Grand Theft Auto San Andreas Review (The Original)

All you had to do was follow the damn train, CJ!

Nearly a full year ago I began my journey of replaying the entirety of the 3D era Grand Theft Auto games in protest of the godawful 'Definitive editions', as well as in celebration to the original's shining greatness. That was an exploration into nostalgia and fond memories cut a little short by my rather sudden obsession with clearing the Master Chief collection which over-road my little GTA series not long after I got done with Vice City. But in truth there was actually a couple of reasons why I just wasn't in the right headspace to review San Andreas at that time. For one I was really replaying the GTA games that I didn't remember quite so well to remind myself what was good about them, and San Andreas has been such a constant presence in my life that I really didn't feel like I needed the reminder. For two, I was planning the next game I reviewed to be Bully, but I couldn't figure out how to get the controller working with it and I refused to play that game with a keypad. (As it turns out, the solution was remarkably simple and built into the ingame menu.) And for three, San Andreas is just a damn hefty game to get through. I didn't know if I wanted to go through the entire game just to review it here.

But after a year of faffing about I feel like it's time to put a capstone on this review trifecta for no other reason than it will free me up to do literally anything else with my freetime. (Having this hanging over me has been a weight on the ol' psyche.) Plus, with the renewed interest in the Grand Theft Auto franchise following the blow-out leaking of VI (Take-Two have finally managed to scrub that footage off the front page of Youtube. Only took them a month.) the impetus is there to drive me to complete this game and explore the wider evolution of GTA. If not to 100% completion, at least far enough to recall what that core experience was like and impart it outwards in this here review. Who knows, maybe my years of growth would have altered my tastes so much as to no longer like the crude style of GTA's sardonic depiction of 1990's LA. (Spoilers: they haven't.)

At the time I remember thinking of San Andreas as the magnum opus of everything that Rockstar was trying to do with III and Vice City, and even now I still feel that way. Everything about the gameplay loop of what makes a GTA game great, the city simulation, dynamic-feeling world interaction and penchant to cause chaos is in a whole different league in San Andreas than it was in Vice City. Back for Vice City, all of those factors felt constrained in a limiting sandbox. The world, it's inhabitants and it's life were dictated by the tightly wound rules of the developers, NPCs act how their told, Traffics turns were it's told, the world turns as it's told to turn. And whilst systematically the same has to be true of San Andreas, back then and now it feels like some wild poltergeist slipped into San Andreas' formula and breathed a genuine soul into the world simulation. Back in the day I remember seeing a stunt plane crash right in the middle of a residential neighbourhood with no interaction whatsoever from me, recently I saw a Police car fall straight down, out of the sky, into the ground and explode. There were no high surfaces nearby, the thing literally dropped from heaven. I cannot convey the amount of charm such insanity breathes into the world you're running around in except through offering the largely empty platitude of : San Andreas' world simulation feels like a world that keeps turning after you put down your controller; and that makes it all the more fun to turn it upside down everytime you pick it up.

In terms of design, the map of San Andreas is still compared to modern open world games today. Not so much in comparison of size, because SA's map is actually rather small compared to most modern open world games, but in the manner of how that space it utilised to convey the impression of vast distance. San Andreas features such variety across it's three main cities, from the suburban LA streets of Los Santos to the hilly mountains underneath 'San Francisco-inspired' San Fierro to the rocky desert sands surrounding the Las Vegas parody, Las Venturas. Crossing these biomes as they naturally flow into one another, broken only by cities, bridges and that beloved fog effect, feels like a cross-country trip from the middle-state hick towns to the metropolitan West Coast tourist traps. All in a map that is dwarfed by the likes of most every game today. Yet this is the example people keep coming back to, because Rockstar did it so right this one time. Behold the power of intelligent art design!

The basic gameplay of San Andreas marks the point at which Rockstar finally managed to develop their little open world crime spree game to actually feel intuitive to play. Free aim and lock on naturally flow in and out of each other so you can fire how you want, crouching and rolling adds versatility to positioning even without a cover system. The RPG elements wrapped into your specific gun proficiency encourages the player to pick favourites, but also experiment with other weapons to bring their skill bar high on their entire arsenal. Carl can actually swim, making huge swathes of the map a whole lot less dangerous to traverse. You've got stamina based sprinting, eating and gaining muscle mass and/or fat, 'girlfriends' to maintain and keep happy for special benefits; this is that evolution pinnacle point where everything GTA bought to the player's arsenal coalesced into a gameplay experience where the player felt free in how they wanted to play and weren't wrestling with controls that sometimes don't feel like they want work with you or a world simulation that falls a little flat when you poke at it. Again, a breathing and tangible and insane open world is the legacy of San Andreas. 

Vehicle controls are improved on, obviously as being one of the key tenets of Grand Theft Auto, and whilst the 'driving proficiencies' skill level don't provide quite as tangible benefits as some of the other skill tress; (falling off your bike is something you want to not be thinking about, so the less you do it the better) the skill-dependant races and Derbies lit up across the map provide enough incentive to want to improve your driving game. And the various vehicle schools, whilst frustrating at times, are great benchmarks for improvement that can bring clumsy drivers to a point of genuine skill. I know because I used to be one of those insanely clumsy drivers back when I played GTA SA for the first time all those years ago, and this was the game which taught me, through fire, how to handle the Grand Theft Auto driving mechanics. Hiding an in-depth and complete driving  tutorial as an in-game obstacle course that both celebrates all of the improvements to the driving simulation and teaches you how to exploit them is just another genius bit of game design from the company who wrote the patent on smart game development ideas.

In narrative, Grand Theft Auto San Andreas lays out the story of a gangster from the hoods of Los Santos embarking on an adventure of gang warfare that expands out into an struggle against corrupt cops, Vietnamese gangsters who use Japanese-style Katanas for some reason, mafia run casinos and even a bit of intergovernmental conspiracy. (Although you're, very intentionally, not really integrated too much into the specifics of that plotline to avoid the narrative slipping into 'spy-action' territory.) As opposed to some of the earlier GTAs (specifically 3) where it can kind of feel like you're passing through these sectors of criminality in order to tick off their appearance on some overarching list of criminal representation, San Andreas is big enough for the player to take their time getting into the gritty of each seedy underworld and learning the distinction between each one. Of course, these are very surface level distinctions, in gameplay just about every enemy acts in the exact same way just as they've done through GTA history, but in the narrative you really tackle every grift the devs could think of, so that when you're out on the otherside it really feels like the whole West Coast is beneath your foot. (With the exception of the Mafia. Even if I know that Salvatore Leone couldn't die, because his appearance was a cameo anyway.)

The only part which I think severely lets the general package down is the structure of the missions, which I think takes far too long to evolve into anything approaching complexity. Throughout the early game you're being presented with extremely straightforward missions with one or two objectives tied to a simple format, by the mid game that hasn't changed and it's not really until the set-piece endgame moments like the Mansion Raid, Casino Heist and final mission that we get these more involving missions with multiple layers that stretch beyond that basic premise of 'Go here and do the objective, great job mission complete'. This makes a lot of the smaller mid-game missions feel almost like side content that get forgotten about as soon as you're done with them. Perhaps there was a little bit of 'quantity over quality' buzzing around the mission dev department. At least those final few missions were fun.

Talking about the quality of the voice cast almost seems like a waste of time because you merely need to look at the names of the cast to know exactly the level of performances San Andreas has in store. One of the main villains is played by Samuel L Jackson, for goodness sake; there really was no expense spared. But in terms of writing; Rockstar did a perfect job nailing the colloquiums and verbiage of this sort of world in a way that is both entertaining and natural, almost in stark contrast to what another gangster-themed game, Saints Row, has recently done. Would I go so far as to say this is an improvement over the great job that Vice City does? I think it's ultimately a question of taste; I prefer this style of dialogue and story to the mafia/Scarface themes of Vice City and so I like this game's dialogue more, but in terms of quality I'd argue both are as good as each other. Prime quality voice acting, as Rockstar always demands.

Oh and lastly I want to mention the endgame state which I think was, at least to some degree, designed to be a direct foil to GTA 3's endgame state. The narrative of GTA 3 made it so that every gang wanted to kill Claude, ultimately making free roaming post the main story next to impossible in highly concentrated gang areas thanks to how quickly you'd get shot to pieces. San Andreas has an entire riot phase of the city which is meant to mimic the LA riots. San Andreas focuses more on depicting general chaos between citizens by making the AI hostile to one another, putting a smoke effect over some buildings, depopulating cars that aren't police cars on the streets and making those that do spawn close to exploding, and throwing in a unique animation or two of citizens running down the street holding a TV. Free roaming through all of that is pretty miserable, thanks to the constant chaos, but it's used as a back drop for the narrative that is entirely reversed by the end of the game. Meaning that unlike GTA 3, you can still go around in your completed save and enjoy the game world without being gun downed the second you enter Leone controlled territory. I appreciate that.

San Andreas is a piece of my childhood and always will be, a guilty pleasure I remember waking up in the wee hours of the night to play just a little bit of before anyone could spot me. So I'm going to be biased towards the thing, that's just how it works. But even with that bias, I think it's hard not to see that for the 3D era of GTA, San Andreas is the perfected state of everything the company were trying to achieve with their open world efforts. Everything felt improved and remade to such a standard that it fit together in a seamless package of moving parts so intricate that the untrained eye never even sees the inside of the clock in motion; a standard which Open World games have been required to meet ever since or face being labelled 'dated'. It's my favourite of this era, and still close to my favourite Rockstar game ever made, which is why a nostalgia driven grade of A should surprise nobody. If you can swallow 2005 graphics, the game still functionally holds up to tell a fun gangster story across a sprawling open world that breathed before we even knew what that style of open world even meant. A benchmark in the history of games, that I still heartily recommend.