This game was genuinely great until Trevor gets introduced lol

I've replayed and beat this game three times (Xbox 360, Xbox One then PC) and I've had fun playing it but to be honest I didn't care much about the story and just played it to do crazy stuff.

After playing IV and paying more attention to stuff, I wanted to replay V to get a better perspective of how I'd view at as I'm older and I was genuinely having a lot of fun at first. I really like Michael and Franklin as characters, they're both funny but have some traits about them that make them feel like they could be real people. The missions in the game are also pretty varied and enjoyable and IMO, much better than IV's missions.

However, as soon as you finish the Jewelry Store heist, I feel like the game's story just completely declines and even the missions start to become much less fun.

I fucking hate Trevor, there's genuinely not a single thing I like about him as an adult. He's ugly, insanely try hard edgy with him being a cannibal and being into bestiality for some reason? He's dick to pretty much everyone unless its made for comedic value like how he falls in love for Martin's wife because she's a silly old lady (because its funny I guess). He just completely embodies the QUIRKY RANDOM🤪 era of the early 2010's when this game was made and Rockstar tries to glaze him as much as possible and make him seem so funny and badass when he's just an insane retard.

Trevor's missions fucking suck too and I hate all of Trevor's friends. All of his friend's barely exist after you leave for LS in the part of the game where you're FORCED to play as Trevor and they all just suck him off and praise him and have no other traits. Again, Rockstar tries SO HARD to make you like Trevor but I feel like it would be impossible for anyone over the age of 18 to do so.

If it was just Michael and Franklin it would be a cool dynamic between the rich class who's disillusioned with materialism and Franklin who's trying to grind to get to the top. Trevor is has like no thematic reasoning in the story besides just being apart of Michael's past, he's such a FORCE!

This game in general has a lot of places where it jumps the shark in terms of trying way too hard to be satire to the point where it isn't funny. Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of funny things in the game but so many of the Weazel News ads on the radio made me roll my eyes and there's still plenty of characters outside of Trevor's story that are just obnoxious and way too cartoonishly annoying like all of Michael's family. GTA has always had pretty on the nose stuff in terms of humor but idk I feel like in V they try way too hard.

I do like some of the characters though. I really liked Lamar and Franklin's dynamic (It's too bad Franklin just doesn't exist in the story after Trevor is introduced 🙃) and there are plenty of things that are cool about the game. Los Santos is really cool, the radio is great, I love the amount of customization and money sinks with the cars, weapons, clothes, stocks, real estate, etc.

I just am really disappointed with how much worse this game gets after the Jewelry Heist because tbh if the game was just as consistently good beforehand, I may even say that this game is better than IV, even despite its detail and gameplay downgrades.

Regardless of all the things I bitch about, the game is still pretty enjoyable IMO, just very disappointing in a lot of ways.

Chapter One
A child ran off from their village, filled with rage. A petty kind of anger; one that the child would have all but forgotten about the next time you saw them. This next time would never come, though. The child disappeared and in their place stood a Destroyer.

Chapter Two
The village seemed different. Strange new people kept showing up, with pig shaped masks covering their eyes. On the surface, they went about their business and chatted like any other villager but the more mind you paid them, the more their words rang hollow. Their thoughts and jokes seemed inorganic; mass produced even. As these Pigmasks gathered in the village, the original people there felt alienated. An old man, once known for his insights and his sharp wit would get angrier and angrier, lashing out at those around him and eventually leaving. More villagers would follow suit, some of them against their will, as this community they saw as a safe haven to share things they couldn’t share anywhere else slowly but surely became part of that “anywhere else.”
Were these Pigmasks to blame for everything? Or was it merely a case of things that always infested the community finally bubbling up to the surface? And what of the Destroyer, a one-time villager, now hailed as the champion of the Pigmasks?

Chapter Three
A monkey walked through a forest with boxes on their back; head and torso fighting a fierce battle to not fall and hit the ground. This grueling process eventually became routine and the monkey’s body eventually went on autopilot. They had all this time to think about if they’ll ever move past this task and if they’ll ever have a purpose.
Did the Destroyer have the same thoughts in this same forest?

Chapter Four
Another village child was not unlike the one who would become the Destroyer. In fact, you could say that these two village children were a single entity; two sides of the same coin. The Destroyer was the head of this coin, facing up and always the topic of conversation from those who saw this “face.” The tail, stuck to the ground, reveled in the attention the head received. They took glee in seeing friends talk about the Destroyer without any clue of its relation to the one standing near them. They searched for other villagers’ words on this mysterious Destroyer and snuck into houses to see them: the praise, the insults, the natural discussions surrounding this new “symbol” of the village.
This was not healthy for the village child. But still, could you blame them? This sensation of feeling important, even if that importance was just a niche micro-celeb in a small village, was much more comforting than the cold reality of meaning nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Chapter Five
A Pigmask working in a tower was a big fan of a rock band. They were utterly awestruck at the sight of that band’s merchandise on the man that entered the tower earlier that day and could not talk about anything other than that band: expressing their love of the band’s work, idolizing the ones behind it as supposedly great people, and elevating the band to some moral paragon because of milquetoast political opinions in its songs.
The Destroyer was in the tower too, watching this Pigmask’s conversation with mere apathy if not active contempt.

Chapter Six
Sometimes, ghosts of the past appear as reminders of what will never come back.

Chapter Seven
The Destroyer pulled a needle out of the ground and felt nothing. They pulled quite a bit of these needles before but something was different this time. The act was now done only out of some perceived obligation; to the Pigmasks and villagers cheering on or to the fake images of hearts that result from the act. It was time for the last needle to be pulled.

Chapter Eight
The Destroyer laid on the ground motionless as its tail pulled the final needle on its behalf. Its supposed stardom was crushed into not even half a star.
It’s over.