader of the gang once. We see the characters around him act with shock and confusion as he makes blatantly destructive decisions for hardly any reason whatsoever other than to soothe his bloodlust, but we have no reason why they're surprised. As far as I know, Billy has forever been a terrible leader.

The highlights of the game are really the way it slides in and out of the GTA 4 narrative, and even slightly touches on TBoGT. We get to learn a little bit more about the diamonds and who's hands they changed with, and I like the through line of these valuable cure-all money injectors that everyone swaps hands with and no one benefits from. But The Lost and Damned mostly keeps to it's own undercooked narrative with climaxes that feel rushed and unearned and a cast I never really had a chance to understand and so didn't get attached to. I only really like Johnny in comparison to everyone else he interacted with, and even then there's a shade of narrative/gameplay dissonance that makes it hard to fully immerse myself with him. Such as how the Gang Warfare minigame pits you against any gang in the local area, not just the rival biker gang you start beef with in the narrative. Which is odd given that Johnny is against senseless fighting, but then has no problem picking fights with the Yardie gangs out of nowhere or even the mob... when he's supposed to be working with the mob for most of the story! It's just confused, for the most part, which is probably why most people choose to forget The Lost and Damned altogether.

The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the otherhand, is TLaD's antithesis. A colourful champagne-popping alternate face of the spin-off with popping glitzy glamour all over the UI and a brighter night-time palette tint to highlight the main attraction of this ballad; Nightclub life! Much as I did enjoy the utter desaturation employed by GTA 4; getting to see actual colour in the world even at night is a nice return to normalcy for me, as this is the game in the GTA 4 trilogy which best recalls one of the most important side-elements of older GTA games; a celebration of hedonistic excess! Not to the extent where that's the entire crux of the game like some of it's contemporaries, but enough that you can enjoy yourself in a simulated world where nothing matters without having to reflect on the harsh turmoil of life as an impoverish immigrant who drags himself through the criminal underworld, building a name for himself but isolating himself in the same breath. 

The nightclub life is more than an aesthetic, it's a genuine optional gameplay mode where you 'manage' the club by being a bouncer during the night. It's painfully boring to do so, basically just being a walk and stand simulator until a cutscene happens or some other event drags you away, but at least you get to soak up the very well realised atmosphere of "the hottest straight club in LC". I doubt a ton of concept and thought was pushed into realising this idea beyond figuring it would be fun if players got to soak in the Nightclub outside of missions, which remains just as true for the other minigames that TBoGT adds to the minimap including Drug Wars (which is literally just TLaD's Gang wars), Parachute trials and Dance minigames. I'm going to be a little unfair here, but there is a comparison to be made... GTA's club themed minigames suck next to Yakuza's. Their dancing minigame is rhythm based where you have to jab the joystick in time to the music (which is pretty odd and uncomfortable) and calling the Bouncer job a 'management' mode is ridiculous. Where TBoGT brings it's best, however, is in the narrative.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is, throughout it's playtime, a celebration of all the crazy excess that the Rockstar franchises are capable of, often to the detriment of the cohesiveness of events, but you know what; I don't care if everything that happens makes sense when the writing is this good. The Ballad shares the same rough length of The Lost and Damned but that length shoots past like lightning because the characters are all infinitely more likeable and you'll find yourself greedily vacuuming up every single scene. Pretty much since Vice City the quality of narrative and character writing at Rockstar has been at a higher level of quality where dialogue is clear, characters are popping and the narrative is engaging; but The Ballad of Gay Tony might be the only game, and I'm counting GTA V in this too, where the dialogue, in particular, is a knockout in practically every scene.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that Gay Tony is perhaps my favourite character in the GTA franchise, as the aging neurotic nightclub owner who's too busy snorting half of South America up his nose to deal with his empire crumbling down around him necessitating Luis, a frankly stellar straight man, to patch the holes in his sinking ship. A character like that can so easily be unlikable and annoying but Tony is just that perfect mix of witty, pitiable and manic to worm into that special place where you can't help but love the man. But not just Tony, all the side characters are to some level worthy of their time on screen. From the obligatory man you love to hate; Rocco, to the guy too rich for his own good but honestly more of a socially-illiterate weirdo than an actual scum bag, Yusuf Amir. This game even managed to make me somewhat like a character I couldn't stand in GTA 4, Brucie, by introducing us to his considerably worse brother, Mori, and exploring how his inferiority complex led to his apparent overcompensation.

Luis is sort of a character without any significant compunction of his own, but in his role as Tony's wet nurse he is perfectly placed to be the guy who suffers for every enemy that his boss makes. You never worry about the progress of the narrative feeling sluggish because of the relative shortness of the narrative, and rather cleverly Rockstar found a way to wrap up The Ballad's narrative, the diamond overall subplot and GTA 4's last hanging loose thread all within a neat campaign. And with missions that are simply insane and rememberable, such as when you snipe a tank out of a sky crane, or fight off police helicopters from the roof of a speeding train with your explosive pellet shotgun or turn an experimental military attack helicopter on a yacht full of international gun smugglers you just stole it off. All of these missions are the kind that sound crazy on paper and live up to that fully in the flesh, the best of all worlds!

I consider The Ballad of Gay Tony to be the 'Assassin's Creed Brotherhood' of GTA 4, as in the follow-up experience that shaves off all the chaffe of the long base game without losing what made it effective and fun; and sprinkling excitement all over the package to make it ridiculously fun. The free-time conscious who find playing through an entire GTA intimidating can find themselves perfectly served with this masterfully balanced slice of everything great about GTA; explosive action, memorable characters, varied side activity, (although not always fun) and a satisfying narrative experience. And it's the first Grand Theft Auto game in the franchise's history to realise that it's campaign is so good that it needs a replay mission system. Even The Lost and Damned, which released on the same disk, didn't have a replay system. I don't... that really doesn't make any sense to me. (Red Dead Redemption 1 had a replay; they really should have learned.)

Playing through the GTA 4 trilogy again after all this time has been a delight; and I've loved relearning what it was about this era of Rockstar that made their games industry juggernauts. Finishing off these two side games has been like coming back to old friends and remembering their wrinkles and their wit at the same time; where some have grown long-toothed and rambling, others have matured perfectly with age. I don't think my view on these two games will be any great upset for commonly accepted opinions on the quality of this trilogy amidst the community, but I've enjoyed reaffirming for myself what I always quietly believed to be true. In terms of ranking, The Lost and Damned is going to miss my recommendation just slightly with a B- Grade, being my least favourite of the trilogy. The Ballad of Gay Tony, on the otherhand, demonstrates the potential of leaner, better, experiences and pushes itself to an A- Grade; with my tacit recommendation for open world lovers and even Saints Row fanboys. I think the whole spectrum of open world enjoyers can find a lot to love in the Ballad. This whole era of reviews was supposed to lead me to another Rockstar property, but have instead sent me a little astray to another franchise my subconscious told me was probably a damn decent spiritual successor to what GTA 4 was trying to accomplish. Come see if my subconscious callously lied to me when I review 'Watch_Dogs'.