Let's move on to the more serious flaws. I must mention the game's protagonist, CJ. The designers really screwed this character. In the beginning, he seemed so much more than the stupid thugs from the previous GTA games. But they had to turn him into a total mess, into a character without mutually contradicting values and more than vague personality.
Could you describe CJ? What kind of a person is he? Is he kind? Is he cruel? What's the most important thing for him? What does he like, what does he dislike? Let's say I'd try to conclude the answer from what CJ does in the game. Very well. During one of the missions, CJ rescues a girl from a house he himself set on fire. He doesn't think twice. This is an obligatory action: you have to enter the burning house and save a totally unknown girl.
From this I conclude that CJ is a really good, compassionate, brave person. And then in another mission he has to drown two people, one of which is a girl. So he just saves, for no reason, a totally unknown girl, and within a very short time period, kills another unknown girl? Does it make any sense at all?
And this is just one drastic example; there are plenty more of those inconsistencies in the character. And no, nothing happens that would change the hero's values. The order in which you undertake the two aforementioned missions is not set. Both are obligatory, but you can do them in any order you like. You can first drown one girl, then rescue the other one. Or the other way around.
This reveals the attitude the developers have to their games. They don't take them seriously. That would be okay with GTA III, because it wasn't serious to begin with. But in "San Andreas", they managed to lure me in. It was supposed to be a serious, dark revenge story, but they carelessly turned it into a disjointed plot with a randomly acting protagonist.
But my biggest problem with "San Andreas", something that nearly made me quit playing the game, were some disgusting, revolting missions the designers felt obliged to include in the game. Usually, the missions of this game involve killing other bad guys. Most of the time they attack you the moment they see you. Unfortunately, the developers probably felt that all this stuff was too "good, and therefore boring", and decided to add some more "cool evil" stuff - obligatory, like everything else in the game.
There is a mission in which you must kill two unarmed people. One of them is a manager who must be killed only because he dislikes the songs written by your twisted friend, the one who gives you the mission. The other is his girlfriend. You have to kill them by driving them into the water, allowing them to drown. Okay, the manager was obviously a bastard, but what about the girl?
Then there is another mission in which you have to kill a valet in order to get his uniform. You have to kill him. The game forces you to. You can't intimidate him. You can't beat him up. You can't knock him unconscious. When I knocked him down, hoping the game will be satisfied with that. But it was satisfied only when the valet's blood started gushing out of his body. And the valet didn't even resist. He didn't even hit me back once. He was a completely innocent person the game forced me to kill.
But there's more. In another mission you must bury a worker alive in cement just because he whistled at your sister. Okay, so he was the foreman of the workers who tried to kill me after I destroyed their constructions, but why did the game make me kill him in such a fashion?
I have no problem that this game allows you to kill innocents. That would be your choice, and your choice only. I actually love this kind of freedom, I like it that you can always choose whether to be good or evil. But here, they made me do evil things for no reason at all. That's where I draw the line. And I'm very, very surprised that nobody else seems to have been bothered by this design philosophy.
