"Welcome to Los Santos"
It feels like it's been an eternity since then.

2013 was 11 years ago, I was twelve.. 11 years ago.. but everytime I hear that soundtrack it sends chills down my spine.

This game WAS everything to me. Being the pre-pubescent kid that I was, its narrative perfectly represented that teenage angst I embodied at that time, "the world sucks, society sucks.. and we all suck more for wanting to live with it". Grand Theft Auto 5's narrative was glazed by a layer of pessimism, no one in this story is genuine, everyone's out for themselves, everyone's lying for breakfast and backstabbing each other for dinner. That pessimism was sprinkled with comedy that is so blatantly and unapologetically ironic, everything in this world is a parody for the 2010s and thinking about it again, its superficiality is so.. obnoxious.. that it became rather charming. The characters were.. fun? I think they're perfect vessels for the player to go out and interact with the world, I really love their respective side-missions that were just bat-shit insane. Each of their personalities clash well with one another, creating a dynamic that is both intensely unhealthy and surprisingly wholesome at the same time, I really enjoy that.

Years after I finished playing the campaign, i hopped back into this game, this time to experience the online version.. and god it was a mix of emotions.

The game was cooked, like seriously. People were just going around griefing each other with their Oppresor MK2s, hackers were everywhere, chats were just spammed with missing Chinese characters promoting some service that'd probably get you flagged by the government. Load times were horrendous, finding a server takes forever and you're almost CERTAINLY guaranteed to disconnect some time in the next hour, forcing you to go and load in all over again.

The online content was BAD. I'd admit though, there's charm in the first few hundred hours of trying to become a business mogul.. but overall, running the businesses felt like a waste of time. The activities were pointless and repetitive, heists were fun for the first couple of runs but it ends up turning into a grind once you found the exploits to everything. Everything just felt like a routine, it's so braindead.

Slop aside though, I think some of my best experiences of online gaming happened through GTA:O. Going online with friends was amazing and the possibilities were damn near limitless.. and honestly, I'd go through the shitty loading times to have the same fun I had with my mates all over again. This shit was therapeutic lowkey.

To conclude, let me reiterate the point I made earlier, this game is truly cooked. The live service stuff just sucks and I don't think Rockstar could've added anything more for this game. Shark cards are stupidly expensive, the items in the game were scaled way too hard to balance and new players have trouble adjusting to the way the game (grind) simply operates.

Grand Theft Auto 5 was a great game, it truly was.. in 2013. It's about time we let it go