GTA: San Andreas’ Most Frustrating Mission Shows How Far Rockstar Has Come in 22 Years

With Grand Theft Auto 6 on the horizon, I felt the urge to go back to the game that defined much of my childhood: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. In 2005, it was one of the first four titles I bought for my PlayStation 2, along with Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts, and Devil May Cry 3. I can’t play the version I replayed countless times as a kid, so I bought Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition on Steam, which includes San Andreas, and launched it.

I also refused to play it with a controller. Not with those controls.

It has been 22 years since San Andreas arrived. Back then, its enormous map and nearly endless list of activities felt like a technological leap. It also told a story that felt like an urban epic. You play Carl “CJ” Johnson, a former gang member, and I still feel like I know him the way I’d know a childhood friend. He returns to his hometown to find out more about his mother’s death. There he finds his old crew, the Grove Street Families, struggling to survive a gang war. The game opens with CJ being dumped out of a police car, a brief and brutal lesson in systemic violence. He grabs a nearby bike to get to his old neighborhood. The moment I hopped on that bike in the opening sequence and rolled onto Grove Street, I was 14 again. I was a more tired version of that kid, but I was still earning respect and kicking ass in style. Hell yeah!

Riding that bike also reminded me how clunky Rockstar’s controls used to be. Steering felt like piloting a truck. Running around on foot with CJ and trying to aim drove me up the wall, because he kept veering off in sudden, unwanted directions. Playing San Andreas after two decades of advances in game design and technology demands some forgiveness. Still, oh my god, going back to a 22-year-old Grand Theft Auto game puts those advances in perspective.

My mix of affection for the world and characters and frustration with the controls peaked during a single mission: “OG Loc.” It’s one of Big Smoke’s missions. He, Sweet, and CJ go to the police station to pick up Jeffrey, an old friend. Jeffrey has been desperate to break into gangster life, so he’s reinvented himself as “OG Loc” and started committing petty crimes, which landed him in jail. Behind bars, he was sexually assaulted by another inmate, who, according to Jeffrey, had stolen his rhymes.

Through Jeffrey, San Andreas examines how crime gets glamorized and the moral cost for people living inside that world. Jeffrey has always longed to belong to the same world as his friends from Grove Street, chasing the status and power he believes being a gangster would give him. Within seconds of meeting him, you can tell his tough-guy image is a forced imitation of what he imagines a “real” gangster is like.

CJ, Big Smoke, and Sweet don’t lecture Jeffrey about his choices. They treat him like a naive kid, a “fool,” as Sweet calls him more than once. Each of them came to crime for different reasons, but they all agree that anyone with a way out should take it. Jeffrey had the chance to go to college. Big Smoke even jabs at him with, “Hey Jeffrey, I thought you was going to, uh, college.” Instead, he’s playing at being a bad boy.

“OG Loc” tells a compelling story, and it helped me understand why this game resonates so deeply with me and with so many other players in Brazil, where I live. I doubt I could have fully absorbed and appreciated its writing 22 years ago, for a number of reasons. Then again, I wasn’t prepared to feel so wretched while chasing down Freddy, the man who abused Jeffrey.

After you collect Jeffrey, the mission leads you to Freddy’s house. Jeffrey’s former cellmate brushes him off, calling it “just a prison thing,” and flees on a motorcycle. Jeffrey declares, “I gotta protect my rep!” and asks CJ to help him chase Freddy on another bike. Freddy never really stole his rhymes. By assaulting Jeffrey, he took away his dignity, and Jeffrey tries to win it back through violent revenge. The characters’ moral values are tested here, but what comes next is one of the most irritating chase sequences I’ve ever played.

Freddy tears through narrow alleys, and as I tried to keep up, I kept slamming into the walls of nearby buildings, sending both CJ and OG Loc flying. Getting the motorcycle upright and moving again took forever. When I finally beat the alleys, I still had to fight the game’s stiff handling. Making U-turns to stay on Freddy’s tail felt like a boss fight, with every move demanding careful calculations of speed and angle. Each time I toppled off the bike or lost precious seconds lining up with the right street, I mashed the buttons, hoping to speed things along. Inside my head I was screaming, “Faster!! Freddy is escaping, and I don’t want to start this mission again for the fifth time!!!”

San Andreas is a classic that left its mark on gaming history in more ways than one, and I’m curious to see how GTA 6, with its push for realism, measures up against the groove of Grove Street. The stories and characters of San Andreas will never lose their weight and depth, but I doubt I’ll keep cruising around San Andreas for much longer.

Source: Polygon