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What they should have done for a sequel: Time Travel. It was in the ending of SR4 if you got 100%, and can you imagine a sandbox game where you can swap between the old west, modern day, the future, maybe even the medieval periods all at the touch of a button? The potential was amazing (even if it'd require multiple versions of the same city) for taking it truly to the next level. Instead we got.. this..
There is something you forget about the end of Saints Row 4: they introduce time travel. Now imagine a naked guy dildoing his way through the crusades, and tell me it wouldn't have been a hell of an escalation.
True. They could have also borrowed from the isekai tropes in anime and other stories and had them get flung into a sword and sorcery dimension devoid of all their original wealth and influence. The boss powerbombing an ogre from the top of a fortified tower onto an enemy wizard would also be an escalation.
It could've been a cool adventure through time. they could even do a whole SR2 part where you have to make sure not to meet your younger self, all tounge in cheek. maybe even referencing that the default boss had an entire different look from 3 and 4.( as well as a redo of the "shaundi meets stoner shaundi-joke" from 4).
>a naked guy dildoing his way through the crusades >Evil Dead was a great movie series Imagine your [naked] character in a cutscene going "THIS...is my BOOMSTIIIIICK!" with a giant purple dildo.
The fact your character is supposed to be a young twenty-something struggling with student debt really restricted the character customization for most people. Sure you can make your character an old man or granny with a thick Texan or British accent, but then you hear them talk like they're fresh out of college and it just ruins the suspension of disbelief. It's the first time where the plot is actually getting in the way of the customization. In trying to become relatable it ends up being alienating.
Yeah. Saints Row 2 and onwards were really good with carefully writing to make sure any possible character would slot into the story, but the reboot just abandoned that ethos entirely.
okay you're right, but I just want to add that its not uncommon for older people go to back to uni to study a new field, LOTS of people actually do that. for example, I studied film and media with a 45 year old who was sick of psychology and wanted to move onto something different.
@@kabobawsome Even the zombie voice in SR3 somehow worked, but most of the custom characters in the reboot just look wrong. Having such a young supporting cast and having them as your roommates really limits things.
Another thing I want to bring up and why Saints Row 2 has a firm placement in my Top 10 games of all time: is that in addition to the crazy wackiness of things is the contrast of really good characterization and storytelling. What I like about SR2 more than the others is that your character is, while mostly an unstoppable badass, also prone to consequences. Carlos’ death, one of the most heartbreaking things in this series, is because the protagonist directly declined to work with The Brotherhood. Johnny Gat loses the love of his life in an actually gut wrenching scene. But when these things happen: your Protagonist fights back. You killed Carlos? We kill your girlfriend. You killed Aiesha? We bury your ass alive. Even the final “gang” Ultor has compelling reasons to be villainous and it’s fun watching the leader of the Saints dismantle them. The other Saints have great characterization too: Carlos feeling out of place, Pierce’s attempts to lead being completely shut down, and the fact Shaundi’s promiscuous nature actually proves a vital asset to the gang due to the fact she has so many contacts she can utilize. It’s this strong characterization and the contrast between the silly and serious that makes 2 my favorite of the games.
Dude have you played 2 recently like Carlo's death is hilarious because the game thinks it did anything to make me care about Carlos like oh my god here is the entire character of Carlos hi I'm the guy who couldn't scream I'm going to die more likely if I was wearing a red hat instead of a purple one I have no other distinguishable personality trait except I'm young. Saints row 2 is has very poorly written story if we can't work don't end it is one note in fact I'm going to list all those notes please Johnny Gat badass, Shaendi stoner girl guy Dean Vogel ass hole businessman the general Haitian stereotype pappi Sanji l sidekick of stereotype Marlo the scary big guy the Ronin leader compensating arrogant son the Ronin leaders dad disappointed father the Ronin bald guy is just a ninja. Yah no everything you've said is completely wrong and filled by nostalgia. Saints row 2 isn't a bad game but it is not the perfect game people treat it as
Saints Row 2 also didn't sugarcoat that the Boss was a bloody psychopath - heck, there's only one character he never really yelled at or treated badly in any way and that was Carlos. The other Saints had to earn that affection. This was a guy who had no problem locking somebody in a trunk to get crushed by their unsuspecting lover or burying somebody alive. 3 played with the idea of the Boss and their crew having grown soft, which was kinda interesting - but then 4 kinda lost the plot for me by making the Boss and the Saints bona fida heroes. While Yahtzee praises the serial escalation, It was always a drawback for me personally because it kinda took the series away from what I enjoyed about it in the first place. 3 at least still had you do gang shit, even morally questionable stuff, but 4 just threw that all out for space VR hijinks - it also managed to make some of its own mechanics obsolete. For example, why steal and upgrade a car if you can just jump or fly anywhere?
Although Carlos wasn't a character I particularly liked his death was incredibly handled, you could see the boss trying to find someway to help him before realising its too late, and just to save him anymore pain, its a perfectly nightmarish and horrific scene. And this is why I despise the beginning of saints row 4, the boss is put into their worst nightmare and its a silly world without violence rather than one of the most traumatising character deaths I have seen in fiction.
@@kendaar9002 ding ding! Yeah maybe Carlos wasn't a super deep character but I don't need a fucking bottomless ocean of characterisation or get to know everything about a character to make me care. Carlos saved you from prison, had a brother in the Saints and really wanted to be part of it always ready. With that I saw the type of man Carlos was and that was enough. And his death is brutal, the way it was handled brutal that it forces you to care. Seeing my boss take out one of his own lieutenants? That shit hit hard.
I will always have a soft spot for my Boss, a man dressed like a detective in a white fedora and trenchcoat, and insists on going through the entire game with nothing but dual-weilding gold pistols.
My boss was a dreaded redhead, drunk on vodka all the time and mobbed around with his shotgun always stopping to beat up pimps . Who has the better pimp hand now, buddy!
My Boss was an asshole Latina who occasionally ran around as a nudist because she was THAT damn proud of her tattoos. She also had an interesting story arc as she lost her accent by the forth game.
I love that there are two types of saints row fan. Yet both of them tend to despise the reboot. 1. Those that hold 2 as the peak of the series, enthralled by the contrast between serious, weighty narrative and absurd side jobs (I feel like most of us moved onto Yakuza and felt right at home, tbh) 2. The spectacle chasers who like 3 and 4 the most, whose enjoyment comes from watching the trainwreck and wondering when some random 747 is going to slam into it.
I can totally identify as the first type. Coincidentally I discovered the Yakuza series a few months ago and got completely hooked to the series. Also completely struck as to why Japanese studios still seem to do it right while Western studios all fall in line of the same bland (bugged/broken) game design and writing. I was actually amazed how intense the story of Yakuza 0 was and at the same time gave me so much crazy side activities to explore. It actually felt like I was playing something that simply doesn't seem to exist in modern gaming anymore.
I got in the SR3, the charm of that game got me, and I also liked tig ol' bitties, and the jiggle physics. But the larger point is right -- we two groups banded together and hate the Reboot. Volition decided to be cross with both of us to seek out another group, so we cast them away.
100% second type for me, bf is the first type and thinks I'm weird. Probably helps I'm not nostalgic for SR2 at all (not to say you SR2 guys are wrong, but nostalgia's the only conceivable way I'd personally like it more) since I didn't pick up the series until my mid-twenties. SR3 specifically is peak for me. 2 has a blend of serious mainquest and whacky sidequests, but it's like steak and potatoes. It's very much 2 things. 3 is like a hearty beef stew with potato chunks in it, where the whacky and the serious achieve something approaching homogeneity. Perfect balance of trainwreck whacky fun time that pushes the boundary on plausibility to the very limit, *just* shy of becoming a full-on sci-fi/fantasy game. Sure, there's some advanced technology (the hoverbikes and stuff) but it isn't ubiquitous or commonplace within the world of the game - it's... "futuristic but not sci-fi", I guess (obviously this is still technically sci-fi, and this is a total cop-out) . 4 and Gat Outta Hell go off the deep end entirely. 4's *really fun*, the superpowers and stuff are great gameplay additions, but it's 'all whacky all the time there are no brakes on this train to crazy town lol XD so random". I unashamedly admit I do absolutely love that, it just... lost something for me. It lost its potatoes and deepfried the steak.
Am I the only SR fan who actually likes the reboot? Probably. I'm in group 2, and that might be why I like it more than others. Hear me out. I've never given 1 and 2 a real go because 1 was never on PC and 2 was a broken port. Perhaps why I like SRR so much is because of that. I had never really played a silly yet 'realistic' SR game. This is the closest I had. But yeah, I'm not going to call Reboot Row good or anything. I just said I liked it, but I won't defend the bad parts of it.
I picked up Saints Row 4 as a whim because it was like 15 bucks and to this day it is one of the best values I've ever gotten. I had played SR1, and enjoyed it, but even after skipping the middle entries and diving into 4 cold, I was immediately sucked into the experience. Most of the time, I was like a parent coming home after a weekend business trip to discover my child turned the dog green, gave themselves laser eyes and is now the night manager at the local Home Depot.
2's pretty good even though you need to install a mod to actually get it to run right on PC since the port literally has Turbo Mode locked to ON and that mod is the only way to really fix it...plus it's just a good mod in general that doesn't pull a Bethesda mod and wildly change the game. 3 is honestly one of the last gasps of ye olden days when cheat codes were something you unlocked instead of something you bought, since the late-game upgrades can make you pretty much immortal and have infinite ammo with no reloading, but that's tied together with a relatively-serious plot about the identity of the Saints as a whole. Plus zombies, for some reason.
Why do I feel like the only takeaway Deep Silver will pull from this is that they need to add a Cockney accent into their next run-of-the-mill Saints Row game?
@@KeithCopeland67 Never underestimate funding that comes from thin air. Every time you think it's a failure, someone pulls money from their ass and it becomes a trilogy.
To be fair to Volition, they did try to put the Saints to rest. Unfortunately, their solution was a cringy mess with tired gameplay, and their takeaway was "I guess we have to use the Saints IP to prop up our cringy messes with tired gameplay." Volition took the absolute wrong lessons from Agents of Mayhem, and so we got this.
All Saint's Row 5 needed to do was have the Saints try to save the Earth using time travel (established in the end of 4) and fudge it all up only to do a sort of soft reboot where they know what's coming and have to prepare for it. (and since the world isn't listening to "Aliens are coming" they have to make them listen)
@@sarafontanini7051 The antagonist would have been "Everyone who doesn't believe them" and that would probably have been all the countries of the world. Yeah it's a step back from "Spaaaaace" but they could have also gone with time travel antics and having the player do missions that the player would then need to stop later on because they made such a huge mess. Having the player be the protagonist and the antagonist would be a masterstroke.
I like the failing aspect, but since historic characters like Jane Austin, Aleister Crowley, and Santa has all be established, why not have the Saints traveling through time to recruit legends and epic heroes to help them save the Earth. Or maybe even Zinyak would recruit his own team of super evils throughout history? Having Hitler getting smack in the face with an red white and blue pixelated 'penetrators' by a major Saint character would make for great marketing materials.
@@rurimuni2937 Having a time travelling player be their own antagonist is a genius idea, but probably _incredibly_ hard to design, especially in a large open-world game. I know some smaller indie games have played around with similar concepts, and I hope one day somebody makes it work on a large scale. I can think of many ways it could go wrong and no ways it could go right, but fortunately I'm not a game designer 😕
@@KillahMate When they posted for writers for this game I did put in an application, with this outline for what would be cool. Sadly, I've only a few very niche smut novels under my belt and that isn't good enough.
Funnily enough, Saints Row IV DLC demonstrates that you _can_ escalate after you've gone into space: you just need to _go to Hell._ IMO the biggest mistake Volition made with the series was releasing Gat Out Of Hell as an expansion instead of turning the concept into Saints Row V - the same way they turned Enter the Dominatrix into Saints Row IV in the first place.
Actually, Saints Row 5 could've actually gone further. When you're finally in space, what comes next is time. Imagine if the reboot was instead about the Saints travelling back in time and across multiverses to save the dead characters and the world since it ended in 4? Couple that with jabs at the superhero burnout in recent time, and all the crappy adaptations going on. It's like what Deadpool did when he got the ability to change past events. Somebody commented this on a video about the reboot elsewhere. "What if all the reboot's trailer stuff was a bait all along, and then after you finish the tutorial the original Boss and crew arrive and shoot the reboot's Saints wannabes and take over as an entrance? Then you immediately enter character creation to start the game. That would be epic."
They had it right there. It was even teased in the credits of SR 4. Also, imagine if that game ended with you fighting God because he wants to scrub the Saints timeline, since it's so borked. An ending would be you losing, but then the new kids take up the mantle because "there will always be Saints." It would've kept the energy high since we would want to know if they ever get back to the 'weird' timeline, if it's an inevitability that s**t happens.
@@noxteryn This is the thing I can never agree with on Yahtzee. There is so many games in the space genre for a reason... It's infinite, which means you always have options to create tension and stakes. Ultimate crime syndicate of Earth? Meh ok. Ultimate crime syndicate of the galactic trade network? Oh my!
The thing about Always Be Escalating is an interesting concept. The God of War games did that from the first, to the second, to the third. The two side games and prequel (Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta and Ascension respectively) didn't have to escalate, never lowered the bar too much either. So I think it was a good idea for God of Four to instead go different. Then again, I don't think we have to worry about the God of War series going to space. Unless of course a future game takes on Japanese mythology and we end up on the moon fighting rabbits.
I mean traveling the nine realms is basically the same thing as going to different planets. In the Marvel Universe it arguably IS the same thing, even. So from a non-linear, non-subjective point of view, God of Four actually did go to space. Technically. Sort of. With wormholes instead of spaceships.
@@ThePCguy17 More of a dimensional thing I think, but point well made. Still, it was able to go different instead of bigger because the game changed location. Speaking of, I think Chains of Olympus might be low key the most important game of the franchise. If it wasn't for Kratos, everyone would be dead. If Atlas holds up the whole world instead of the part Greece is on, there would BE no location for Kratos to wash up on post III.
If I may interject, The New SR went wrong by misunderstanding what made the first ones so fun. The over the top whackiness, fun writing, and brilliant character customization are factors. However, the SR games had variety and still had consequences for your silly actions. Game modes where you play with the games ragdoll physics or have to get to an objective really fast. Have your character go cartoonishly flying 200ft because you crashed a motorcycle into an 18 wheeler. etc. A Saint's Row reboot could have been great, if the game was solid.
Saint Row IV's ending hinted that the next game would involve time travel. It may not exactly escalate from being the president of space, but it would certainly have kept the series' craziness while offering many different settings with new gameplay mechanics. (sigh) What could have been.
Well what obstacle cant be solved when you can out time travel your enemies? This super bad guy whose going to end the world? Go back in time five seconds before he pops up and shoot him in the head.
Saints Row IV established at the end of the game, The Zinyak (those aliens you fought in the simulation.) had access to time travel. That should've been the revival game. The Saints traveling through time with the boss fucking something up and creating new paradoxes within the Saints Row Universe. This could lead to trying to establish The Saints in different time periods and playing events from past games with differing results such as stopping Jessica from abducting Carlos or killing a young Phillip Lauren to prevent the SR 3 version of The Syndicate from forming. It could draw heavily from BTTF where you're in Stilwater / Steelport throughout time with different buildings and such.
Why stop there? Saints in medieval times. Saints in 1920s America. Saints in imperial Japan. While it would essentially just be a wacky slideshow of settings, that doesnt have to be a bad thing.
@@AnonJuggerbot "While it would essentially just be a wacky slideshow of settings, that doesnt have to be a bad thing." They've been doing this with Assasins Creed for a while and people still buy them.
Which is odd because Niko, as cool as he is, does suffer from Ludonarrative Dissonance, like how in the story he goes on about wanting to start a new life and avoid all the violence, blood, and death from the wars he was part of and yet they put him in a GTA game, the kind of game where you can run over civilians and commit mass shootings, and none of it has an effect on Niko in the story. If anything, a character like Claude Speed from GTA 3 is more suited to the kind of catharsis that GTA games tend to go for.
@@AshleySOAD Same, he's a good character who is very quotable, it's just that he's the odd one of the bunch. Like every other GTA protagonist, with maybe exception to Franklin and Michael from GTA 5, all want to become crime bosses/lords in one way or another, while Niko just wants to live a normal life. The chaos of GTA's gameplay suits them, it doesn't really suit Niko though.
@@TheCyclicGamer I guess it could work in him struggling to move on and that he wants to protect those around him, and depending on your choice revenge could consume and hurt those around him. But yeah, he's probably the most """jarring""" compared to the others in the series.
In terms of Rockstar protaganists, I don't know if Niko going around killing people is more or less jarring than the incorruptible Cole Phelps carjacking someone's convertible because it's faster than Rusty's Nash, then immediately mounting the sidewalk to get to a non-urgent appointment very slightly faster.
I'm gonna have to disagree with Yathzee here, because IV didn't go to space, not really. It went to a normal city that just happened to float into space (metaphorically speaking). They could've gone further by actually taking us to a city in space, populated by various alien species that you can interact with and whack over the head with a giant dildo. In other words, Saints Row V should've taken The Boss and fired them at The Citadel from Mass Effect!
was just thinking this. But that would mean the developers would have to have been imaginative... and the game would have probably cost more to develop ....and why would parasitic publishers want to do that?
Could have taken a rival factions/gangs on a new planet apprach. Plenty of room for wacky cultural misunderstandings and serious moments of dealing with being the last of humanity.
Agreed, Saints Row 4 was primarily a Matrix parody with us exploring a virtual reality human city with superpowers. They definitely could have escalated the next game even further by making it a Star Wars parody set in a proper alien city and having the Boss end the story as the Emperor of Space.
Yahtzee's Eulogy to Spider, the Cockney-accented custom character in a Riddler suit, is pure art. Also his delivery with proper contempt for the gods of game dev, who have sold their souls to the diabolic production committee of AAA Hell.
Yeah the addition of a 4th voice type (pretty sure it was 3 before), but total removal of the cockney geezer does read somewhat as cutting off your nose to spite your face...
It's kinda funny as well because at the end of SR4 it's said that the characters could go back in time because the main antagonist had a time machine so they probably could've done something with that instead of completely rebooting the series
Putting what I consider the fantastic saints row 2 aside, we really only need to look at saints row 1. For those who haven't played it the game did a good job of making you feel the struggle. Before you even start dealing with the other gangs you almost pointlessly die, and you get beaten up as initiation. You feel yourself rise up to where you are trusted and a valuable member of the gang. SR2022 you start with wingsuits and a chip on your shoulder.
Also the motivation for the protagonist. In saints row 1 he join the gang to push gang warfare out of his neighborhood. In SR2022 they start the gang to pay their student debts, but then to pay their gang members they rob a train, completely undercutting the necessity of starting the gang in the first place.
Yeah, not to mention that in the first game, you're not even the boss of the Saints, Julius is! You're just someone who rises up through the ranks. It's not until the 2nd game that you actually become the boss, but even then you do it by rebuilding the gang from the ground up. Playing the series from the very start really was like a rags to riches story.
@@BadgerOff32 More of a rags to "Holy fuck what is this now?" story. As you face off against a galactic overlord. Then the spinoff is literally about going to hell and kicking Satan's ass.
@@BadgerOff32 Actually why isn't Julius in this game ? He created 3rd streets Saints. If it's suppose to be origin story it would only make sens for him to be there.
@@BadgerOff32 true in the first game you only take over lead at the very end with explosive results. It is the second game you start from nothing as the leader and build up your gang. In both of these games you have a struggle, low points, drama, and heck even subtly. You grew up in a rough world and you become the bad element to try and get rid of the bad element. That even speaks to the futility of gangs in general all while having some damn fun. To me SR2022 feels like a cheap mini-golf course if that makes sense.
The thing you mentioned about the characters is so right. I make a british punk rocker with purple and blue liberty spikes EVERYTIME. I try to play as a different boss sometimes but I always switch them right back to my spikey headed psycho
That part about getting attached to the characters explains why I was so upset by the lack of Cockney voice in the reboot. It ain’t *my* boss without it.
Funnily enough, through every dark souls game and elden ring, I have always played the same character and taken great care to make her look more battle hardened, weary and attrited with every new installment. Some vague headcanon about her surviving to the next age each time as well. She decidedly always wears a bandana of sorts, to keep the face visible.
@@Aota1740 It's more about patience than anything. Dark Souls is like a puzzle game. If you know where the enemies are and how they behave, you can bust through basically anything. ESPECIALLY for Dark Souls 1. That game has so many hidden paths and alternative solutions that it's kinda insane. Elden Ring had the worst design in that aspect, as things are just sorta scattered around instead of deliberately placed. It's one of the reasons I personally don't like Elden Ring much. It loses all of its replay value once the first NG is over because it's so broad that getting to where you want to be (for whatever reason) or beating the game again while still collecting things takes ages. In addition to this, while Dark Souls and Bloodborne have this air of desperation where you have to use things you find and your wits to your advantage, Elden Ring has so many things that essentially let you get through any challenge by standing there AFK or hitting a single button that there's no challenge at all if you don't hold back on the enemies. So every run where there's even the slightest amount of challenge feels like a challenge run in the Soulsbornes, like Level 1 naked runs or something. Something you have to do deliberately to make the game more difficult.
@@terratrox7180 i suck at video games in general which is why i like fromsoft games so much. they feel like no matter what, as long as you find the right method, you can reliably overcome any of the games' obstacles, unlike a lot of other rpgs / shooters / beat-em-ups etc. where it feels like you're stuck relying on your own skill or dexterity or just luck (which is also why the waterfowl dance ruined what would've been my favourite boss fight of the series). I like how noah caldwell-gervais put it - "in Dark Souls your hard work pays off; that's part of the fantasy"
I reject the notion that space is the final frontier. There's all sorts of wacky shit they could have done for a sequel. Time travel. Alternate realities. Have some fantasy shit burst in. Eventually they would hit a ceiling but they weren't there yet.
Besides the bugs: I don’t think it did go wrong. People just have unnecessarily high expectations that games should always get better and evolve. Sometimes a cake is just a cake.
My idea after Saint Row 4 was: now really go to space, full on Star Trek/Wars rip off with meeting you father and banging aliens, heck tie Mass Effect in even more at that point. Could have been a great space opera with still a valuable lesson, like "don't hotbox the pressure chamber" or something.
@@Hysteria98 It was like Saints Row 4, with 90% of the great cast removed, 50% of the map and side missions cut and the story reduced to 4-5 major cutscenes total. So no, not really. It felt more like a standalone DLC. Fun to see some of the diseased Saints Row characters like Dane Vogel and the DeWynter sisters playing major roles, though.
@@Hysteria98 Yes, it was. It introduced a new core mechanic (flying by flapping your angel-wings) and expanded upon it. The story was somewhat basic, but it did feature a really cool musical number, which you can look up on RUclips. It wasn't a masterpiece, but it was definitely worthy of being part of the Saints Row series. Much better than the reboot, that's for sure.
I was wondering why he didn't mention that. Regardless of what you think about it, you have to admit that conquering Hell as a follow-up to conquering space was a pretty clever form of escalation. Certainly more so than the idea of conquering time, which is actually a de-escalation if you ask me.
Yahtzee’s point that Saints Row went wrong because it shouldn’t exist in the first place sounded exactly like my argument on why God of War 4 shouldn’t exist. But then GOW4 came out and proved that all you have to do is be good and everything else will work itself out. Saints Row was not so lucky Next on the list of dead franchises being resurrected 10 years later with unnecessary sequels that shouldn’t exist, we have Mass Effect 4. Will it blow everything out of the water like God of War or go the way of Saints Row and further ruin BioWare’s good name? TAKE YOUR BETS EVERYONE
'All you have to do is be good and everything else will work itself out.' Well said. I often think about how every nonsense idea could be gold if it's executed right, and every golden opportunity can be squandered. Will BioShock make a good TV show? Depends on whether they make a good TV show.
I find it odd how often people say SR4 had nowhere to escalate to. I totally assumed that the end of the game was setting up a very clear direction for the sequel when they discovered all of Zinyak's time travel technology. I figured the next game was going to see the crew going on some adventure through time and fucking with historical events (as seen in the credit sequence). I mean imagine something like your player character's future android gangmate handing Jane Austen a huge laser gun and then rampaging through an army of medieval knights together.
Gurren Lagann went from land to world to space and kept going. It went to the absurd limits of reality, to sizes that made space seem minuscule. I think one way they could've topped the series was going after reality itself. Either in a fourth wall breaking "fight the game itself" or some other creator deity. Have your character literally fight god/the game designers. Break time itself.
I designed my (SR2) Boss to be a Cockey-voiced skinny rat-man, complete with pointed eats, nose, and chin. He wore a tilted bowler hat, Bright Hawaiian shirts, and fishnet stockings. It should have been a complete mess, but the Scar-Face-as-portrayed-by-Eddie-Izzard result fit the Saints Row world perfectly.
I think there could have been a SR5 or Saints Row Finale. As alluded to SR4, there's a time machine. What's more up the an ante than space? Time! The Saints goes back to prevent the destruction of Earth, but failed because of the weaken state of post SR4 events, so they go back in time to recruit epic figures throughout history and the previous games to help them battle Zinyak at the height of his and his fleet's power. Crank everything even higher to end the series on a high note.
I like how you keep ignoring that Gat Out of Hell was a thing Also, shoutouts to my Boss: default appearance, crank the muscle mass, remove the shirt, body slam absolutely everyone you can.
I finally understand why I disagree with Yahtzee on the Borderlands series. He used "Whedonesque" as a derisive term, while I reserve it as my highest compliment.
My take on where Saints Row 5 could've gone, based on the ending of Saints Row IV where it turns out the alien emperor was using time travel to steal historical figures that he could keep on his collection, is that the Saints toy around with the time machine, fuck it up, and accidentally end up bringing samurai, pirates, vikings and other historical warriors to Stilwater or Steelport. The historical warriors start using guns and take over different parts of the city and its up to the Saints to kill them all.
I had a similar situation with a wrong character on screen vibe. My brother played it before I did and I watched him play a lot of 4. He used the cockney voice, so when I decided to try it out I made a guy as I usually do, picked a male voice and everything seemed wrong since I associate male boss with cockney voice. So after a bit I restarted, made a female boss and everything was fine. Personally I made her look like a barbie doll (long blonde hair, blue eyes, wears a lot of pink) because I like the contrast of seeing someone who looks distractingly stereotypically feminine doing all the turbo violence the boss gets up to.
I have to agree that a Saints Row V could have used time travel to help up the stakes. And alternate timelines too, because be serious: having the Boss pick up a friend named Temujin in twelfth-century Mongolia could have some interesting effects. And yes, my Boss would do it looking as she always does. Blue hair in pigtails, glasses, Saints purple dress-suit with black blouse, purple pumps. Because nothing says 'whimsical gang boss' like a woman who's going to foreclose your mortgage.
I always loved playing as my pink-haired psychopath, customizing all her vehicles in pink and black, then using them as missiles to start off a running firefight with the cops. I really need to go back and replay 3.
I just wanted to clarify the plot of SR4, while on SR3 your character becomes the president after an takeover job and is mostly fun and on the sequel Saints Row 4 is not about saints on space, is mostly a simulation in witch you get overpowered (like what a good superman 64 should be, your character gets into a VR machine to save the world) also this game has returning old friends who died on previous titles. But is basically an overpowering fantasy of saints row, and you escape this VR chamber (ala Matrix) and then reunite forced on the enemy ship. But that's it you don't travel or go to other planets just outside of earth (or where it was) So at the end of SR4 I was promise time traveling so I did hope this title to be a red herring to try to distract us from this plot, and having the president changing history of the origins of the saints, but so far nothing like that. Well no back to the future jokes. Maybe in a different timeline.
I would actually say that there IS a way to top space, and they even teased it at the end of 4: Time. They teased us with time travel and seeing tons of settings across our history. You could create a sort of infinite time crisis where the puckish rogues accidentally jump across time too much and now you have an overworld of mismatched eras as you struggle to put things back together. And hell, you COULD setup a reboot at the same time by putting the timelines back together only to end up back at the beginning of 1 again. Instead, we got Agents of Mayhem.
Everyone weighing in on Saints Row's various qualities and I'm here just frantically panicking because Yahtzee saying he likes GTA4 has completely ruined my Zero Punctuation Lore Analysis.
Tbh I love how GTA4 stands out so much because of how dark and gritty it is. It shows their ability to tell stories that aren't just silly and dumb punchlines (Same with RDR2) so I kind of hope they continue with the trend of shifting tone in the next GTA when it finally releases in 2036
One of the things that i really enjoyed about Saints Row 2 was that you could have a female protagonist, years before other similar franchises even thought about it. And it was great, my boss always had people underestimating her and her violent rages terrified all around her. It really was, like Yathzee said a masterclass in getting the audience to care about a custom protagonist.
The custom character section really pins why I love the Mass Effect series. It's my Commander Shepard that I painstakingly customized to my liking, but in game they are still Commander Shepard with a lightly customized backstory and their own personality that we don't have full control over.
I know lots of people shit all over Mass Effect 3’s ending, but the first time I went through the ending I felt incredibly melancholy. Because this was the end of MY Shepard. I had made her all the way back in ME1, watched her grow with my choices. That’s what can make character customisation so good. You get more invested in your character.
I said it in your other video and I'll say it again, *SUPERVILLAINS.* They should have shifted to full on super villains, HBO Harley Quinn style. Take their beloved character creator and extend it to all the characters (like they would need to stick to one voice option per for practical reasons, but their character models could look like anything you want). Take all the powers from SR4, add NEW powers to let you build a custom team of wacky supervillains. Have wacky adventures of trying to do crime in a city, fighting police, superheroes, and rival supervillain groups! Now realistically the writing would still probably be shit because the same people would be responsible, but this is a game that could be a lot of actual fun!
Technically (since I see both concepts mentioned in the comments below), depending on your belief system and perceptions of a multidimensional plane, they did do that with Gat out of Hell. HOWEVER..... That game was the product of: 1) People not being able to get over the fact that they didn't kill Dex but, more importantly, 2) Volition admitting that the game is a stopgap while they were making what we thought would be the reboot but was actually Agents of Mayhem. There is nothing wrong with the stopgap measure. Insomniac did Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault so they wouldn't have to fire/let go of the people whose talents weren't compatible with what Insomniac thought would be the next big thing with Fuse. In many ways, I respect companies that would rather allow a reduced team work on a smaller project than the normal industry practice of treating employees like disposable assets.* But stopgap measures, while they can be fun/patch up a few last holes in the old franchise before the reboot/have musical numbers, don't really ratchet things up. As such, Gat Out of Hell didn't really do better than "more Saints Row 4". Still, I feel like, even with a full game budget, the two suggestions in the comments (Time Travel/punching God in the face) would have fallen flat. At that point, it feels like it would have been "Here's the same game with different backgrounds and different NPC clothing." *And, yes, that's why I spent the $20 on R&C:FFA. Not so much for the game which was....all right but to support a company trying to do right by it's employees.
I'm perfectly fine with going down a baseline to build back up again. What I'm not okay with is removing every ounce of wit and edge the previous games had. I don't even mind bugs, I've played Saints row 3 , and that can often be one of the buggiest games I've ever played, but it's freaking fun.
I personally played SR2 as an Asian Punkrocker with Green Hair and Clothing Based in Violet and Red Tones. In SR3 I made him a little bit older maybe in his 30s. In SR4 he was grittled with scars from one to many brush with death and was in his 40s to 50s. It helped that there was a Priest Garment I could use and double pistols. I miss you boss - SR4 was one of my favorite experiences I ever had, played it through with a friend who was working for Deep Silver at the Time, so I got all the special gossip from the developer too. It was nice.
I had my own OC for some time, and she really fit in well as a Saint Row protagonist - she was a mad-scientist for hire. Rest in Peace Spider, Rest In Peace Dr. Robinson; Rest In Peace (All of our O.C.'s) - "R.I.P.O.C."
I srsly thought Saints Row 5 would be about travelling in time, further space exploration with the ship and somehow getting Earth back or a new planet. Shit would have been lit
I recently replayed SR3, 4 and Gat Out Of Hell for the trophies and I tried to not create the same character I always make, I even picked a different voice for them. I got about an hour in and changed back to the character and voice actor I knew a loved.
Oddly while I agree with every point leading up to the final why it wrong, i don't think it proves the point it's making. Saints Row has gone wrong, but it's not that "you can't go bigger than space" or of course you can or rather, that's the wrong attitude entirely. The goal wouldn't be to go bigger, it would be to go different. Saints Row hinted that time travel was next, I mean given the success of Red Dead Redemption and the Assassins Creed games turning the sandbox in a trip through a few different eras of history could have been cool. Or alternate realities, Saints Row in the Multiverse. And that's really just with idea of "bigger" BUT... I don't think a prequel was pre-destined to fail, because 'not space.' Space was fun but that was just the window dressing for the story. It's not The actual core of the game play was still a city and a few special levels. So you could set Saints Row 5 in backyard of a kids birthday party if you fill it with a bunch of fun stuff to do. A prequel would have been good if they made a good game. Or at best we would need a GOOD Game with fun characters (like past Saint Row games) to know if the failure was because it was a prequel. This game sounds like it was a failure because it was a bad game.
Saints on other planets. Saints at the bottom of the ocean in Atlantis. Saints travelling through time. Saints Simply travelling the globe, since they've never really explored much of the world itself. Saints invade alternate dimensions. There are so so many different ways they could have taken things that wouldnt necessarily have needed to kill the escalation entirely. There are ways to make superpowers go away and introduce new mechanics that wouldnt make you feel like you got robbed. That was the great part about these games, you had no idea what kind of batshit nonsense they were going to toss at you next.
Was SR4 really space though? Like… in theory yes, in practice it was just Steelport again because it was an overgrown DLC for 3 and because of the simulator gimmick it did a glitchy every so often. SR4 did set up a potential escalation since the Saints got access to all of time and space but I guess that’s too much scale to deal with.
an idea that they could've done: from space go multidimensional, have a system where you can upload your saints boss and as you play the game with wacky multiversal hi jinks you have missions where you play alongside other peoples Bosses
It's gratifying to know that Yahtzee and I independently made exactly the same character (save for the name and that mine wore aviators all the time), and that he's equally as angry their voice is wrong now. Call it convergent evolution.
Hideki Kamiya really understands this moving baseline thing. Most of his games start with "Punchout on a street", middle at "You are fighting on the arms of a giant behemoth wrecking a city!" and end with "Galgor the Destructor who is the size of the moon is going to destroy the entire earth, so go punch him you tiny tiny man". I guess that's why Bayo 3 is taking its sweet time and Wonderful102 doesn't exist. Because both of those previous entries already ended at the battle with the space diety lol.
Shoutout to my high school buddy who lent me the myriad of what would be become the most influential games I've played on the PS2 during the last days of school: Capcom Vs. SNK2, Shadow Of The Colossus, and Silent Hill 2. I had no idea what gaming was about til I played those titles, and my first game ever played was Final Fantasy VII.
Back on Xbox360, I did Saints Row 3 first and it was unlike anything I've ever played before. Its gameplay and nutty story was very much aware of how ridiculous-yet-enjoyable it was. 4 put me off... I spent alot of money on it and its DLC's, so you can't have a go at me for not doing all that. I even got the 'Hey Ash' DLC thing! It felt like a DLC dragged out. Weirdly enough, Gat out of Hell felt to me more like an actual game than 4. 4 felt like a bunch of DLC's thrown together and I wish they'd done alot more with that.
I like how Gat out of Hell is just sort of swept under the rug by most, though it does serve as a continued example fitting most of the expected consequence.
I'm glad people in recent years have been appreciating what made Grand Theft Auto IV so memorable. Its brown and drab aesthetics are often considered just a product of its time (in the words of one streamer I like to watch almost any time they play a game from the late 2000s: "Colour wasn't invented yet") but they are in fact an important aspect of its theming and setting, as the game revolves around characters from various migrant backgrounds in a city known for being a smelting pot of different nationalities, and the primary theme of the story is the misery that inevitably follows the pursuit of money.
To be fair, saints row 4 never really went to space. Sure the real world hub was a ship floating in space but space was never explored so it was still on the table for a sequel. 5 could have been a mass effect piss take with the saints exploring the universe and building a galactic empire.
Space being hard to top is a reason why Mario went globe trotting in Odyssey and why we never got a continuation of the R.E.M. fragrance, as Ariana Grande felt it would have been better to leave it as a one and done thing...
I'd argue that the original Mass Effect trilogy follows the same progression that Yahtzee talked about with Saints Row. You have a protagonist you get to customise but still has their own character, so it feels like a joint effort between writer and player when the character does something awesome. The story escalates each game, first you're after a rogue secret agent, then you're fighting a race of space bugs, then a massive galaxy spanning war against nearly invincible machines. And now, the new Saints Row has followed the Andromeda trap. In trying to hit the reset button, they completely killed what made the first games so amazing.
I think a hypothetical Saints Row 5 could've been "the Saints in alien locales" as opposed to the "aliens in the Saints' locale" that a lot of Saints Row 4 is, but in the end that's just delaying the inevitable. It's a lot smaller of a leap than 2 to 3 or 3 to 4, but one that _could_ have worked. But we'll probably never know for sure. It's also probably telling that the literal biblical afterlife was a spinoff/expansion rather than its own sequel.
Where could Saints Row 4 go after presidents, space aliens and (spoiler alert) destroying Earth in the first 20 minutes. Saints Row 4: Gat out of Hell. Technically either an expansion or DLC depending on your definition, but regardless of what you thought of it, it at least answered the "now what?" question of where to take the original series
Actually, there is something beyond space: multiverse. It is highly difficult to do right, but when done right it is the definitely the over the top to top space. But it wouldn't have save Saints Row. Saints Row 4 was the perfect end anyway.
The time travel antics they implied in the end of 4 seemed like the obvious next step up. You could have had a Saint's Row where you end up riding a dinosaur to chase a cowboy stagecoach with Hitler in it to stop him from assassinating Abraham Lincoln.
I don't think it's true that just because a series has escalated all the way to space, that the series has nowhere else to go and there's no room for a sequel to exist anymore. But it does mean that the series has to evolve in some way that makes the game fundamentally different than it was before. Mario Odyssey, for instance, follows up Mario Galaxy by having all the hat mechanics that run throughout that game, which totally shakes up the whole 3d Mario formula and make the game feel very different. A hypothetical Saints Row 5 could have introduced, say, time travel multiverse shenanigans to the plot and gameplay mechanics. Or perhaps set the game as the Saints setting up their influence on an alien planet, and have the sandbox take place in an alien city. Both of those would be major departures from what the game was before, where the juxtaposition of "wacky" and "normal" is a large part of the appeal, but I still feel either of those ideas could work. Or any number of other ideas, so long as thought goes into the execution.
It's also the biome they've chosen for the reboot: An unspectacular desert (city) environment. It's like Tatooine in the Disney+ Star Wars series: Sooner or later it feels like you've already counted every grain of sand there is. Compared to all the weird shit you could do in the virtual city in SR4 and in space, this just feels like two steps back.
Technically, after space the Saints Row went to hell in "Gat out of Hell" however you might consider it a independent game or it might be just considered an expansion to SR4.
It's a flippant joke in the end about the lack of the cockney voice, but that was my boss's voice too, and to play a saints row game without it just doesn't feel right
My SR 3 boss was a blue giant of a beast in a suit that spoke in zombie. He was a lumbering oaf that knew what must be done at the end of the game; He needed to be a hero.
Street World space, but also: Time, a DIFFERENT world, or inner space also works. You can show the hamster wheel under your hat, and put the hat back on, as long as there's something else powering you when you take your hat off again. Super paper saints row, for example, where you saints row through some tabloids or other justly discarded periodicals would be interesting
I would have it so that the saints go back in time trying to save the world, but the boss ends up back in the orginal Saints Row having to help Julius (re)build the Third Street Saints, while also incorporating characters of Saints Row 2 like trying to convince Shaundie who you are 5 years before you've even met her.
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You complain about the lack of English gangster voice i have to complain about the lack of Hispanic gangster voice since 3
What they should have done for a sequel: Time Travel. It was in the ending of SR4 if you got 100%, and can you imagine a sandbox game where you can swap between the old west, modern day, the future, maybe even the medieval periods all at the touch of a button? The potential was amazing (even if it'd require multiple versions of the same city) for taking it truly to the next level. Instead we got.. this..
They could have stepped up the story by going after the gods. That's more over the top than aliens.
In sr3, i made my boss sterling archer. The burt reynolds bit was amazballs.
There is something you forget about the end of Saints Row 4: they introduce time travel.
Now imagine a naked guy dildoing his way through the crusades, and tell me it wouldn't have been a hell of an escalation.
Evil Dead was a great movie series
True. They could have also borrowed from the isekai tropes in anime and other stories and had them get flung into a sword and sorcery dimension devoid of all their original wealth and influence. The boss powerbombing an ogre from the top of a fortified tower onto an enemy wizard would also be an escalation.
And imagine the villains! We could have had a team up of Hitler, Gengis Khan and Rasputin.
It could've been a cool adventure through time. they could even do a whole SR2 part where you have to make sure not to meet your younger self, all tounge in cheek. maybe even referencing that the default boss had an entire different look from 3 and 4.( as well as a redo of the "shaundi meets stoner shaundi-joke" from 4).
>a naked guy dildoing his way through the crusades
>Evil Dead was a great movie series
Imagine your [naked] character in a cutscene going "THIS...is my BOOMSTIIIIICK!" with a giant purple dildo.
The fact your character is supposed to be a young twenty-something struggling with student debt really restricted the character customization for most people. Sure you can make your character an old man or granny with a thick Texan or British accent, but then you hear them talk like they're fresh out of college and it just ruins the suspension of disbelief. It's the first time where the plot is actually getting in the way of the customization. In trying to become relatable it ends up being alienating.
Reminds me of fallout 4, no matter how you roleplay you're aways a loving father and husband
Yeah. Saints Row 2 and onwards were really good with carefully writing to make sure any possible character would slot into the story, but the reboot just abandoned that ethos entirely.
okay you're right, but I just want to add that its not uncommon for older people go to back to uni to study a new field, LOTS of people actually do that. for example, I studied film and media with a 45 year old who was sick of psychology and wanted to move onto something different.
@@kabobawsome Even the zombie voice in SR3 somehow worked, but most of the custom characters in the reboot just look wrong. Having such a young supporting cast and having them as your roommates really limits things.
@@82Catfish Okay.
Another thing I want to bring up and why Saints Row 2 has a firm placement in my Top 10 games of all time: is that in addition to the crazy wackiness of things is the contrast of really good characterization and storytelling. What I like about SR2 more than the others is that your character is, while mostly an unstoppable badass, also prone to consequences.
Carlos’ death, one of the most heartbreaking things in this series, is because the protagonist directly declined to work with The Brotherhood. Johnny Gat loses the love of his life in an actually gut wrenching scene.
But when these things happen: your Protagonist fights back. You killed Carlos? We kill your girlfriend. You killed Aiesha? We bury your ass alive. Even the final “gang” Ultor has compelling reasons to be villainous and it’s fun watching the leader of the Saints dismantle them.
The other Saints have great characterization too: Carlos feeling out of place, Pierce’s attempts to lead being completely shut down, and the fact Shaundi’s promiscuous nature actually proves a vital asset to the gang due to the fact she has so many contacts she can utilize.
It’s this strong characterization and the contrast between the silly and serious that makes 2 my favorite of the games.
Dude have you played 2 recently like Carlo's death is hilarious because the game thinks it did anything to make me care about Carlos like oh my god here is the entire character of Carlos hi I'm the guy who couldn't scream I'm going to die more likely if I was wearing a red hat instead of a purple one I have no other distinguishable personality trait except I'm young. Saints row 2 is has very poorly written story if we can't work don't end it is one note in fact I'm going to list all those notes please Johnny Gat badass, Shaendi stoner girl guy Dean Vogel ass hole businessman the general Haitian stereotype pappi Sanji l sidekick of stereotype Marlo the scary big guy the Ronin leader compensating arrogant son the Ronin leaders dad disappointed father the Ronin bald guy is just a ninja. Yah no everything you've said is completely wrong and filled by nostalgia. Saints row 2 isn't a bad game but it is not the perfect game people treat it as
Saints Row 2 also didn't sugarcoat that the Boss was a bloody psychopath - heck, there's only one character he never really yelled at or treated badly in any way and that was Carlos. The other Saints had to earn that affection. This was a guy who had no problem locking somebody in a trunk to get crushed by their unsuspecting lover or burying somebody alive. 3 played with the idea of the Boss and their crew having grown soft, which was kinda interesting - but then 4 kinda lost the plot for me by making the Boss and the Saints bona fida heroes.
While Yahtzee praises the serial escalation, It was always a drawback for me personally because it kinda took the series away from what I enjoyed about it in the first place. 3 at least still had you do gang shit, even morally questionable stuff, but 4 just threw that all out for space VR hijinks - it also managed to make some of its own mechanics obsolete. For example, why steal and upgrade a car if you can just jump or fly anywhere?
Although Carlos wasn't a character I particularly liked his death was incredibly handled, you could see the boss trying to find someway to help him before realising its too late, and just to save him anymore pain, its a perfectly nightmarish and horrific scene. And this is why I despise the beginning of saints row 4, the boss is put into their worst nightmare and its a silly world without violence rather than one of the most traumatising character deaths I have seen in fiction.
One correction: You killed Carlos? We trick YOU into killing your girlfriend.
@@kendaar9002 ding ding! Yeah maybe Carlos wasn't a super deep character but I don't need a fucking bottomless ocean of characterisation or get to know everything about a character to make me care. Carlos saved you from prison, had a brother in the Saints and really wanted to be part of it always ready. With that I saw the type of man Carlos was and that was enough. And his death is brutal, the way it was handled brutal that it forces you to care. Seeing my boss take out one of his own lieutenants? That shit hit hard.
I will always have a soft spot for my Boss, a man dressed like a detective in a white fedora and trenchcoat, and insists on going through the entire game with nothing but dual-weilding gold pistols.
My Boss was a default hot chick in black clothes. Quite unique and original.
My boss from 3 ended up looking like fit Steven Segal before I realized.
My boss was a dreaded redhead, drunk on vodka all the time and mobbed around with his shotgun always stopping to beat up pimps . Who has the better pimp hand now, buddy!
My Boss was an asshole Latina who occasionally ran around as a nudist because she was THAT damn proud of her tattoos. She also had an interesting story arc as she lost her accent by the forth game.
Mine was an overweigh British bloke in a nice suit
I love that there are two types of saints row fan. Yet both of them tend to despise the reboot.
1. Those that hold 2 as the peak of the series, enthralled by the contrast between serious, weighty narrative and absurd side jobs (I feel like most of us moved onto Yakuza and felt right at home, tbh)
2. The spectacle chasers who like 3 and 4 the most, whose enjoyment comes from watching the trainwreck and wondering when some random 747 is going to slam into it.
I can totally identify as the first type. Coincidentally I discovered the Yakuza series a few months ago and got completely hooked to the series. Also completely struck as to why Japanese studios still seem to do it right while Western studios all fall in line of the same bland (bugged/broken) game design and writing. I was actually amazed how intense the story of Yakuza 0 was and at the same time gave me so much crazy side activities to explore. It actually felt like I was playing something that simply doesn't seem to exist in modern gaming anymore.
2nd type all the way
I got in the SR3, the charm of that game got me, and I also liked tig ol' bitties, and the jiggle physics. But the larger point is right -- we two groups banded together and hate the Reboot. Volition decided to be cross with both of us to seek out another group, so we cast them away.
100% second type for me, bf is the first type and thinks I'm weird. Probably helps I'm not nostalgic for SR2 at all (not to say you SR2 guys are wrong, but nostalgia's the only conceivable way I'd personally like it more) since I didn't pick up the series until my mid-twenties. SR3 specifically is peak for me. 2 has a blend of serious mainquest and whacky sidequests, but it's like steak and potatoes. It's very much 2 things. 3 is like a hearty beef stew with potato chunks in it, where the whacky and the serious achieve something approaching homogeneity. Perfect balance of trainwreck whacky fun time that pushes the boundary on plausibility to the very limit, *just* shy of becoming a full-on sci-fi/fantasy game. Sure, there's some advanced technology (the hoverbikes and stuff) but it isn't ubiquitous or commonplace within the world of the game - it's... "futuristic but not sci-fi", I guess (obviously this is still technically sci-fi, and this is a total cop-out) .
4 and Gat Outta Hell go off the deep end entirely. 4's *really fun*, the superpowers and stuff are great gameplay additions, but it's 'all whacky all the time there are no brakes on this train to crazy town lol XD so random". I unashamedly admit I do absolutely love that, it just... lost something for me. It lost its potatoes and deepfried the steak.
Am I the only SR fan who actually likes the reboot?
Probably. I'm in group 2, and that might be why I like it more than others. Hear me out.
I've never given 1 and 2 a real go because 1 was never on PC and 2 was a broken port. Perhaps why I like SRR so much is because of that. I had never really played a silly yet 'realistic' SR game. This is the closest I had.
But yeah, I'm not going to call Reboot Row good or anything. I just said I liked it, but I won't defend the bad parts of it.
I picked up Saints Row 4 as a whim because it was like 15 bucks and to this day it is one of the best values I've ever gotten. I had played SR1, and enjoyed it, but even after skipping the middle entries and diving into 4 cold, I was immediately sucked into the experience. Most of the time, I was like a parent coming home after a weekend business trip to discover my child turned the dog green, gave themselves laser eyes and is now the night manager at the local Home Depot.
2's pretty good even though you need to install a mod to actually get it to run right on PC since the port literally has Turbo Mode locked to ON and that mod is the only way to really fix it...plus it's just a good mod in general that doesn't pull a Bethesda mod and wildly change the game. 3 is honestly one of the last gasps of ye olden days when cheat codes were something you unlocked instead of something you bought, since the late-game upgrades can make you pretty much immortal and have infinite ammo with no reloading, but that's tied together with a relatively-serious plot about the identity of the Saints as a whole.
Plus zombies, for some reason.
@@dosbilliam it was 2008, when zombies ruled the pop culture zeitgeist. Not having them would get you laughed out of the building
@@dosbilliam They fixed that. IdolNinja helped Volition patch the game.
@@ZiddersRooFurry Huh. Haven't played it in 7 years, apparently, so didn't hear that. Sorry to hear about IdolNinja, though. :'(
If you like 4 don't forget to play 3 !
I'm loving the catharsis of finally learning the name and full description of yhatzees cockney bowler hat villain
Why do I feel like the only takeaway Deep Silver will pull from this is that they need to add a Cockney accent into their next run-of-the-mill Saints Row game?
Rather optimistic of you to assume there will BE another Saints Row game after this...
@@KeithCopeland67 At this point we need someone to try to bring True Crime back or something.
@@SlickSkuddy Sleeping Dogs!! :D
@@KeithCopeland67 And here I was hoping for a Red Faction sequel after this disaster.
@@KeithCopeland67 Never underestimate funding that comes from thin air. Every time you think it's a failure, someone pulls money from their ass and it becomes a trilogy.
To be fair to Volition, they did try to put the Saints to rest. Unfortunately, their solution was a cringy mess with tired gameplay, and their takeaway was "I guess we have to use the Saints IP to prop up our cringy messes with tired gameplay." Volition took the absolute wrong lessons from Agents of Mayhem, and so we got this.
All Saint's Row 5 needed to do was have the Saints try to save the Earth using time travel (established in the end of 4) and fudge it all up only to do a sort of soft reboot where they know what's coming and have to prepare for it. (and since the world isn't listening to "Aliens are coming" they have to make them listen)
and also have a good antagonist to face off against
@@sarafontanini7051 The antagonist would have been "Everyone who doesn't believe them" and that would probably have been all the countries of the world. Yeah it's a step back from "Spaaaaace" but they could have also gone with time travel antics and having the player do missions that the player would then need to stop later on because they made such a huge mess. Having the player be the protagonist and the antagonist would be a masterstroke.
I like the failing aspect, but since historic characters like Jane Austin, Aleister Crowley, and Santa has all be established, why not have the Saints traveling through time to recruit legends and epic heroes to help them save the Earth. Or maybe even Zinyak would recruit his own team of super evils throughout history? Having Hitler getting smack in the face with an red white and blue pixelated 'penetrators' by a major Saint character would make for great marketing materials.
@@rurimuni2937 Having a time travelling player be their own antagonist is a genius idea, but probably _incredibly_ hard to design, especially in a large open-world game. I know some smaller indie games have played around with similar concepts, and I hope one day somebody makes it work on a large scale. I can think of many ways it could go wrong and no ways it could go right, but fortunately I'm not a game designer 😕
@@KillahMate When they posted for writers for this game I did put in an application, with this outline for what would be cool. Sadly, I've only a few very niche smut novels under my belt and that isn't good enough.
Funnily enough, Saints Row IV DLC demonstrates that you _can_ escalate after you've gone into space: you just need to _go to Hell._
IMO the biggest mistake Volition made with the series was releasing Gat Out Of Hell as an expansion instead of turning the concept into Saints Row V - the same way they turned Enter the Dominatrix into Saints Row IV in the first place.
Actually, Saints Row 5 could've actually gone further. When you're finally in space, what comes next is time. Imagine if the reboot was instead about the Saints travelling back in time and across multiverses to save the dead characters and the world since it ended in 4? Couple that with jabs at the superhero burnout in recent time, and all the crappy adaptations going on. It's like what Deadpool did when he got the ability to change past events.
Somebody commented this on a video about the reboot elsewhere. "What if all the reboot's trailer stuff was a bait all along, and then after you finish the tutorial the original Boss and crew arrive and shoot the reboot's Saints wannabes and take over as an entrance? Then you immediately enter character creation to start the game. That would be epic."
They had it right there. It was even teased in the credits of SR 4.
Also, imagine if that game ended with you fighting God because he wants to scrub the Saints timeline, since it's so borked. An ending would be you losing, but then the new kids take up the mantle because "there will always be Saints." It would've kept the energy high since we would want to know if they ever get back to the 'weird' timeline, if it's an inevitability that s**t happens.
I'm so glad you mentioned this. Time travelling saints would have been awesome!
Yeah, the possibilities are endless. Arguing that there was no place for the Saints Row series to go is just lack of imagination.
@@noxteryn agreed. The fourth game ended with the boss becoming the dictator of a freakin galactic empire after all.
@@noxteryn This is the thing I can never agree with on Yahtzee. There is so many games in the space genre for a reason... It's infinite, which means you always have options to create tension and stakes. Ultimate crime syndicate of Earth? Meh ok. Ultimate crime syndicate of the galactic trade network? Oh my!
The thing about Always Be Escalating is an interesting concept. The God of War games did that from the first, to the second, to the third. The two side games and prequel (Chains of Olympus, Ghost of Sparta and Ascension respectively) didn't have to escalate, never lowered the bar too much either. So I think it was a good idea for God of Four to instead go different. Then again, I don't think we have to worry about the God of War series going to space. Unless of course a future game takes on Japanese mythology and we end up on the moon fighting rabbits.
I mean traveling the nine realms is basically the same thing as going to different planets. In the Marvel Universe it arguably IS the same thing, even. So from a non-linear, non-subjective point of view, God of Four actually did go to space. Technically. Sort of. With wormholes instead of spaceships.
@@ThePCguy17 More of a dimensional thing I think, but point well made. Still, it was able to go different instead of bigger because the game changed location. Speaking of, I think Chains of Olympus might be low key the most important game of the franchise. If it wasn't for Kratos, everyone would be dead. If Atlas holds up the whole world instead of the part Greece is on, there would BE no location for Kratos to wash up on post III.
Modern Sony hates Japan so that would never happen.
Leave change' out of this, it's not her fault she didn't want the bandits to have immortality lol
"Japanese mythology" "on the moon fighting rabits".... was .... was that a dragonball reference??
If I may interject, The New SR went wrong by misunderstanding what made the first ones so fun. The over the top whackiness, fun writing, and brilliant character customization are factors. However, the SR games had variety and still had consequences for your silly actions. Game modes where you play with the games ragdoll physics or have to get to an objective really fast. Have your character go cartoonishly flying 200ft because you crashed a motorcycle into an 18 wheeler. etc. A Saint's Row reboot could have been great, if the game was solid.
Saint Row IV's ending hinted that the next game would involve time travel. It may not exactly escalate from being the president of space, but it would certainly have kept the series' craziness while offering many different settings with new gameplay mechanics.
(sigh) What could have been.
Well what obstacle cant be solved when you can out time travel your enemies? This super bad guy whose going to end the world? Go back in time five seconds before he pops up and shoot him in the head.
Technically agents of mayhem was that. It was explicitly an alternate timeline of the Saints universe.
Saints Row IV established at the end of the game, The Zinyak (those aliens you fought in the simulation.) had access to time travel. That should've been the revival game.
The Saints traveling through time with the boss fucking something up and creating new paradoxes within the Saints Row Universe. This could lead to trying to establish The Saints in different time periods and playing events from past games with differing results such as stopping Jessica from abducting Carlos or killing a young Phillip Lauren to prevent the SR 3 version of The Syndicate from forming.
It could draw heavily from BTTF where you're in Stilwater / Steelport throughout time with different buildings and such.
Why stop there? Saints in medieval times. Saints in 1920s America. Saints in imperial Japan. While it would essentially just be a wacky slideshow of settings, that doesnt have to be a bad thing.
@@AnonJuggerbot "While it would essentially just be a wacky slideshow of settings, that doesnt have to be a bad thing."
They've been doing this with Assasins Creed for a while and people still buy them.
Time Travel? That would have been genus. Volition should have hired you.
Either that or push the Saints Row in Space concept much harder and have the Boss conquer alien worlds and build an intergalactic empire.
Goddammit Volition! You had one fucking job!! ONE! JUST ONE JOB!!!
"The standard Whedon-eque misunderstanding of wit" Dang, that's a burn, and spot on as well.
I literally could never have imagined Niko Bellic was one of Yahtzee’s favorite protaganists in gaming, actually blew my mind a bit
Which is odd because Niko, as cool as he is, does suffer from Ludonarrative Dissonance, like how in the story he goes on about wanting to start a new life and avoid all the violence, blood, and death from the wars he was part of and yet they put him in a GTA game, the kind of game where you can run over civilians and commit mass shootings, and none of it has an effect on Niko in the story. If anything, a character like Claude Speed from GTA 3 is more suited to the kind of catharsis that GTA games tend to go for.
@@TheCyclicGamer Yup i agree, but i still think Niko is one of my personal favorites.
@@AshleySOAD Same, he's a good character who is very quotable, it's just that he's the odd one of the bunch.
Like every other GTA protagonist, with maybe exception to Franklin and Michael from GTA 5, all want to become crime bosses/lords in one way or another, while Niko just wants to live a normal life.
The chaos of GTA's gameplay suits them, it doesn't really suit Niko though.
@@TheCyclicGamer I guess it could work in him struggling to move on and that he wants to protect those around him, and depending on your choice revenge could consume and hurt those around him. But yeah, he's probably the most """jarring""" compared to the others in the series.
In terms of Rockstar protaganists, I don't know if Niko going around killing people is more or less jarring than the incorruptible Cole Phelps carjacking someone's convertible because it's faster than Rusty's Nash, then immediately mounting the sidewalk to get to a non-urgent appointment very slightly faster.
I'm gonna have to disagree with Yathzee here, because IV didn't go to space, not really. It went to a normal city that just happened to float into space (metaphorically speaking). They could've gone further by actually taking us to a city in space, populated by various alien species that you can interact with and whack over the head with a giant dildo.
In other words, Saints Row V should've taken The Boss and fired them at The Citadel from Mass Effect!
Didn’t the alien destroy Earth and the result is the simulation that he puts you through? So it would be in space sort of
was just thinking this. But that would mean the developers would have to have been imaginative... and the game would have probably cost more to develop ....and why would parasitic publishers want to do that?
Could have taken a rival factions/gangs on a new planet apprach. Plenty of room for wacky cultural misunderstandings and serious moments of dealing with being the last of humanity.
Alternately, time and space travel, which was setup at the end of IV. The Saints Rule Everywhere!
Agreed, Saints Row 4 was primarily a Matrix parody with us exploring a virtual reality human city with superpowers. They definitely could have escalated the next game even further by making it a Star Wars parody set in a proper alien city and having the Boss end the story as the Emperor of Space.
Yahtzee's Eulogy to Spider, the Cockney-accented custom character in a Riddler suit, is pure art. Also his delivery with proper contempt for the gods of game dev, who have sold their souls to the diabolic production committee of AAA Hell.
That transition into point #2 is so wonderfully smooth.
Well, this ended well for Volition after 30 years. RIP
Yeah the addition of a 4th voice type (pretty sure it was 3 before), but total removal of the cockney geezer does read somewhat as cutting off your nose to spite your face...
It's kinda funny as well because at the end of SR4 it's said that the characters could go back in time because the main antagonist had a time machine so they probably could've done something with that instead of completely rebooting the series
I always thought that the multiverse is where you go to escalate after going to space (it is what the MCU is doing for example).
... that and time travel?
Didn't they kind of already do that with Gat Out of Hell?
Putting what I consider the fantastic saints row 2 aside, we really only need to look at saints row 1. For those who haven't played it the game did a good job of making you feel the struggle. Before you even start dealing with the other gangs you almost pointlessly die, and you get beaten up as initiation. You feel yourself rise up to where you are trusted and a valuable member of the gang. SR2022 you start with wingsuits and a chip on your shoulder.
Also the motivation for the protagonist. In saints row 1 he join the gang to push gang warfare out of his neighborhood. In SR2022 they start the gang to pay their student debts, but then to pay their gang members they rob a train, completely undercutting the necessity of starting the gang in the first place.
Yeah, not to mention that in the first game, you're not even the boss of the Saints, Julius is! You're just someone who rises up through the ranks. It's not until the 2nd game that you actually become the boss, but even then you do it by rebuilding the gang from the ground up. Playing the series from the very start really was like a rags to riches story.
@@BadgerOff32 More of a rags to "Holy fuck what is this now?" story. As you face off against a galactic overlord. Then the spinoff is literally about going to hell and kicking Satan's ass.
@@BadgerOff32 Actually why isn't Julius in this game ? He created 3rd streets Saints. If it's suppose to be origin story it would only make sens for him to be there.
@@BadgerOff32 true in the first game you only take over lead at the very end with explosive results. It is the second game you start from nothing as the leader and build up your gang. In both of these games you have a struggle, low points, drama, and heck even subtly. You grew up in a rough world and you become the bad element to try and get rid of the bad element. That even speaks to the futility of gangs in general all while having some damn fun. To me SR2022 feels like a cheap mini-golf course if that makes sense.
The thing you mentioned about the characters is so right. I make a british punk rocker with purple and blue liberty spikes EVERYTIME. I try to play as a different boss sometimes but I always switch them right back to my spikey headed psycho
That part about getting attached to the characters explains why I was so upset by the lack of Cockney voice in the reboot. It ain’t *my* boss without it.
There's an edit of Saints Row cutscene with laugh track, and it make the game weirdly bearable
Funnily enough, through every dark souls game and elden ring, I have always played the same character and taken great care to make her look more battle hardened, weary and attrited with every new installment. Some vague headcanon about her surviving to the next age each time as well. She decidedly always wears a bandana of sorts, to keep the face visible.
is she even visible under all the scars by elden ring?
@@Aota1740 I can't tell, on account of the controller still stuck in my screen.
@@SirSaladhead this is basically why i've never played any of those games
@@Aota1740 It's more about patience than anything. Dark Souls is like a puzzle game. If you know where the enemies are and how they behave, you can bust through basically anything. ESPECIALLY for Dark Souls 1. That game has so many hidden paths and alternative solutions that it's kinda insane.
Elden Ring had the worst design in that aspect, as things are just sorta scattered around instead of deliberately placed. It's one of the reasons I personally don't like Elden Ring much. It loses all of its replay value once the first NG is over because it's so broad that getting to where you want to be (for whatever reason) or beating the game again while still collecting things takes ages.
In addition to this, while Dark Souls and Bloodborne have this air of desperation where you have to use things you find and your wits to your advantage, Elden Ring has so many things that essentially let you get through any challenge by standing there AFK or hitting a single button that there's no challenge at all if you don't hold back on the enemies. So every run where there's even the slightest amount of challenge feels like a challenge run in the Soulsbornes, like Level 1 naked runs or something. Something you have to do deliberately to make the game more difficult.
@@terratrox7180 i suck at video games in general which is why i like fromsoft games so much. they feel like no matter what, as long as you find the right method, you can reliably overcome any of the games' obstacles, unlike a lot of other rpgs / shooters / beat-em-ups etc. where it feels like you're stuck relying on your own skill or dexterity or just luck (which is also why the waterfowl dance ruined what would've been my favourite boss fight of the series). I like how noah caldwell-gervais put it - "in Dark Souls your hard work pays off; that's part of the fantasy"
I reject the notion that space is the final frontier. There's all sorts of wacky shit they could have done for a sequel. Time travel. Alternate realities. Have some fantasy shit burst in. Eventually they would hit a ceiling but they weren't there yet.
Should've done a Saints Row western. Red Dead Redemption where you can fill the fire carts with manure, and spray away.
would've been a fun payoff on the time travel tease at the end of 4.
Same characters. Just multiple cities across multiple times
Besides the bugs: I don’t think it did go wrong. People just have unnecessarily high expectations that games should always get better and evolve. Sometimes a cake is just a cake.
Second video in a row with "what am I on about?". I approve this descent into madness
My idea after Saint Row 4 was: now really go to space, full on Star Trek/Wars rip off with meeting you father and banging aliens, heck tie Mass Effect in even more at that point. Could have been a great space opera with still a valuable lesson, like "don't hotbox the pressure chamber" or something.
So Yahtzee forgot "Gat out of Hell" existed, huh?
That's fine. So did the rest of the world.
Was it good?
@@Hysteria98 It was like Saints Row 4, with 90% of the great cast removed, 50% of the map and side missions cut and the story reduced to 4-5 major cutscenes total.
So no, not really.
It felt more like a standalone DLC.
Fun to see some of the diseased Saints Row characters like Dane Vogel and the DeWynter sisters playing major roles, though.
@@Hysteria98
Yes, it was. It introduced a new core mechanic (flying by flapping your angel-wings) and expanded upon it. The story was somewhat basic, but it did feature a really cool musical number, which you can look up on RUclips. It wasn't a masterpiece, but it was definitely worthy of being part of the Saints Row series. Much better than the reboot, that's for sure.
@@Hysteria98 it was a 20 bucks standalone dlc. so yeah a bit more of 4 if you wanted it, but nothing more.
I was wondering why he didn't mention that. Regardless of what you think about it, you have to admit that conquering Hell as a follow-up to conquering space was a pretty clever form of escalation. Certainly more so than the idea of conquering time, which is actually a de-escalation if you ask me.
Yahtzee’s point that Saints Row went wrong because it shouldn’t exist in the first place sounded exactly like my argument on why God of War 4 shouldn’t exist. But then GOW4 came out and proved that all you have to do is be good and everything else will work itself out. Saints Row was not so lucky
Next on the list of dead franchises being resurrected 10 years later with unnecessary sequels that shouldn’t exist, we have Mass Effect 4. Will it blow everything out of the water like God of War or go the way of Saints Row and further ruin BioWare’s good name?
TAKE YOUR BETS EVERYONE
If AOM were treated as canon, SR '22 wouldn't exist.
'All you have to do is be good and everything else will work itself out.'
Well said. I often think about how every nonsense idea could be gold if it's executed right, and every golden opportunity can be squandered.
Will BioShock make a good TV show? Depends on whether they make a good TV show.
I assume its going to suck hard. Not only cause the track record is bad, but also if its actually alright itll be a pleasant surprise
We already have a mass affect 4, it was terrible
Your mistake here is assuming it was gonna be bad.
When your expectations should always be apathetic.
I think the Boss has the most character development in any franchise, goes from a lacky, an actual inhuman psychopath, a business man to world hero.
"Times we want to spray shit all over a house. Number two!" I hope that was on purpose.
I find it odd how often people say SR4 had nowhere to escalate to. I totally assumed that the end of the game was setting up a very clear direction for the sequel when they discovered all of Zinyak's time travel technology. I figured the next game was going to see the crew going on some adventure through time and fucking with historical events (as seen in the credit sequence). I mean imagine something like your player character's future android gangmate handing Jane Austen a huge laser gun and then rampaging through an army of medieval knights together.
Gurren Lagann went from land to world to space and kept going. It went to the absurd limits of reality, to sizes that made space seem minuscule. I think one way they could've topped the series was going after reality itself. Either in a fourth wall breaking "fight the game itself" or some other creator deity. Have your character literally fight god/the game designers. Break time itself.
I designed my (SR2) Boss to be a Cockey-voiced skinny rat-man, complete with pointed eats, nose, and chin. He wore a tilted bowler hat, Bright Hawaiian shirts, and fishnet stockings. It should have been a complete mess, but the Scar-Face-as-portrayed-by-Eddie-Izzard result fit the Saints Row world perfectly.
I think there could have been a SR5 or Saints Row Finale. As alluded to SR4, there's a time machine. What's more up the an ante than space? Time!
The Saints goes back to prevent the destruction of Earth, but failed because of the weaken state of post SR4 events, so they go back in time to recruit epic figures throughout history and the previous games to help them battle Zinyak at the height of his and his fleet's power. Crank everything even higher to end the series on a high note.
I like how you keep ignoring that Gat Out of Hell was a thing
Also, shoutouts to my Boss: default appearance, crank the muscle mass, remove the shirt, body slam absolutely everyone you can.
I finally understand why I disagree with Yahtzee on the Borderlands series. He used "Whedonesque" as a derisive term, while I reserve it as my highest compliment.
My take on where Saints Row 5 could've gone, based on the ending of Saints Row IV where it turns out the alien emperor was using time travel to steal historical figures that he could keep on his collection, is that the Saints toy around with the time machine, fuck it up, and accidentally end up bringing samurai, pirates, vikings and other historical warriors to Stilwater or Steelport. The historical warriors start using guns and take over different parts of the city and its up to the Saints to kill them all.
I had a similar situation with a wrong character on screen vibe. My brother played it before I did and I watched him play a lot of 4. He used the cockney voice, so when I decided to try it out I made a guy as I usually do, picked a male voice and everything seemed wrong since I associate male boss with cockney voice. So after a bit I restarted, made a female boss and everything was fine. Personally I made her look like a barbie doll (long blonde hair, blue eyes, wears a lot of pink) because I like the contrast of seeing someone who looks distractingly stereotypically feminine doing all the turbo violence the boss gets up to.
I have to agree that a Saints Row V could have used time travel to help up the stakes. And alternate timelines too, because be serious: having the Boss pick up a friend named Temujin in twelfth-century Mongolia could have some interesting effects.
And yes, my Boss would do it looking as she always does. Blue hair in pigtails, glasses, Saints purple dress-suit with black blouse, purple pumps. Because nothing says 'whimsical gang boss' like a woman who's going to foreclose your mortgage.
I always loved playing as my pink-haired psychopath, customizing all her vehicles in pink and black, then using them as missiles to start off a running firefight with the cops.
I really need to go back and replay 3.
I just wanted to clarify the plot of SR4, while on SR3 your character becomes the president after an takeover job and is mostly fun and on the sequel Saints Row 4 is not about saints on space, is mostly a simulation in witch you get overpowered (like what a good superman 64 should be, your character gets into a VR machine to save the world) also this game has returning old friends who died on previous titles. But is basically an overpowering fantasy of saints row, and you escape this VR chamber (ala Matrix) and then reunite forced on the enemy ship. But that's it you don't travel or go to other planets just outside of earth (or where it was)
So at the end of SR4 I was promise time traveling so I did hope this title to be a red herring to try to distract us from this plot, and having the president changing history of the origins of the saints, but so far nothing like that. Well no back to the future jokes. Maybe in a different timeline.
I would actually say that there IS a way to top space, and they even teased it at the end of 4: Time. They teased us with time travel and seeing tons of settings across our history. You could create a sort of infinite time crisis where the puckish rogues accidentally jump across time too much and now you have an overworld of mismatched eras as you struggle to put things back together. And hell, you COULD setup a reboot at the same time by putting the timelines back together only to end up back at the beginning of 1 again.
Instead, we got Agents of Mayhem.
Everyone weighing in on Saints Row's various qualities and I'm here just frantically panicking because Yahtzee saying he likes GTA4 has completely ruined my Zero Punctuation Lore Analysis.
Tbh I love how GTA4 stands out so much because of how dark and gritty it is. It shows their ability to tell stories that aren't just silly and dumb punchlines (Same with RDR2) so I kind of hope they continue with the trend of shifting tone in the next GTA when it finally releases in 2036
One of the things that i really enjoyed about Saints Row 2 was that you could have a female protagonist, years before other similar franchises even thought about it. And it was great, my boss always had people underestimating her and her violent rages terrified all around her. It really was, like Yathzee said a masterclass in getting the audience to care about a custom protagonist.
I do the same thing every time I replay 3 & 4 I always make the same boss.
For me Troy Bakers voice suited the script and scenes really well
The custom character section really pins why I love the Mass Effect series. It's my Commander Shepard that I painstakingly customized to my liking, but in game they are still Commander Shepard with a lightly customized backstory and their own personality that we don't have full control over.
I know lots of people shit all over Mass Effect 3’s ending, but the first time I went through the ending I felt incredibly melancholy. Because this was the end of MY Shepard. I had made her all the way back in ME1, watched her grow with my choices. That’s what can make character customisation so good. You get more invested in your character.
I said it in your other video and I'll say it again, *SUPERVILLAINS.* They should have shifted to full on super villains, HBO Harley Quinn style. Take their beloved character creator and extend it to all the characters (like they would need to stick to one voice option per for practical reasons, but their character models could look like anything you want). Take all the powers from SR4, add NEW powers to let you build a custom team of wacky supervillains. Have wacky adventures of trying to do crime in a city, fighting police, superheroes, and rival supervillain groups! Now realistically the writing would still probably be shit because the same people would be responsible, but this is a game that could be a lot of actual fun!
Gotta love how no one remembers saints row 4.5: Gat out of hell
Technically (since I see both concepts mentioned in the comments below), depending on your belief system and perceptions of a multidimensional plane, they did do that with Gat out of Hell.
HOWEVER.....
That game was the product of:
1) People not being able to get over the fact that they didn't kill Dex but, more importantly,
2) Volition admitting that the game is a stopgap while they were making what we thought would be the reboot but was actually Agents of Mayhem. There is nothing wrong with the stopgap measure. Insomniac did Ratchet & Clank: Full Frontal Assault so they wouldn't have to fire/let go of the people whose talents weren't compatible with what Insomniac thought would be the next big thing with Fuse. In many ways, I respect companies that would rather allow a reduced team work on a smaller project than the normal industry practice of treating employees like disposable assets.*
But stopgap measures, while they can be fun/patch up a few last holes in the old franchise before the reboot/have musical numbers, don't really ratchet things up. As such, Gat Out of Hell didn't really do better than "more Saints Row 4".
Still, I feel like, even with a full game budget, the two suggestions in the comments (Time Travel/punching God in the face) would have fallen flat. At that point, it feels like it would have been "Here's the same game with different backgrounds and different NPC clothing."
*And, yes, that's why I spent the $20 on R&C:FFA. Not so much for the game which was....all right but to support a company trying to do right by it's employees.
I'm perfectly fine with going down a baseline to build back up again. What I'm not okay with is removing every ounce of wit and edge the previous games had. I don't even mind bugs, I've played Saints row 3 , and that can often be one of the buggiest games I've ever played, but it's freaking fun.
The significance of the Saints Row series in relation to the GTA series
I personally played SR2 as an Asian Punkrocker with Green Hair and Clothing Based in Violet and Red Tones.
In SR3 I made him a little bit older maybe in his 30s.
In SR4 he was grittled with scars from one to many brush with death and was in his 40s to 50s.
It helped that there was a Priest Garment I could use and double pistols.
I miss you boss - SR4 was one of my favorite experiences I ever had, played it through with a friend who was working for Deep Silver at the Time, so I got all the special gossip from the developer too. It was nice.
I had my own OC for some time, and she really fit in well as a Saint Row protagonist - she was a mad-scientist for hire.
Rest in Peace Spider, Rest In Peace Dr. Robinson; Rest In Peace (All of our O.C.'s) - "R.I.P.O.C."
I srsly thought Saints Row 5 would be about travelling in time, further space exploration with the ship and somehow getting Earth back or a new planet. Shit would have been lit
I recently replayed SR3, 4 and Gat Out Of Hell for the trophies and I tried to not create the same character I always make, I even picked a different voice for them. I got about an hour in and changed back to the character and voice actor I knew a loved.
remembering my first boss from sr2 and trying to recreate him every time i play a saints row game but he's never the same :(((
Oddly while I agree with every point leading up to the final why it wrong, i don't think it proves the point it's making.
Saints Row has gone wrong, but it's not that "you can't go bigger than space" or of course you can or rather, that's the wrong attitude entirely.
The goal wouldn't be to go bigger, it would be to go different.
Saints Row hinted that time travel was next, I mean given the success of Red Dead Redemption and the Assassins Creed games turning the sandbox in a trip through a few different eras of history could have been cool.
Or alternate realities, Saints Row in the Multiverse.
And that's really just with idea of "bigger"
BUT... I don't think a prequel was pre-destined to fail, because 'not space.' Space was fun but that was just the window dressing for the story. It's not The actual core of the game play was still a city and a few special levels. So you could set Saints Row 5 in backyard of a kids birthday party if you fill it with a bunch of fun stuff to do.
A prequel would have been good if they made a good game. Or at best we would need a GOOD Game with fun characters (like past Saint Row games) to know if the failure was because it was a prequel. This game sounds like it was a failure because it was a bad game.
Saints on other planets. Saints at the bottom of the ocean in Atlantis. Saints travelling through time. Saints Simply travelling the globe, since they've never really explored much of the world itself. Saints invade alternate dimensions. There are so so many different ways they could have taken things that wouldnt necessarily have needed to kill the escalation entirely. There are ways to make superpowers go away and introduce new mechanics that wouldnt make you feel like you got robbed. That was the great part about these games, you had no idea what kind of batshit nonsense they were going to toss at you next.
Was SR4 really space though? Like… in theory yes, in practice it was just Steelport again because it was an overgrown DLC for 3 and because of the simulator gimmick it did a glitchy every so often. SR4 did set up a potential escalation since the Saints got access to all of time and space but I guess that’s too much scale to deal with.
an idea that they could've done: from space go multidimensional, have a system where you can upload your saints boss and as you play the game with wacky multiversal hi jinks you have missions where you play alongside other peoples Bosses
It's gratifying to know that Yahtzee and I independently made exactly the same character (save for the name and that mine wore aviators all the time), and that he's equally as angry their voice is wrong now. Call it convergent evolution.
Hideki Kamiya really understands this moving baseline thing. Most of his games start with "Punchout on a street", middle at "You are fighting on the arms of a giant behemoth wrecking a city!" and end with "Galgor the Destructor who is the size of the moon is going to destroy the entire earth, so go punch him you tiny tiny man". I guess that's why Bayo 3 is taking its sweet time and Wonderful102 doesn't exist. Because both of those previous entries already ended at the battle with the space diety lol.
Shoutout to my high school buddy who lent me the myriad of what would be become the most influential games I've played on the PS2 during the last days of school: Capcom Vs. SNK2,
Shadow Of The Colossus, and Silent Hill 2. I had no idea what gaming was about til I played those titles, and my first game ever played was Final Fantasy VII.
“The Whedonesque Misinterpretation of Wit” is such a choice line lmao
2:53
Dude, i'm the same way. Seeing other peoples Boss's drives me nuts cuz i'm used to mine.
Back on Xbox360, I did Saints Row 3 first and it was unlike anything I've ever played before. Its gameplay and nutty story was very much aware of how ridiculous-yet-enjoyable it was.
4 put me off... I spent alot of money on it and its DLC's, so you can't have a go at me for not doing all that. I even got the 'Hey Ash' DLC thing! It felt like a DLC dragged out.
Weirdly enough, Gat out of Hell felt to me more like an actual game than 4. 4 felt like a bunch of DLC's thrown together and I wish they'd done alot more with that.
I like how Gat out of Hell is just sort of swept under the rug by most, though it does serve as a continued example fitting most of the expected consequence.
I'm glad people in recent years have been appreciating what made Grand Theft Auto IV so memorable. Its brown and drab aesthetics are often considered just a product of its time (in the words of one streamer I like to watch almost any time they play a game from the late 2000s: "Colour wasn't invented yet") but they are in fact an important aspect of its theming and setting, as the game revolves around characters from various migrant backgrounds in a city known for being a smelting pot of different nationalities, and the primary theme of the story is the misery that inevitably follows the pursuit of money.
LOLed at the Riddler-Spider, especially at the ending. :D
To be fair, saints row 4 never really went to space. Sure the real world hub was a ship floating in space but space was never explored so it was still on the table for a sequel. 5 could have been a mass effect piss take with the saints exploring the universe and building a galactic empire.
Space being hard to top is a reason why Mario went globe trotting in Odyssey and why we never got a continuation of the R.E.M. fragrance, as Ariana Grande felt it would have been better to leave it as a one and done thing...
It is insane seeing yahtzee calling GTA IV underrated when he ripped it apart back when he made saints row 2 his game of the year
time makes fools of us all
I'd argue that the original Mass Effect trilogy follows the same progression that Yahtzee talked about with Saints Row. You have a protagonist you get to customise but still has their own character, so it feels like a joint effort between writer and player when the character does something awesome. The story escalates each game, first you're after a rogue secret agent, then you're fighting a race of space bugs, then a massive galaxy spanning war against nearly invincible machines. And now, the new Saints Row has followed the Andromeda trap. In trying to hit the reset button, they completely killed what made the first games so amazing.
I think a hypothetical Saints Row 5 could've been "the Saints in alien locales" as opposed to the "aliens in the Saints' locale" that a lot of Saints Row 4 is, but in the end that's just delaying the inevitable. It's a lot smaller of a leap than 2 to 3 or 3 to 4, but one that _could_ have worked. But we'll probably never know for sure. It's also probably telling that the literal biblical afterlife was a spinoff/expansion rather than its own sequel.
These Extra Punctuations are so good I could listen to them all day
Where could Saints Row 4 go after presidents, space aliens and (spoiler alert) destroying Earth in the first 20 minutes. Saints Row 4: Gat out of Hell. Technically either an expansion or DLC depending on your definition, but regardless of what you thought of it, it at least answered the "now what?" question of where to take the original series
Actually, there is something beyond space: multiverse. It is highly difficult to do right, but when done right it is the definitely the over the top to top space. But it wouldn't have save Saints Row. Saints Row 4 was the perfect end anyway.
The time travel antics they implied in the end of 4 seemed like the obvious next step up.
You could have had a Saint's Row where you end up riding a dinosaur to chase a cowboy stagecoach with Hitler in it to stop him from assassinating Abraham Lincoln.
I don't think it's true that just because a series has escalated all the way to space, that the series has nowhere else to go and there's no room for a sequel to exist anymore. But it does mean that the series has to evolve in some way that makes the game fundamentally different than it was before. Mario Odyssey, for instance, follows up Mario Galaxy by having all the hat mechanics that run throughout that game, which totally shakes up the whole 3d Mario formula and make the game feel very different.
A hypothetical Saints Row 5 could have introduced, say, time travel multiverse shenanigans to the plot and gameplay mechanics. Or perhaps set the game as the Saints setting up their influence on an alien planet, and have the sandbox take place in an alien city. Both of those would be major departures from what the game was before, where the juxtaposition of "wacky" and "normal" is a large part of the appeal, but I still feel either of those ideas could work. Or any number of other ideas, so long as thought goes into the execution.
"Left vacant a gaping niche"? Such imaginative prose! 👏
GTA Online feels more like Saints Row these days with the large wardrobe, rocket cars, elaborate set-piece missions, and goofy tone.
It's also the biome they've chosen for the reboot: An unspectacular desert (city) environment. It's like Tatooine in the Disney+ Star Wars series: Sooner or later it feels like you've already counted every grain of sand there is. Compared to all the weird shit you could do in the virtual city in SR4 and in space, this just feels like two steps back.
Technically, after space the Saints Row went to hell in "Gat out of Hell" however you might consider it a independent game or it might be just considered an expansion to SR4.
It's a flippant joke in the end about the lack of the cockney voice, but that was my boss's voice too, and to play a saints row game without it just doesn't feel right
My SR 3 boss was a blue giant of a beast in a suit that spoke in zombie. He was a lumbering oaf that knew what must be done at the end of the game; He needed to be a hero.
RIP the marriage of Yahtzee and the Saints Row Series, July 2011 - Sept 2022, you had a good run.
Street World space, but also: Time, a DIFFERENT world, or inner space also works. You can show the hamster wheel under your hat, and put the hat back on, as long as there's something else powering you when you take your hat off again.
Super paper saints row, for example, where you saints row through some tabloids or other justly discarded periodicals would be interesting
A saints row dead or alive volleyballs for instance
Genuinely glad to hear Yahtz is deep down a fan of GTA4 - It is underrated, and in my book second only to San Andreas in the franchise.
I would have it so that the saints go back in time trying to save the world, but the boss ends up back in the orginal Saints Row having to help Julius (re)build the Third Street Saints, while also incorporating characters of Saints Row 2 like trying to convince Shaundie who you are 5 years before you've even met her.