The second trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 came out yesterday. The open world crime ’em up looks as flashy and expensive as you might expect from a Rockstar game, and we now know more about the game’s story, particularly the two sexy reprobates you’ll be playing as in the streets of Vice City and the swampy countryside beyond. They are horny, jacked, thicc, and pretty as a picture of your prettiest purple petticoat. They are also, so far, extremely boring.
This is all knee-jerk op-ed trash talk coming up, you understand. It’s usually best to wait until release and let a game speak for itself before passing judgement in the form of a tidy review. But this is GTA. It’s huge enough to take a few muckslings from an errant dirtbag journo who watches this latest trailer and feels close to no human connection to anyone or anything in it.
Take Jason. I hope he doesn’t get arrested. Because you could not pick him out of a line up of pate-razored 2010s-era male protagonists. Both he and Lucia are good-looking and sexy in a way that GTA anti-heroes have not previously been, as Edwin observed in a behind-the-scenes RPS meeting where we gripe about people more handsome than ourselves. Perhaps they’re so photogenic because we’ll be watching them fuck each other a lot and Rockstar can’t fathom an audience among today’s TikTok fiends who would endure two uggos doing the dirty burpees.
There’s nothing wrong with being gorgeous – ride on, you beautiful bastards. But if you are going to be eminently bonkable, at least have the decency to also be mildly interesting. Here’s the blurb for Jason “Commander Shepard Again” Duval.
Jason grew up around grifters and crooks. After a stint in the Army trying to shake off his troubled teens, he found himself in the Keys doing what he knows best, working for local drug runners. It might be time to try something new.
“Ex-army strong guy” is not a particularly interesting character pitch, and over the course of the trailer Jason offers no line of dialogue or physical action to pique my interest. He likes beer. He drives a car. He loves his hot crazy Latina girlfriend. I could not give two Florida figs about this bro, he looks like an extra in Home And Away. There is a conspiracy theory among online speculators that he is an undercover cop, which would explain a lot, and perhaps make the central relationship of the game more interesting. But it’s just as likely Jason was pitched as exactly the type of blandoman that GTA’s core audience would happily inhabit as a cipher. This itself is a problem for storytelling if you are going for the cinematic approach, as Rockstar often do.
Now, let’s look at his other half. Lucia “My Hips May Actually Lie” Caminos. Aka, we have Michelle Rodriguez at home. Aka, every Latina character in Orange Is The New Black but rolled into one.
Lucia’s father taught her to fight as soon as she could walk. Life has been coming at her swinging ever since. Fighting for her family landed her in the Leonida Penitentiary. Sheer luck got her out. Lucia’s learned her lesson — only smart moves from here.
There is, I think, more to work with here in terms of building a compelling character. From Rockstar’s description and a few lines of dialogue, we can sense some grim determination in Lucia, a belief that the world is out to get her, and that the only way to win such a fight is to become even fightier. In other words, Lucia is likely to be the engine of the protagonal pair, whose beliefs and motivation drive things forward. But even with that, there is more than a whiff of “spicy girlfriend” to her persona, which we’ll again have to hope is dispelled with some interesting twist. (Oh my god, could SHE be the cop!?!?!?! (no)).
Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. In the original Vice City, Tommy Vercetti was simply an angry jerk with a penchant for screaming bloody murder. In GTA 4 we had Niko, an Eastern European immigrant whose American Dream was to become rich doing scummy odd jobs for the various lunatics of Liberty City. Neither Niko or Tommy are particularly fascinating characters, but they were at least motivated, unlike the seemingly along-for-the-ride Jason. In GTA 5 we had the odd thruple of Michael, a crime guy in midlife crisis, Trevor, a trailer trash loose cannon, and, uh, Franklin, who was also there.
As you might have guessed, I feel like GTA’s characters have always struggled to develop beyond their synopsis, partly because of the game’s messy “spray ‘n’ pray” approach to satire. Throw enough caricatures of tech bros, CIA men, and yoga instructors at the wall and some of it will stick. But none of it will grow legs and walk in a curious new direction. Most of the side characters for GTA 6, as described in a swish scoll on the game’s website, fail to step outside Grand Theft Expectations. Bank robber in a suit. Gangster turned rapper. I can’t be the only one yawning at this, surely.
Again, all this is just me trash-talking a game that still has at least one year of the development treadmill left to run. But when all we’ve got are story trailers, all you’ll get are hot takes. There are others at RPS who value Rockstar’s storytelling chops more highly, in particular when it comes to Red Dead Redemption 2. But if the game wants me to care about its cast, Jason and Lucia are going to have to be more than gun-shooting eye candy.
