GTA IV has a unique aesthetic that's got a hopeful but grounded feel to it. You really feel like you're a schmuck in the land of opportunity trying to get your dreams of Stephanie with beeeg teetttees and Barbara who suck like vacuum. The post-Soviet expat community in Hove Beach mixed with Vladivostok FM and doing dirty work for Vlad and Faustin really makes you feel like you're at the bottom rung in a new world, still clinging to the hard lessons of the long gone eastern bloc but with an underlying hope of making it, only this feeling falls flat once you leave the first island. Nowhere else does the game feel as visceral, real, or concentrated. The mission variety sucks and the environments that follow just don't hold a candle to the early game so aside from good characters hard carrying, like my boys Dwayne and Little Jacob, it's just a slog from then on out. Meanwhile GTA V succeeds in fleshing out the world beyond the first quarter of the game, giving you some good substance to chew on and places to explore, even though it's much less personal and grounded than Niko's story. Its aesthetic, despite not being as distilled as GTA IV, still gives you the real essence of Los Santos, from the hustlers in the hood to neon illuminated vinewood hills and the romantic granduer of the past. As much as I love GTA IV, GTA V managed to implement the scale, variety, and clarity of their core vision much more effectively even if the almost episodic minis-series story didn't scratch the same itch that GTA IV's crime thriller did. What can I say? I just like both games a lot, and they both have different strengths that the other doesn't quite match.
https://youtu.be/eukAfV8H7X8
