History YMMV / GrandTheftAutoSanAndreas

** There's a popular fan theory that the ex-wife one police biker may refer to when accusing CJ of being a homewrecker is Barbara Schternvart, one of the girlfriends CJ can date. This is despite the fact that you can encounter this particular police biker before you can even meet Barbara.

** CJ is almost depicted in fan arts, fan videos, and fan mods, as wearing the white tank-top and blue jeans he wore early in the game, despite CJ has the most extensive customization options before the [[Videogame/GrandTheftAutoOnline Grand Theft Auto Online]] protagonist.

** CJ is almost depicted in fan arts, fan videos, and fan mods, as wearing the white tank-top and blue jeans he wore early in the game, despite CJ has the most extensive customization options before the [[Videogame/GrandTheftAutoV Grand Theft Auto Online]] protagonist.

** The most notable glitch is by far the so-called "territory glitch", which allows the player to have all zones in the entire San Andreas map as gang-controlled territories. The original, better known version of the glitch can be triggered by traveling out towards the sea in any direction for approximately 30 minutes: it turns the whole map into gang territories, but it was patched in some game versions. Another version involves throwing satchel charges at the enemies that appear during a gang attack, then detonating them in a non-gang area: it turns only that specific area into a gang-controlled territory, but it works on all game versions. Once an area has been turned into a gang-controlled territory, it can be taken over by the player for the GSF by successfully completing a gang war there. [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAMp4moYwmMhsdBIAZdEKGxq7sfuCfVur This]] Youtube playlist shows how it's done. Players who want to take over the entire San Andreas map should know, however, that some areas are hard-coded to not spawn any gang members (mainly, but not exclusively, around the countryside and the desert), and some of the areas are entirely water-based, which means it can be a pain to acquire them. Furthermore, the original glitch is only safe in the [=PS2=] version, as in the PC and XBOX versions it's rather a GameBreakingBug [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L97xXbFnFWM&t=1431s that can disable the taxi sidequest]].
** If you don't feel like having to go and defend an area of Los Santos from rival gangs, you can simply enter any vehicle that allows you to do a side mission (taxis, police vehicles, ambulances and fire trucks) and start said side mission in order to cancel the attack on ally turf; the turf will still be yours and the enemies will disappear. The same happens when you save the game.

** Some players found the requirement to feed CJ periodically (or risk losing strength and health) to be rather annoying. It can be especially annoying if you lose track and find yourself starving in the middle of a mission, especially longer ones like the ambulance and taxi minigames which do not allow you to get out of your car unless you break the streak required to unlock a unique bonus. This is less likely to appear in the PC and later version (in fact it doesn't appear at all in regular missions), especially if you save (as it reset the unseen hunger meter) or eat something (quicker to do in outdoor vendors and vending machines) before starting the ambulance and taxi minigames.

** Having to defend your turf from Ballas or Vagos can be this. The "turf is under attack" warning can pop up randomly as long as you are in Los Santos and when you least expect it to (including dates with a girlfriend) and cannot be ignored unless you don't mind losing influence in the city. The turf that is attacked is always random, so tough luck if you are in one corner of the city and the rival gangs decided to attack the other one. Fortunately, saving the game or entering any side-mission (Taxi driver, for example) [[GoodBadBugs automatically cancels the enemy attack on your turf]] and prevents you from having to go and defend it.

* ThatOneAchievement: Serial Offender, which requires you to get busted 50 times. Not only is this a ViolationOfCommonSense because you lose your weapons and some of your money, but it's extremely unlikely to get through normal play unless you're really, really bad. To make it worse, the game starts having ''significant'' frame drops after getting busted enough times, regardless of the version you're playing on. It's recommended that you get this out of the way immediately after starting and only then.
* ThatOneBoss: Hunting down and killing Pulaski. When you start the mission, the car you came in (assuming you came to the starting point by car) will usually have vanished. Pulaski drives a Buffalo, a very fast sports car, while you're stuck with a weird looking off road car that handles like crap. If Pulaski manages to get out of minimap range, it's an instant fail. To even get Pulaski to get out of his car, you have to wreck it by either making it flip over via ramming or pumping it full of lead with a drive-by, which is difficult because even the Hunter chopper will need multiple missile salvos to make the thing stop. Even when Pulaski finally bails, he shoots you with a friggin' '''Desert Eagle''', the most powerful handgun in the game which can knock you down. If he knocks you down with it, he'll keep shooting at you until you're dead. Oh, and his health is sky high, requiring a lot of firepower to take him down. Although it is possible to run him over or use explosives, usually your car is near a total wreck by then and Pulaski's gun can bring it to a near total explosion, forcing you to bail. The chase can be made a lot simpler, however, by shooting out the tires on Pulaski's car before he can get in, or by arriving with a jetpack.

* AngstWhatAngst:
** [[spoiler:CJ becomes very upset of Smoke's betrayal and never once says anything about Ryder, nor did he even bring his name up when he tells Sweet about Smoke's betrayal. Right after CJ kills Ryder, the latter is only brought up once by the former (who was, at first, upset about his friend's betrayal, up until Cesar mentions that Ryder tried to have sex with Kendl), and Sweet, following his release from prison, never even asks about Ryder's whereabouts.]]
** San Andreas' citizens' reaction to a dead body in the middle of the street? Approach it, look at it for three seconds or so, and then continue on with their daily lives. Some of the pedestrians even have quotes in which they [[SpeakIllOfTheDead mock the victim]], especially criminals and thieves, who ''love'' the sight of a dead body.

* AssPull: [[spoiler:While Big Smoke's betrayal of the Grove Street Families gets plenty of {{Foreshadowing}}, the fact that Ryder is his accomplice seems to come out of nowhere. The fact that all his missions involve improving the GSF's strength, and the fact that unlike Smoke he has no qualms with directly fighting the Ballas, doesn't seem to frame him as someone who is secretly TheMole. More conspiratorial fans, pointing out that Ryder is barely mentioned in the dialogue directly following the twist, suggest that having Ryder betray the gang was not in the original script]].

* UnintentionallyUnsympathetic: Sweet is written to be a strong leader with heart who is expected to share the sympathy with CJ once their families fall apart (and the climax of the game even tries to make it appear that Sweet was right). However, it's very difficult to feel sorry for Sweet when not only does he constantly give CJ a lot of shit for his past mistakes, [[UngratefulBastard he doesn't even show the least bit of gratitude after CJ went through all the trouble to bail him out of jail]], and yet somehow, Sweet gains the temerity to claim CJ was doing everything for himself and even goes as far to call him a perpetrator. Not to mention that [[NeverMyFault he puts all the blame on CJ for the gang falling apart even though Sweet himself is the leader yet did nothing to get them back on its feet between the five years CJ was at Liberty City]] and, at one point, was even willing to give into crack, which makes him a bonafide hypocrite. To say nothing of the fact that Sweet had even gone as far to unfairly compare CJ's ambition to get out of the hood to [[spoiler:Big Smoke betraying his gang to get into the crack game]]. This last comparison is made more frustrating by the fact that CJ, once he is forced away from Sweet and dumped into a trailer park in the middle of nowhere, manages to become renowned as both a career criminal and a legitimate businessman at a scale that is far beyond what he ever could have previously imagined, yet once he returns to Los Santos it's back to street gang loyalties and Sweet framing CJ's successes elsewhere as a betrayal of that. As evident in the video shown above, [[TheScrappy it really isn't a wonder why he's one of the more unpopular characters of the game]].

** Anytime a mission includes a rail shooter sequence is pretty much this. "Just Business" starts off with a shootout against the Russian Mafia that ended up in one of the most memorable moments early on in the game as well as a homage to [[Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay the truck chase from Judgement Day]]. "Reuniting The Families" cranks up the elements of what makes "Just Business" great in the first place by replacing the Russian Mafia with the SWAT Team and the entire LSPD detachment going for Sweet's head and ends up in an equally awesome rail shooter where you can easily level your [=AK-47=] skill and get the funniest dynamic and banter the four friends would ever had before the inevitable happens. And that's not counting the final level... The only downside would be that these missions tend to give a weapon with infinite ammo, replacing any weapon in that slot, only to later strip you of it after the mission is completed, without giving the previous weapon back, which can be ''very'' annoying if the player had spent money buying ammo for that weapon slot.

* AccidentalAesop: While Sweet is in prison, CJ becomes a genuinely successful person with his own goals, motivations and methods; but once his brother comes back to his life, CJ starts regressing to being "Sweet's little brother" again and keeps doing what he asks for. It's not hard to see the whole thing as a lesson about toxic family relationships, and how trying to please a {{Jerkass}} family member who keeps acting like your accomplishments don't matter is not a healthy thing to do, no matter how important they are to you. Pretty much the only reason why it doesn't appear to be an intended aesop is that Sweet's borderline abusive relationship with CJ isn't really treated as such in the game itself, with Sweet being UnintentionallyUnsympathetic to many.

** Troper, you a busta.[[labelnote:explanation]]To save you a possible trip to Urban Dictionary, 'busta' means 'poser', 'coward', or 'snitch'. CJ gets called one a lot by his homies.[[/labelnote]]

* HypeBacklash: Considering the overwhelming praise both the game and its storyline receives from the diehard fans of the game, as well as their tendency to constantly boast about [[SeinfeldIsUnfunny the improvements over the first two games while concurrently ignoring the flaws]], the praise that it receives to this day can get rather irritating and a turn-off for many folks who are just discovering the GTA series.

** Catalina. See her entry [[VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIII here]].

** [[YMMV/GrandTheftAutoIII Catalina]]. See her page for more details.

** Some players found the requirement to feed CJ periodically (or risk losing strength and health) to be rather annoying. It can be especially annoying if you lose track and find yourself starving in the middle of a mission, especially longer ones like the ambulance and taxi minigames which do not allow you to get out of your car unless you break the streak required to unlock a unique bonus. This is less likely to appear in the PC version (in fact it doesn't appear at all in regular missions), especially if you ate before starting the ambulance and taxi minigames.

** Having to defend your turf from Ballas or Vagos can be this. The "turf is under attack" warning can pop up randomly as long as you are in Los Santos and when you least expect it to (including dates with a girlfriend) and cannot be ignored unless you don't mind losing influence in the city. The turf that is attacked is always random, so tough luck if you are in one corner of the city and the rival gangs decided to attack the other one. Fortunately, entering any side-mission (Taxi driver, for example) [[GoodBadBugs automatically cancels the enemy attack on your turf]] and prevents you from having to go and defend it.

* NoSuchThingAsBadPublicity: The game encountered mixed results of this. By the time it came out the series' [[SeinfeldIsUnfunny shock value had gone down]], but got a huge new boost after the discovery of the "Hot Coffee" sex mini game mod. While the game did get tons of publicity for this, it also led to a huge recall of the game which ended up costing Rockstar tens of millions of dollars.

* CompleteMonster: [[DirtyCop Officer Frank Tenpenny]] is the crooked, self-righteous head of [[Characters/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreasAntagonists C.R.A.S.H.]], using the unit as his own personal gang in a quest to control all of San Andreas. For years, Tenpenny has abused his authority to exploit the gangs of Los Santos for his own profit while turning them against each other and orchestrating bloody {{gang war}}s. Tenpenny eventually throws in exclusively with the ruthless Ballas, supplying them with dangerous crack cocaine with which to flood the streets and turn countless civilians and crooks alike into suffering addicts. To secure Balla rule, Tenpenny ensures the systematic slaughter of smaller gangs, such as [[Characters/GrandTheftAutoSanAndreasGroveStreetFamilies Grove Street]], and in a haphazard attempt on the life of Grove Street's leader Sweet, Tenpenny has a drive-by carried out that kills Sweet's elderly mother. To keep his crimes hidden, [[KillerCop Tenpenny]] regularly [[CopKiller murders fellow officers of the law]] as well as other whistleblowers, either with his own hands or by forcing those like [[AntiHero Carl "CJ" Johnson]] to do his dirty work, threatening the latter with having his brother raped and killed if he refuses. [[TheCorrupter Tenpenny]] is also responsible for the corruption of Big Smoke, making him become the face of the drug empire Tenpenny has constructed, planning all the while to eliminate him. Tenpenny's villainy is so rampant that Los Santos begins tearing itself apart in an outraged riot over his unchecked evil, at which point Tenpenny tries to eliminate loose ends, [[BadBoss leave his allies to die in a fire]], and flee the state to save his own skin. Tenpenny's ambition nearly destroys San Andreas, and to the very end he sneers that those against him were [[KnightTemplar nothing but "trash" to be taken out]].

** Modding CJ (and to an extent, Big Smoke) into other games with modding capabilities has become something that the fanbase has been doing religiously, to multiple hilarious effects. Expect to see CJ (and Smoke) in games like ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGd6TiYeXKg Yakuza 0]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDR1jODNoWI God of War (2018)]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNL6S2_0h3s Sekiro]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gofn_avrTs SIFU]]'', '''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdkpZnjkVHo Genshin Impact]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ0K-4GjfRU Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3]]'', and ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPTiCfBn9X0 Stray]]'' (yes, that VideoGame/{{Stray}}), of all things.

** The main conception of the Grove Street Families is that they're against drugs. Correction: They're only against the hard drugs such as crack cocaine. They have nothing against marijuana since most of the members of the gang are occasionally seen smoking weed.

** And there is the case of Officer Frank Tenpenny. Some see him as a kind of HeroAntagonist, and why? Los Santos's criminals are completely out of control, and playing them against one another may be the only way to keep the violence down. In short, he could be trying to eliminate the gangsters from the streets, who are the real villains in their interpretation. Subverted when, in a real context, the relationship between Tenpenny and CJ seems to be a scene of EvilVersusEvil, since in many missions he hints at having Tenpenny committed horrendous acts (in the mission "Riot" is believed to be blamed to rape). It's further hurt by the fact that Tenpenny empowers the drug-dealing gangs like the Ballas and Vagos, while the NeighborhoodFriendlyGangsters are the ones he's largely deposing. Sure, he could be considered someone who fights fire with fire if not for one thing that is heavily understated in the game. By playing gangs against each other, he is indirectly responsible for a lot of innocent deaths (Beverly and Brian Johnson are even included into main plot) and escalation on street violence and drug abuse. So Tenpenny thinks of himself as a WellIntentionedExtremist but in fact he is more of a FascistButInefficient thug.

** While not entirely major forces of evil, many fans ignore [[spoiler: Ryder and Big Smoke's deaths and betrayal of Grove Street and often include them in works as CJ and Sweet's [[VitriolicBestBuds snarky best friends]] (and in Smoke's case, both for being the FatComicRelief and the BigEater)]].

** While nobody thinks Tenpenny is a good person, a lot of people believe him when he says his murdering and other criminal activities are for the greater good, even though he is never seen doing anything good or helpful for anybody and only cares about himself.

* MagnificentBastard: Mike Toreno is an enigmatic government agent who engages in several illegal ventures to further US interests. Originally running the Loco syndicate to traffic drugs into Los Santos, Toreno fakes his death before revealing to Carl "CJ" Johnson his true allegiances, forcing the reluctant criminal to assist Toreno in running black ops against enemies of the state and rival agencies. Toreno has CJ engage in missions such as boarding a cargo plane during take-off and bombing it in mid-flight, stealing an experimental jetpack from a research base to attack a military train convoy, and infiltrating an aircraft carrier to steal a Harrier Jump Jet and assassinate protected targets elsewhere in the state. A witty and affable man through and through despite his shady nature, Toreno ultimately keeps his promise to release Carl's brother Sweet from prison by calling in some favors.
* MemeticBadass: Carl Johnson is by far the poster boy for the franchise (only rivaled and possibly surpassed by the GTA V trio). After all, he canonically breached [[{{Expy}} Area 69]]'s defenses in order to steal a jetpack, using it without previous instructions, then flying out of the base to give it to a hippie. He's also capable of stealing various vehicles from the military forces, owning half the state of San Andreas and [[spoiler:completely annihilating the drug empire in San Fierro and Los Santos]]. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

* ContestedSequel: Initially, some fans fresh out of ''Videogame/GrandTheftAutoViceCity'' were disappointed in ''San Andreas'' for it's grittier tone/atmosphere and more washed out aesthetic, as the 1992 setting had them hoping it would be another cheesy, nostalgia-filed romp. Instead, ''San Andreas'' put nostalgia in the back seat to instead try to give as much of a realistic portrayal of life in 1992 as possible, with the societal problems faced at the time (the crack epidemic and the related rise of crime and violence in the inner cities, police brutality, the anti-gang police units engaging heavily in criminal activity and effectively becoming gangs themselves, the economy being in recession, the infiltration of Russian criminal syndicates into the United States thanks to the Cold War ending) being front and center and driving the plot.

* ThatOneLevel:
** One opening mission, "Sweet & Kendl," can be this. You're on a BMX... and must avoid a Voodoo full of Ballas who specifically target you. Not to mention that they have Submachine Guns -- before you're even introduced to armor and weapons (barring GameplayAndStorySegregation). While not too bad, it's still a bit jarring for such an early mission.
** A mission where you need to save [[spoiler:Madd Dogg from killing himself]] would have him jump before you can save him (at the very beginning of the mission), and players literally would have to start over and hope the glitch didn't happen again. Worse is that the only confirmed reason why it happens is if you use the "pedestrians riot" cheat, which can't be turned off once you activate it unless you have a save from before doing so - and even without cheating ''at all'' it might happen to you anyway. The sole saving grace is that it's apparently rare enough that if you are forced to start over from the beginning, it most likely won't happen again when you make it back that far.
** Until you get the hang of them (and even then), flight missions are just awful. Helicopters are reasonably easy to fly around (except the Hunter, which is a lot more sensitive), but planes are horrible. One ding usually makes them catch fire, you have to do gimmicks like flying near ground level to dodge radar, and you have to successfully land the things when you're done (most of the time). If you haven't aced every flight school test, go back and do that first so you won't be totally driven up the wall. And you think the regular aircraft are tricky, try flying the Hydra, a fighter jet with hover jets that you can manipulate to hover in place. Luckily, it seems the developers realized that the Hydra controls were awkward and only force you to fly it for one mission.
** Flight School itself can be very frustrating. Hours upon hours upon god-damned hours at failing to pull off perfect barrel rolls and loop-de-loops, and ''it's necessary to continue the game''. The worst part is that flight school starts off deceptively easy. The first two challenges involve simply taking off and landing the plane, respectively, and they're both really easy. But on the third challenge, flight school takes a steep nosedive into the depths of Hell. It's "Circle Airstrip", where you have to take off and fly from corona to corona, all while you're most likely wrestling with the wonky plane controls. It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to fly through the damn coronas - which are rather small targets - nigh-perfectly. And when you finish that one, guess what the next challenge is? You have to do the exact same thing, only when you're done you have to land the plane, which is incredibly easy for beginners to screw up. What fun! You CAN make all the flight school challenges a bit easier by just switching to first-person view, but it's still a huge pain in the ass.
** "Freefall" can be frustrating beyond all comprehension, mostly due to the fact that you're screwed by the interface from the start. The short version is that you have to kill a jet full of targets by jumping to it from a ''Dodo''. The jet won't arrive until you find it up north, beyond the borders of map. This means you only get a second or two or warning when you do finally find it, which takes a while. Then you have to do a 180 degree turn without screwing up so you can fly through a ring just above its tail while going the same general direction. Your Dodo can barely outrun the jet, and that's if you have the advantage of being higher than it. You'll never catch it if you have to climb. This you have to do while struggling with very frustrating controls. Oh, and you have less than a minute to manage all this, because the jet counts as landed if it gets over the city. ''Then'' you have to kill all the bad guys on the plane, while forced into a first-person target mode that only lets you duck behind cover, and you can only use a pistol which takes several headshots just to waste one of them. This is one of those missions where cheating through various means may actually be preferable to doing it fairly, given how difficult it can be to pull off. The best part is that it's ''delightfully ridiculous''. If the widely-touted "something new in every mission" pre-release prospect showed itself rather questioningly in any one mission, this would probably be it.
** The infamous "Wrong Side of the Tracks" is an early mission in which you drive a motorcycle alongside a moving train while Big Smoke, your passenger, shoots at the rival gang members perched on top. The problem is [[GuideDangIt there isn't an indication]] that you need to stay at least another train's width apart from the train or Smoke can't hit them (luckily your enemies seem to suffer from ATeamFiring no matter where you are). The mission failure line "All we had to do was follow the damn train, CJ" has reached a degree of MemeticMutation. Additionally, Big Smoke will only aim at one gang member at a time, so you have to move forward or back to target a specific person. Admittedly, the game clues you in on [[BulletSparks the missed shots when you're not in position]], but it's not that intuitive.
** "Life's a Beach", early on. You have to impress a girl by dancing on the beach (read: playing a button-timing mini-game). Since this game pre-dated ''VideoGame/GuitarHero'' (though notably came after ''VideoGame/DanceDanceRevolution''), the concept of [=HDTV=] lag hadn't really hit the public consciousness yet. A lot of early adopters couldn't beat that mission. History repeated itself when the "Remastered" version was unwinnable for some, but thankfully since then a [[GoodBadBug Good Bad Bug]] was discovered [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2s9SSRTDIE that allows it to be skipped.]]
*** Even earlier than that is "Cesar Vialpando", the similar mission where you have to bounce a lowrider to the rhythm of the music.[[GuideDangIt The PC version switches the button to the numpads without any indication except that the numpad can be used to manually do hydraulic bounce outside of the minigame]]. And even if you guess you need to use the numpad to bounce the car, you'll probably fail the minigame thanks to an abysmal score the first couple of attempts, because the Up[=/=]Down commands are inverted.
** "Tanker Commander". It's actually a fairly simple mission - steal a tanker truck and take it to a man who will buy it. However, you have two guys in a car chasing and shooting at you, the tanker can't take that much damage, and it's quite easy to make too sharp a turn and disconnect the tank, which means mission failure. One can't help but wonder if the reason why "Tanker Commander" is the nearest mission when you first join up with Catalina is so you can get it over with. Of course, this is a lot easier when you remember you can exit the truck without ending the mission and [[WhyDontYouJustShootHim cap the two guys in the car]] [[BoomHeadShot through the windshield]] for a safe and leisurely drive to the destination (not to mention that completing the mission this way awards you with an indestructible Sadler parked near the delivery point). But even if you do that, the guys chasing you will likely be close to the truck/tank-and sometimes stuck under the tank-and there's a very good chance that destroying their car will cause the tanker to go off. And even if you try to lure them away from the tanker, Catalina will continue to shoot at them and may cause them to blow up by the tanker anyway.
** "OG Loc" features an annoying motorcycle chase, and the guy being chased not only shoots back (this is at the time where Ammu-Nation is still closed, thus you can't buy armor yet and your max health is still low), but also immune to damage. In the end you are even ambushed by his thugs. Thankfully at the end of the chase, you can kill him. You can [[SequenceBreaking blow up the bike]], but you need a lot of SMG ammo to do that, and at this time, Ammu-Nation did not open yet and the one SMG pickup can only be slowly periodically picked up.
** "Highjack" is a bit of a pain, just because Cesar won't shut up. You have to ride along side a truck at just the right speed, and be RIGHT NEXT TO IT, and it's timed. Have fun.
** "Stowaway" requires the player to drive a motorbike into the back of a plane as it is taking off, with literally no pause between "mission starts" and "plane is moving". This would be difficult enough were it not for the fact that you have to run through a group of people shooting at you (and their boxes and cars in the way), but the plane dumps barrels periodically to make it even harder. Worse, there's no leeway. One mistake means you lose, because the plane only has to reach the end of the runway. On the early PC releases, there was an issue where frame rate would affect how fast the plane moved relative to you; basically the lower fps it is, the faster the plane is (usually this can be remedied by turning off frame limiter - which Rockstar warns the players against - and also lowering resolutions to the lowest possible).
** Before Stowaway, there's also "N.O.E.". There's a time limit, yes, and that's exactly why you want to finish that mission as soon as possible. The problem is, the Surface-To-Air Missiles surrounding the Restricted Area won't allow you to take the shortcut above the area even if you're just passing by. And that's only the [=SAMs=]. There's still the radar, which will detect your presence and will send the Hydra (a fighter jet) to hunt down your Rustler (mentioned above, it's only slightly better than the ''Dodo''), and if you're unable to shake it off in time, that Hydra will fire missiles at you. And no, not only one missile, but possibly up to three at one time! And aside from the radar and [=SAM=]s, the area the player has to get to (Angel Pine) is surrounded by high trees and rocks, making it very difficult to keep below the radar without blowing the Rustler up. The best way to get this while avoiding the radar detection is taking a longer path above the ocean. There are many hills or canyons which will help concealing your presence as well. Although it may take longer, you can still actually finish the mission before the time expires.
** "High Noon" can get extremely infuriating, mostly because your target is driving a car twenty times tougher than it has any right to be while your dune buggy is prone to spinning out and/or flipping over on a whim. On top of that, the mission fails if he gets out of mini-map range, so you have to keep up on top of trying to stop him. And when you finally do manage to coax him out of the thing, he's got a Desert Eagle that can blow up your car if you've taken damage trying to get him out of his. You can alleviate the difficulty somewhat by popping his tires before he gets a chance to get in (you can reliably get the entire left side with a rifle), then watch as he flails about in a vain attempt to outrun you. Or just drop near the quest with a Jetpack, and lots of SMG ammo. As soon as mission starts, get the jetpack, and fire at will. A real cakewalk.
** Any mission (especially the valet missions) which requires you to keep a vehicle at or near pristine condition. The game does not in any way encourage careful driving, and these missions are timed more often than not. That means you not only have to avoid hitting a single car on the way there, but do so while driving in the typical fashion because you simply won't make it in time otherwise. And that's not even getting into the fact that the car you're trying to keep intact can be difficult to drive, and the game actually counts scraping damage from ''driving up hills'' if you're moving too fast.
** "Photo Opportunity". To elaborate, this mission has you meet up with Cesar halfway across the map, tedious but not especially difficult. Where it starts to suck is when you have to drive his lowrider from the meeting point to Angel Pine, which means taking either a massive detour or taking the freeway. The kicker? The car is prone to rolling especially on hilly roads, and the freeway has a lot of speeding cars. Its saving grace is that there is no time limit at all.
** "Robbing Uncle Sam". You have to take a truck -- which is very easy to tip over, incidentally -- and Ryder down to the military area at Ocean Docks and then use a hard to maneuver forklift to get six crates into the back of the truck while Ryder stops the National Guard. Except Ryder is nothing but TheLoad -- he can't hit soldiers standing less than six feet away from him so you have to keep stopping, getting out of the forklift and doing his job so he doesn't die and fail the mission for you. If you do manage to get all six crates on without Ryder dying, he then insists you drive as well. So then you have to drive this very easy to tip truck as you are pursued by two Humvee style military trucks with soldiers firing semi-automatics while Ryder tells you to beep the horn so he'll throw an explosive crate at the trucks. Except his aim is equally terrible and if it takes you too long to get to the lockup he'll either fall out of the truck or get shot by the soldiers, and you can't tell how much health he has this time because there is no gauge as there was for the section in the docks. Basically this mission would be orders of magnitude less difficult if Ryder had simply stayed at home. The real kicker is that before the mission starts properly Ryder brags about how no weekend soldiers are a match for him, and the thought that if you know the story of the game he's probably going to be running all the guns stolen on the job to rival gangs anyway. On a touchscreen device it's frustrating from beginning to end.
** "Toreno's Last Flight" can be a nasty one. This mission has you chase down Mike Toreno's helicopter onto the freeway and shoot it down with a rocket launcher. Since you can't shoot rockets from vehicles, this means standing in the middle of the freeway with maniac AI traffic barreling towards you. Plus, the initial shootout at the helipad tends to draw police attention, so cops are also thrown into the mix. Good luck.
** "Cop Wheels". You have to steal four specific police motorcycles at designated spots in Las Venturas, and then load them onto the Packer that is driving around the city perimeter, all in under 12 minutes. Stealing any of the bikes will automatically give you one star on your wanted level, while killing the cop to get the bike will net you two stars and send the cops chasing after you. And since a couple of cops are scripted to get on the motorcycles and drive away in them for one reason or another, you'll have to chase after them unless you're fortunate enough to shoot them off their bikes. And there will be a lot of remote areas that the Packer will go through that will leave you stranded on foot without a vehicle, and traffic will decrease significantly if you have a wanted level. All you can do is pray that a vehicle (usually a car driven by the police chasing after you) will show up so that you can jack it and then head to the next motorcycle to steal it.

** Vehicle customization. It's only function is to aesthetically modify your vehicle and it serves no purpose other than to look good (all but one modification only affects your car aesthetically), which is rather surprising because of the good amount of modification you can get to each selective car, and certain cars (like Lowriders and Tuners) can only be customized in certain locations in Los Santos and San Fierro respectively. You can't even bring your own modified car to any race (apart from the first racing mission by Cesar) as the street racing game puts you in a chosen or randomized car. Besides, unlike in ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoV'' where personal vehicles store any modification done and retain it when they respawn, in ''San Andreas'' the player must be very careful with any modified vehicle because, if the vehicle despawns or it's destroyed, the modifications are lost forever.

* FranchiseOriginalSin: The protagonists of ''III'' and ''Vice City'' were hardened, vicious and unrepentant criminals for whom the violence they commit both in-mission and [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential out-of-mission]] was in-character. CJ, on the other hand, was the first GTA protagonist to be portrayed more sympathetically, making the violence the player can make him commit in-game feel [[GameplayAndStorySegregation out-of-character]]. While this wasn't an issue around the time of the game's original release, probably because the game mostly stuck to the wacky tone of the other GTA games of its era, it did become a major criticism of ''VideoGame/GrandTheftAutoIV'', due to its shift towards a more grounded, realistic, and serious tone.

** Modding CJ (and to an extent, Big Smoke) into other games with modding capabilities has become something that the fanbase has been doing religiously, to multiple hilarious effects. Expect to see CJ (and Smoke) in games like ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGd6TiYeXKg Yakuza 0]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDR1jODNoWI God of War (2018)]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNL6S2_0h3s Sekiro]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gofn_avrTs SIFU]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T81Y24c4hMA Spider-Man (2018)]]''', '''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdkpZnjkVHo Genshin Impact]]'', ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ0K-4GjfRU Dragon Ball Z Budokai Tenkaichi 3]]'', and ''[[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPTiCfBn9X0 Stray]]'' (yes, that VideoGame/{{Stray}}), of all things.

** While the Drive-Thru Confessions Church in Palomino Creek, Red County may seem like a rather irreverent joke towards the sacrament of confession by Catholics, there was actually a RealLife version of it [[https://abcnews.go.com/US/priest-offers-drive-confession-coronavirus-pandemic/story?id=69726217 carried out]] by an enterprising priest in response to church closures in the US during the UsefulNotes/COVID-19Pandemic.

** This wouldn't be the last time Creator/SamuelLJackson played [[Film/LakeviewTerrace a crocked cop]].