YMMV / Grand Theft Auto V

A - G

• Accidental Aesop:
  • Trevor, serving as a kind of Anti-Role Model, inadvertently makes a case for legalization during his "Grass Roots" mission, complaining it would put him out of business.
  • Be careful of continuing to associate yourself with a Addled Addict ex and try to get them the help they need if you do so, lest they drag you into their mess. Johnny spends most of The Lost and Damned trying to distance himself from Ashley due to her drug addictions, often having to drop by to save her from the messes she gets into because of her addictions. Come 2013, and Johnny has gotten back with her, at the cost of her meth addiction rubbing off on Johnny, resulting in him being not the man he used to be and ultimately killed by Trevor without much resistance.
• Alternative Character Interpretation
  • Trevor is a big one. Some think he's an absolute Jerkass, whose occasional Pet the Dog moments do nothing to redeem his unrepentant, brutally psychotic behaviour, while others consider him a deeply disturbed individual whose actions are down to the myriad of mental problems the game alludes to him having. More still simply consider him an incredibly badass Villain Protagonist who's similar to some of the other main characters in the franchise, who are perhaps undeservedly held up to a higher moral standard than him. The game actually has Michael posit an in-universe alternate interpretation of Trevor, theorizing that much of his behavior is a front; a persona he puts on to intentionally frighten, disturb and offend the people around him.
    • As a possible example of this: During the heist set-up that takes place at Trevor's meth lab, he microwaves some clearly rotten food that he implies may or may not contain human flesh. When his crewmates blanch at his offer to share it, he happily chows down. As soon as the meeting is finished and the others leave, he immediately vomits it all back up.
    • Also, ever notice how Trevor's spelling is very good in his texts and emails to Ron, while it's absolutely atrocious in his texts to Michael, Franklin and Jimmy?
    • Did he spare Mr. K as a rare show of mercy? Or was it an act of rebellion against Steve Haines, who told him to kill him? Or was it both?
    • Is Trevor really the most evil of our protagonists? Or is it Michael? While Trevor is easily the most openly psychotic and violent of the three, he's also the only one who actively acknowledges how awful he is and has a fair number of Pet the Dog moments as well as a few notable Noble Demon traits, such as how he genuinely cares about his friends in spite of how he treats them. Not to mention his Dark and Troubled Past where it's implied he was molested by his mother. Michael on the other hand comes across as a backstabbing, opportunistic Hypocrite who previously sold out both Trevor and Brad to save his own hide. To further emphasize the point, when Trevor finds out the truth about what happened to Brad, he was understandably hurt, but he still couldn't bring himself to kill Michael. Adding more ambiguity to the situation are the alternate endings. In Ending A, if the player chooses to kill Trevor, Trevor spends the entire mission running from Franklin and refusing to fight; as opposed to Ending B (kill Michael), where Michael fights back with clear lethal intent.
    • Were Trevor's feelings towards Michael entirely platonic? Or is there something more?
  • Jimmy too. Is he a smug manchild layabout happy to blame his father for his own laziness and refusal to do anything other than do drugs and play video games, or is he a friendless, socially awkward young man with some legitimate Freudian gripes, who sorts himself out through a little Character Development?
    • Both Jimmy and Tracy's obnoxious entitlement and immaturity take on a whole new meaning when you think about how much shit they probably went through as children. Jimmy especially was forced into witness protection when he was only eleven, losing any friends he made in the process and probably a large part of his innocence. Indeed, his refusal to grow up might have a lot to do with him being outright denied a childhood because of the actions of his psychotic ex-criminal dad. And even after all that he still has to deal with his incredibly dysfunctional parents who are every bit as immature as him if not worse, and he's even the one partially responsible for mending them back together by the end of the game. It makes people's analysis of him as a loser with no real problems just because he's a wealthy white guy in a big house with a (seemingly) stable family somewhat short-sighted when you think about it.
  • Then there's Michael himself who has several in-game interpretations. Supposedly the Only Sane Man with an Awful Wedded Life who sees himself as a Jaded Washout disappointed with a lifestyle of shallow materialism, he's also described by both Trevor and his wife as a self-deluding hypocrite who in Amanda's words, "kills people and then lounges in the sun and feels bad about it" while Trevor regards him, with some justification, as a self-centered hypocrite who sold his friends for his own filthy rich lifestyle. Notably in the two alternate endings, Michael is far more willing to betray Trevor than Franklin is, and he immediately justifies killing Trevor on grounds that he had it coming, while Trevor will refuse to help Franklin kill Michael and will call him a traitor for doing it. Then there's the case of whether his death in one ending is an intentional suicide or if he didn't think what headbutting Franklin would actually do and did it on impulse.
  • Tanisha is apparently the Only Sane Woman in Franklin's circle of friends. She's not stupid, she's not a crook, she's the only one who sought to and ultimately did escape the criminal lifestyle, she tries to let Franklin know that money isn't going to win her favor or make him happy, and disparages him for always looking for the easy solution. However, many see her as a high-and-mighty Hypocrite who's guilty of everything she accuses Franklin of being (see The Scrappy for details).
  • What was Sanchez's motive for betraying Haines? Was he more honest than he seemed, or was he just looking to move up in the world?
  • Devin's anger at Michael for Molly's death. Was it a sign that he genuinely cared about her even if he didn't return her affections? Was he just upset at how it hurt and inconvenienced him? Or was he just using it as an excuse to justify taking revenge on Michael for ruining his plans to prevent Meltdown's release?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The final heist, loud approach, is based on the 2006 heist that happened in Argentina, which became the movie The Heist of the Century.
• Anti-Climax Boss: As tough and well armed as Terry and Clay could have been in The Lost and Damned they're barely tougher and well armed as the rest of the mooks they're with and usually go down in 3-4 shots. Justified in that, much like Johnny, the meth addiction has made them far less tough than they were in TLaD.
  • Pretty much all of the game's Big Bad Ensemble goes down fairly easy, no more difficult than any other mook. Wei Chung and Stretch get offed by (from their perspective) complete strangers. Steve Haines gets sniped by Trevor, having never seen it coming. The real challenge with these kills is getting away clean. Devin Weston, last on the list, puts up no fight at all, but at least he gets some face time with the protagonist so he knows exactly who is killing him and exactly why, giving it more emotional context than the others.
  • In the first two endings respectively, Trevor and Michael don't put up much of a fight. The former is a chase scene which ends in a single bullet being fired, while the latter has a shorter chase scene which ends in a red herring moral choice.
  • Basically, the game doesn't have bosses in a gameplay sense, only a narrative one.
  • Trevor's Rampage side missions. You go from fighting Rednecks, to two gangs in Los Santos, to the freakin U.S. Military. Who's the target of the fifth and final rampage? Hipsters. In this case, it's balanced out with being funny as hell.
• Anvilicious:
  • Like GTA IV before it, while it does take potshots at both the American right and the American left, the right gets the brunt of it. There's the return of the Republican Space Rangers, the Kung Fu Rainbow Lazer Force, Weazel News: Confirming Your Prejudices! again, Jock Cranley's Patriot Test, one of Trevor's Contacts (Joe and his sidekick Josef, who salutes by sticking his arm straight out),and others.
  • The mission where you torture Mr. K. It tries to communicate that torture is an ugly method that is pretty much useless for gathering information through the most gratuitous and inappropriate depictions of violence possible.
  • The themes also get involved with issues of money and power are also heavily tied into the current Recession and The War on Terror, to the point that the main enemies end up being: a Corrupt FIB Agent who isn't above Cold-Blooded Torture and egging on Inter-Service Rivalry with the IAA for the sake of his career, and Corrupt Corporate Executive Devin Weston, who scams and screws over his business partners and employees for maximum profit, and practically owns his own private army in Merryweather, a near N.G.O. Superpower of mercenaries who are notorious for committing war crimes, but are given free license to operate at will by the American government - a blatant Take That! to Blackwater's messy attempts at "security consulting" in the Iraq War.
• Arc Fatigue: The sidestory of Michael and Trevor's strained relationship starts about a quarter of the way through the game... and then continues on toward the very endpoint. Almost all their interactions throughout the game are the two bitching back and forth with no resolution being made between them until a post-game drinking session. It gets so bad that even Franklin starts repeatedly mocking the two for it.
• Badass Decay: Johnny Klebitz. In The Lost and Damned he was the very epitome of a Badass Biker. But by the time of Grand Theft Auto V he has become a pathetic meth addict who doesn't even have the balls to stand up to the guy who is screwing his girlfriend.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Trevor. His Ax-Crazy behavior in general is seen by half the fanbase as a hilarious parody of the franchise's Video Game Cruelty Potential tendencies, and the other half as obnoxious and forced. Furthermore, the way he brutally murdered Johnny Klebitz and The Lost in his introduction infuriated many fans of The Lost and Damned, who thought it was an insulting way to treat a returning character, to the point that many fans of The Lost MC picked Ending A (where Franklin and Michael murder Trevor) in order to make Trevor pay for his massacres of members of the club. Considering who Rockstar Games claimed he's supposed to represent, this may have been the point.
  • Michael. He is either a deeply troubled man who only wants the best for his family and to become a better person, or an unsympathetic selfish hypocrite who uses the fact that he has a family to pretend he is a better person than he actually is. While he isn't as psychotic as Trevor, Michael is implied to have cheated on Amanda first, and he screws over Franklin so he could meet his idol, but he also seems to genuinely love his family.
  • Steve Haines and Devin Weston. Depending on how you ask, they're either interesting, entertaining antagonists who tie in nicely with the game's themes, or the weakest and least threatening GTA antagonists yet. The fact that they're both killed off anticlimactically (and in the case of Haines, killed in a really unsatisfying manner without a final confrontation with the protagonists) doesn't help either.
  • Lamar. To some players, he's a hilarious comic relief character who acts as a nice foil to Franklin. But to others, he's an obnoxious Ethnic Scrappy who frequently gets into trouble with rival gangs like the Ballas, and relies on Franklin or Trevor to bail him out. Half the time, Lamar's not even grateful that his friends come to rescue him from his own screw-ups.
  • Your opinion of Jimmy and Tracy is going to depend on your tolerance for people like this in real life (who have only become more noticeable in the years since thanks to social media and streaming) and your opinion on how much having parents like Micheal and Amanda justify their respective attitudes. Either way, it is very rare to find someone online who has a mild view of them.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The mission "I Fought the Law..." is often regarded as this by players. The reason? You get to do a street race against two of the fastest cars in the game (the Overflod Entity XF and the Grotti Cheetah) in the motorway which connects East Los Santos to Blaine County.
  • "Derailed", a mission sometime before the Union Depository heist, has Trevor chasing a train in motorbike. Despite being a late game mission and no doubt brings GTA San Andreas players back bad memories of that one early game mission, this one is far easier. Doesn't help it has funny dialogue mostly courtesy of Trevor, awesome music, awesome setpieces, and one of the achievements being 'Better than CJ'.
  • "Minor Turbulence", one of the Trevor's missions, also combines several infamous missions from GTA San Andreas involving planes, but this one has improved plane handling and again, Trevor's funny dialogue helps.
  • "Hood Safari", where Trevor accompanies Lamar and Franklin to buy dope. First of all, this is your first mandatory return to Grove Street. Second, not only do you get to watch Lamar and Trevor interact, but Trevor tells off Franklin's annoying aunt, and stops Lamar from being ripped off. Third, when the drug deal goes bad, the trio fight off wave after wave of gangbangers (and then cops), and this mission is the earliest that you can purchase a grenade launcher, making Grove Street a literal war zone. There's also a very brief cameo appearance by CJ, Big Smoke and Ryder, who were three characters from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. And last, but certainly not least, you must escape from the cops by jet skiing through the Los Santos River.
  • "Bury the Hatchet". On top of the Awesome Music, The Reveal for Trevor about what actually happened to Brad, and when playing it as Michael getting a voice over flashback to him breaking the news to Amanda, which is implied to be the start of their marriage going downhill. It's emotional, to say the least.
  • Any mission where you are free to switch between the three characters tends to be climatic and amazing, with the mission taking full advantage of their abilities.
  • "The Wrap-Up": What starts off as a simple meeting between Michael and Dave escalates very very quickly in a matter of minutes. What happens? Well, Haines and Sanchez arrive to arrest the aforementioned pair, leading to a 4-way standoff. Next, a group of rogue federal agents appear to arrest the four...and then another separate FIB squad comes in, called in by Sanchez. Then fucking Merryweather pulls up in a chopper. A free-for-all gun fight erupts when Haines shoots Sanchez dead, leaving Michael and Dave to survive hordes of agents and mercs on their own...at least initially. Trevor shows up to provide cover for the two by first shooting down a chopper. The fact that only three people managed to take down waves of private militia and the FIB is amazing to say the least.
    • Props to Agent Norton in particular. Despite his profession, he's very loyal to Michael and their arrangement and immediately backs him up despite the major consequences of it all.
  • The Heist missions, naturally, but special mention to the last 3:
    • "The Paleto Score": When the gang needs to knock over a small-town bank, fully aware that the local Corrupt Cops would be on the scene in less than a minute after the alarm goes off. The gang came prepared, and counter the police response by walking out of the bank wearing Bomb Suits. Michael and your gunman come out sporting Light Machine Guns, and Trevor comes out hefting a freaking Minigun! So they tear up the police men... and the police cars... and the police choppers... and then Army Fort Zancudo sends soldiers, Crusaders, and [Rhino tanks. The gang kills all of them, too.
    • "The Bureau Raid": To clean the records on Corrupt Cop Steve Haines, the gang has to break into the FIB building. There are two options. First Option: Pull the largest Bavarian Fire Drill in history: first by having Michael plant firebombs posing as a janitor, then the crew charges into the building as firefighters to grab the data drive, having to eventually have a shootout with FIB agents in the flames, and rappelling down an elevator shaft while dodging falling blocks of concrete. Second Option: Skydive onto the roof of the FIB building, hold off FIB goons while doing Hollywood Hacking on the computer, before rappelling down the side of the building, and having your Badass Driver get you out of there in an ambulance to slip past the police.
    • "The Big Score": "Subtle" or "Obvious." Either way: you get to steal four tons of gold, and you do it in a badass way.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • When Michael gets drugged and robbed by his own son, he undergoes a Mushroom Samba that involves spaceships, aliens and flying through a city of rainbows in his underwear that just has to be seen to be believed. And all that while sound bites of Michael's family yelling at and disparaging him play in the background.
  • On that topic, anytime Trevor, Michael and Franklin finds and ingests peyote and have a trip of them being an animal of some kind. Generally accompanied by a narrative of the characters themselves.
  • The two side-missions involving Michael and Trevor smoking some very potent weed and being forced to battle aliens and clowns, respectively.
  • Trevor's rampage missions in general are these, but special mention goes to Rampage Five, where he is attacked by hordes of gun-wielding hipsters who drive to the battle in electric cars and scooters, and die while saying things like "I was trying to finish my screenplay."
  • The opening cutscene of "Blitz Play" has a less obvious example. In the middle of this almost completely serious dialogue, when Dave mentions that "some parts of the government might be corrupt," all three Player Characters, in perfect unison, make comical "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" gestures.
  • The first mission in Dom Beasley's series of parachuting missions begins with Franklin meeting a dog in the middle of the woods. Somehow, Franklin is able to determine that Dom is stuck hanging from a parachute on a tree somewhere just by listening to the dog bark. After a while of following the dog and finding Dom stuck in a tree, Franklin tells Dom that he has a cool dog. Dom replies "What dog?" Franklin turns around and intends to point the dog out, only to realize that the dog is completely gone. Naturally, this is never mentioned or brought up ever again.
    • The dog appears yet again in a later mission in the same series of missions, where the dog once again leads Franklin to Dom Beasley, only this time he's about to jump off of a dam without a parachute (and he actually goes through with it, too.) Once again, the dog disappears without an explanation.
• Bonus Feature Failure: The video editor included with the PC version has a lot of irritating problems, like only being able to go roughly fifty feet away from your character, recording ending the instant your character dies, the "smooth" camera option causing the camera to lag behind the set keyframes, poor video output quality, and other arbitrary limits that make it just plain annoying to use.
• Broken Base: See here.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • As much of a Hate Sink Stretch is, seeing him shoot D in the head, not once, but twice, can make some feel good.
  • Killing Peter Dreyfus after what he's done to poor Leonora Johnson and being a Karma Houdini Warranty for a long time is satisfying.
  • Remember Rocco from Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony? Michael's first mission with Solomon Richards has him beat the shit out of him after being a walking Hate Sink and a Karma Houdini that you wish Luis Lopez would kill him himself. And then you get to do exactly that as Michael.
  • Smashing Fabien's nose and torturing Lazlow with tattoos not too long after is pure pleasure.
  • Killing all four Devin Weston, Steve Haines, Stretch and Wei Cheng in Ending C is nothing short of satisfaction. No wonder many people consider it the best mission in the whole game.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: In terms of weapons, many weapon classes have one weapon that is perceived as absolutely better compared to the other weapons in its class. Expect players to always gravitate towards such weapons while ignoring the rest. Notable examples include the Special Carbine in the Rifles class and the Marksman Sniper in the Snipers class.
• Complete Monster: Peter Dreyfuss is a seemingly eccentric but egotistical retired Vinewood director, and a twisted "artist" obsessed with the suffering of others. The culprit of Leonora Johnson's infamous murder, Dreyfuss had tortured and raped Leonora for an extended period, mutilating her both physically and sexually while she was still alive, before decapitating her. Years after the fact, Dreyfuss torments her surviving family with taunting phone calls and messages, regularly sending them Leonora's belongings and severed body parts. In a confession letter to his "friend", Dreyfuss subtly belittles him for not understanding why he did it, comparing it to other instances of torturing hitchhikers; sleeping with young girls; and paying two prostitutes to stab each other. Confronted by Franklin, Dreyfuss cowardly tries to flee, attempting to justify himself by claiming he "immortalized" Leonora through his art.
• Crazy Is Cool: As morally reprehensible as he can be, Trevor arguably crosses over into this with the sheer level of insanity he gets up to. The best example is probably the mission "Minor Turbulence", where Trevor crashes a crop duster into the back of a cargo plane with an open hatch, hijacks it, and bails out of it after being attacked by the Air Force, potentially by driving a jeep out the back, simply because it's there.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Police Brutality is portrayed at its worst in this game through its AI, but the cops are so over-the-top in their brutality and are so gung-ho about it that it wraps around to being plain funny. It helps that the police AI is also indiscriminate in who it targets.
• Demonic Spiders
  • NOOSE troopers. Unlike regular cops who only occasionally ram you, they do it every chance they get. At worst they actually will ram you, at best they'll get in your way. Regardless, because there's also Rubber-Band A.I. this will allow the two guys hanging off the sides to take potshots at you, and no matter what you do, their bullets WILL hit you. And if you're on foot, they can take multiple machine gun bullets to the chest and not only survive, but also get up and continue fighting as if nothing happened. The worst part is how easy it is for them to get called in. Killing a cop instantly gets you three stars, and killing at least three or four more after that gets you four, which is when the NOOSE troopers start appearing. And when you get five stars, they spawn far more frequently, sometimes two or even three at a time.
  • Cougars can become this thanks to their ability to One-Hit Kill you combined with their near-inescapable speed and tendency to ambush you out of nowhere. If you're wandering the wilderness in Blaine County and see a red dot coming for you, your only hope of survival is, at best, a very narrow window to blow its head off with your shotgun. They only attack you while you're on foot, thankfully, so if you're in a vehicle (even just a motorcycle), you're safe.
  • Worse than cougars are the sharks that appear in certain water areas, as well as at the very edge of the map. Unlike cougars, which you can just kill with a well-timed shotgun blast, your arsenal against a shark is limited to a very small selection of melee weapons which barely hurt it at all, and only really serve to temporarily delay you from becoming its dinner.
  • Dogs usually leave you alone unless you bother them or their masters, but if you do happen to piss one off, it'll become a big threat very quickly. Like cougars, they can easily outrun you, and the larger ones are capable of killing you instantly, but they are harder to hit thanks to their smaller hitbox. What's more, there are even police dogs that will attack and potentially insta-kill you if you get a wanted level. Worst of all, some parts of Blaine County (particularly Sandy Shores and Paleto Bay) have aggressive stray Rottweillers that can dart after you from out of nowhere, and you might not even know they're on your tail until they drag you to the ground for an insta-kill.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: All three protagonists seem to have a screw loose or two, which has been noted by the playerbase:
  • There's clearly something off about Michael. He frequently uses extreme force when dealing with mundane tasks, (see Disproportionate Retribution below) is anti-social, and appears to suffer from a Lack of Empathy. (If the player kills a couple NPCs, and then goes to Michael's therapist, he'll acknowledge the killings, saying that he "Doesn't even care." His tone of voice even indicates that he feels guilty, about NOT feeling any guilt.) His therapist diagnoses him differently depending on how you play. Including, but not limited to: A Nice Guy with a terrible homelife, a Sociopath, a Psychopath, both a Sociopath, AND a psychopath, and a sexual deviant.
  • Under clinical and objective perspective, Trevor embodies the most typical features of antisocial personality disorder: he has enough charm and charisma to be Affably Evil, looks for thrills whenever he can (need for stimulation and prone to boredom); he embraces his criminal life and enjoys it, disregards his violent actions (impulsivity), is incredibly aggressive and violent, possesses promiscuous sexual behavior and has an incredibly high criminal versatility. On the other hand, he is also incredibly erratic, emotional, and a habitual substance user, something that would be diminishing him in terms of judgment and mental stability, and he is known to have had a difficult childhood. He also has many weaknesses and is very emotionally dependent on other people, traits commonly associated with borderline personality disorder. There is no doubt that Trevor has some psychiatric disorder, possibly reinforced by his regular substance use. It's also possible that he suffers from Pica, a feeding disorder where sufferers consume non-food substances that have no nutritional value, which is shown by how Trevor drinks gasoline recreationally.
  • Franklin may have sociopathic tendencies. Despite his status as the decidedly most "sane" protagonist (or should we say less dysfunctional?), he frequently shows signs of being unable to form real attachments to people; Lamar is his only friend at the start of the game and he shows open contempt for him most of the time (he seems to stick with him only out of fear of being alone) and his love for Tanisha comes off as very self-serving. Of course, he has a massive Lack of Empathy, but unlike true sociopaths, he is much more self-controlled and civil, so we may be talking about some mental disorder left to the interpretation of the players themselves. If you have him use the bong in his house, while high he will voice his concerns that something may be broken within him. It's worth noting that even Franklin's mother, implied throughout the game to serve as a Morality Pet to him even post-mortem, is not enough to really curb his criminal activity. Franklin is more than willing to buy and - presumably - sell the substance that caused his mother to overdose and turned his high school sweetheart into a prostitute, crack cocaine.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Three words; Trevor. Has. Fangirls.
  • Played With - while there are an inordinate amount of Original Characters shipping with Trevor, most of those stories don't change Trevor's Laughably Evil persona much - in fact, that might be part of the appeal.
  • While definitely not to the extent of Trevor, people also tend to downplay Michael's negative qualities. While yes, he wants to change for the better, he betrayed his gang to be with his girlfriend^note While this is completely understandable if he had no other choice, he was onboard with the idea of them dying in the process, despite knowing he'd be in witness protection regardless cheated on said girlfriend before the events of the game, complains when she cheats on him for revenge, ignores his kids, and has It's All About Me mentality^note Most noticeably, he makes Franklin work for someone so he'd get to work at his dream job. He does get better, but only after his family leaves him.
  • There's a lot of people who try to paint Amanda as an innocent victim of Michael's psychotic impulses, when she's basically as bad as him aside from not being murderous. She cheats frequently (even beyond the one time she cheated on him "for revenge"), disregards her husband's incredibly generous ground rules for said cheating (like not doing it in his house, or with anyone he has to pay for the privilege), and blames every problem in her life on Michael even if he had nothing to do with it, or no choice in the matter. She also seems to think not being a murderer makes her morally superior to him and gives her full license to hypocritically ridicule every aspect of his life. Even in "Reuniting the family" it's clear she still doesn't feel she should be held responsible for her share of the friction in their marriage.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Wade Hebert, the Juggalo of Trevor Philips Enterprises, has gained a lot of love from the fanbase for his humorous lines and endearing innocence.
  • Agent Dave Norton, the Reasonable Authority Figure who fully acknowledges that Steve's Glory Hound schemes and insistence of perpetuating Inter-Service Rivalry are more destructive than all three of the protagonists combined, and tries his best to keep Michael and his crew safe as much as he can, as well as being a legitimate badass when push comes to shove, such as breaking into an IAA black-site to prevent a bioweapon from devastating the west coast, and fighting alongside Michael through a Mexican Standoff with Steve, an FIB team, the IAA, and a Merryweather Buzzard.
  • Chef, the badass meth cook for Trevor Philips Industries. He only appears a few times in the game (once during the mission "Trevor Philips Industries" and he can also be used as a gunman during heists), but every time he shows up he proves himself to be such a tough and competent gunman that he's become quite a popular character.
  • Brad, considering that he only shows up alive for five minutes during the prologue, there is a lot of Wild Mass Guessing that centre around him and his past with Michael in particular. Many fans even want to see the DLC focus on Brad, Michael and Trevor in their bank robbing days.
  • Ensemble radio station in this case, Radio Mirror Park is by far the most popular station in the game, and for good reason.
  • A minor example, but the drunk redneck NPC who stumbles out of the Yellow Jack Inn in the first Civil Border Patrol mission and starts singing has quite a few fans who find his song enjoyable.
  • While all the strippers have fans, Sapphire emerged as the most popular, mainly just because many find her extremely attractive and she has a sexy voice to boot. The fact that she can sleep with the player and is the only in game stripper to appear in any missions both in story and online implies that she was popular with the game developers as well.
• Even Better Sequel: When compared to Grand Theft Auto IV, though not universally (see Contested Sequel above). Rockstar seemed to have addressed a lot of player concerns such as many features that were taken away (character customization, the ability to fly airplanes, buy property, etc.) in GTA IV and made several improvements to the GTA formula (i.e. better driving, shooting, and crapton of side activities to do).
  • In addition, heist missions like 'The Job', 'Breaking the Bank at Caligula's' and 'Three Leaf Clover' are widely considered the Best Level Ever in each game by the fanbase. Rockstar responded to this by giving the heist theme a much greater focus in GTA V.
  • The PC version. GTA IV's PC port was not that great when it first came out, with three pieces of DRM tied-in (SecuROM, Games for Windows — Live, and the Rockstar Games Social Club) and some pretty high requirements for the time, yet it was not a stable game. Its only redeeming parts were the video editor, the usual support for custom music through Independence FM, high resolution support and 60fps gameplay, and having a huge modding community. Come the much-delayed GTA V PC version in 2015, and we have a much better-looking and (for the most part) more stable game. It comes with a large palate of custom settings, an even better video editor, less DRM (just the Rockstar Games Social Club, plus Steam if purchased from there), great graphics with 4K resolution and 60fps support, and, as always, support for custom music through Self Radio (with the newly-added ability to show artist and song title metadata).
  • While some players fault the game for focusing too much on multiplayer, there is no arguing about how popular GTA Online is. What's better than exploring a city and causing mayhem? Why, doing it with friends of course! As successful and iconic as the GTA series is, no other installment can claim it was played by millions of people daily years after its release like it was an MMORPG.
• Evil Is Cool: Michael, Franklin and Trevor, as usual in GTA.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Red Dead Redemption II. Fans tend to debate about which game is best in terms of storyline, characters and online mode.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • What Michael and Trevor did during their pre-GTA V robbery sprees, before and after they hooked up with Lester and Brad.
  • The things Franklin did back when he was still a member of of the Families.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • As far as certain hardcore fans of Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned are concerned, the mission "Mr. Philips" didn't happen; if Johnny did die after the previous game, he didn't go down like that.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV fans of the Story Branching that make it possible for Derrick and Kate to survive might ignore this installment due to both of them being established as dead.
  • Fans willing to accept Johnny's death might still try to ignore how his returning associates Clay, Terry, and Ashley are canonically considered dead, even though the player can choose to spare their lives.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Balcony Guy - A name for Michael before his name was revealed because he was standing on a balcony in the first trailer.
  • Red Car Guy - A name for Franklin before his name was revealed because he was driving a red Rapid GT in the first trailer.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • Considering all the Ho Yay they get and the highly dysfunctional state of Michael's marriage for most of the game, it's more common to see fan works pair Michael up with Trevor than his canonical wife Amanda.
• Funny Moments: More like Crowning Front Porch Of Funny. Virtually every cutscene that takes place in or around Franklin's front yard in Chamberlain is hilarious, mostly because they involve Lamar and/or Trevor doing and saying ridiculous things.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Assault Shotgun. It has an extremely fast fire rate, and with the extended clips upgrade an absurd amount of rounds. It also has decent range, fires full auto from blind fire and all factors combined makes it an incredibly overpowered weapon in general.
  • For singleplayer on the PC, some realism mods turn shotguns in general into this, though they also turn any enemy using one into a Demonic Spider.
  • The Advanced Rifle. High firing rate, great accuracy, and decent damage make this weapon ridiculously powerful against other enemies (or players if you're playing online), especially since the Carbine Rifle and Assault Rifle just can't hold a candle to it.
  • The Combat MG. Has slightly lower damage than the Advanced Rifle but has more range and a massive 200 round magazine with extended clip making this extremely effective for fighting large amounts of opponents, especially cops and gangs.
  • AP Pistol. Perfect for players seeking more accurate drive-bys, and with a few quickly spent clips, a highly effective killer of any cars players are chasing/chased by.^note Although, the AP Pistol is powerful against mainly non-armored cars than armored cars. Previously, a lot of vehicles were weak to weapon damage in general, even with armor, but a later patch made cars more resistant to damage. The AP Pistol can still be enough to blow up a car, but extra armor makes explosives more viable.
  • In Story Mode, properly investing using the Lester Assassination missions with the money gained from The Big Score can easily max out the amount of money you can have in the game. This makes all other money making opportunities moot in the process.
  • Also in Story Mode, returning players can grab a Railgun from Ammu-Nation. It takes a bit to unlock and costs an arm and a leg, but players who do get it are effectively set, since all they have to do is point and click and an explosion will appear. No surprise, then, that this weapon is nowhere to be seen in Online. Or at least, it was nowhere to be seen for a good few years.
  • Among the special abilities in single-player Trevor's rage mode is easily the strongest. Not only does it amp up his damage so he can kill large groups of enemies in seconds with almost any gun but it also turns him completely invincible letting him survive explosions, turn the minigun from Awesome, but Impractical to a handheld apocalypse machine and even kill groups of armed enemies with his bare fists. By the time it runs out you could easily have killed everyone in the vicinity or be back in cover no worse for wear considering the damage you would've done.
• Genius Bonus: The Mexican farmer Trevor meets claims his family had been living around Los Santos for 200 years. This is Truth in Television: there was already a community of Mexican settlers in Real Life Mexican California, known as Californios, by the time the lands were annexed into the U.S. by the 1840s. The fact that the man has been harassed by people who've been in Los Santos less time than he has, one of them a Russian immigrant, is a subtle swipe at xenophobia and harassment over what side of the border you come from.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The game has gained a considerable amount of fans in Japan thanks to hololive's Vtubers streaming the game to the point that there's been a surgence of Japanese players playing Online. This has not gone unnoticed by Rockstar themselves and their voice actors that noticed the game's rise in popularity in Japan, despite the wide-open sandbox genre being a niche market there.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Police helicopters, which start coming in at a three-star wanted level. They have a nasty tendency to spawn right when you think you're in the clear. What makes it worse is how easy it is to get a helicopter after you - if you kill a cop (even by accident), you're smacked with three stars and you'll have a chopper hot on your ass in no time. At four and five stars, you have to deal with two or even three at once, on top of NOOSE troopers.
  • Some pedestrians, usually the "aggressive" types such as rednecks, enemy gang members (Ballas and Vagos), and Lost MC members, qualify as well. They can start attacking you if you run into them, talk to them wrong, or sometimes for no reason at all. Depending on the pedestrian, fighting back may even result in other pedestrians joining in the fight, or even pulling guns or knives on you. Some pedestrians may have dogs with them, who will also join in on the fight and can instantly kill you. The worst part? Even if you do choose to defend yourself, you'll frequently end up gaining a wanted level in the process, forcing you to deal with the cops on top of the attacking pedestrians.
• Goddamned Boss: The blue helicopter in the final Epsilon mission if you choose to escape with the money. Unlike other enemy helicopters in the game, this one will try to hover right above you, messing with your aim. Either hide under cover and let it run until the pilot gives up and goes away, confuse it under cover and shoot it down as quickly as possible, or just blow it up (or kill the pilot) before it even leaves the ground. The last two options are part of a Gold Medal requirement.
• Good Bad Bugs
  • In what looks like a Spiritual Successor to the crashing plane glitch from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, when walking around in places in uptown Los Santos like Michael's house, you can sometimes hear what sounds like a plane crash from a distance. This is due to the game deactivating the AI for the planes flying in the sky but not despawning the planes themselves, causing some of them to crash into the mountain north of Vinewood Hills.
  • You can also duplicate your cars via another glitch, meaning that all three characters could possibly have a fully-modded Z-Type while only buying one.
  • Since cutscenes are rendered in real time, you can have odd things happen during them like having the police plug multiple shotgun shells in Trevor and Michael while they are arguing.
  • By staying inside a building with windows like a barber shop, blocking the entrance with a car, and killing everybody inside, you can attract the cops but they will not shoot you. However, you can since bullets can go through the seemingly bulletproof glass. This can make it very easy to attain five stars and still stay safe.
  • Certain NPC models have voices and dialogue that don't match their appearances at all. Examples include a blue collar worker claiming to be a highly paid lawyer and a burly NOOSE member sounding like a spoiled valley girl.
  • If you choose Option A after the Big Score, you can sometimes get this to happen if you hold your fire instead of killing Trevor. Words can't describe how hilarious it is, so just watch.
  • Redditors discovered a bug in the Taxi AI which they turned into a hilarious minigame. Calling a taxi to hurry between two specific points in Blaine County causes the driver to attempt to navigate a twisting, cliffside road at speeds it is not equipped to handle. So far players have found that it has about a 10% survival rate.
  • In the original version of the game, Franklin's special ability gave vehicles a brief speed boost during its activation, and this could be applied above a vehicle's normal top speed. By repeatedly using his special ability it is possible to go faster than otherwise possible. This was removed in the enhanced version however.
  • Brake boosting. Discovered by speedrunners, this glitch allows for rear-wheel drive cars to go above their normal top speed with properly timed usage of the brakes while driving over certain edges. Combine this with Franklin's special ability and you can go flying for many city blocks from any hill.
  • When firing a suppressor-equipped weapon from a car, the suppressor will for some reason be invisible.
  • Two more exposed by Cracked: The fact that you can tell a taxi to drive off into the ocean and drown both the driver and the player (although if the player leaves the cab fast enough, s/he can still escape, but the poor taxi driver is consigned to a watery grave). Impractical, but many players find it a good laugh. Additionally, you can do yoga while riding a bicycle- getting on backwards, then riding arms crossed with your head looking forward upside down. Looks painful, but it did entertain players. Similarly, taxi drivers were never programmed to take terrain into account when being told to hurry. In mountainous areas this can lead to the driver going way too fast, and flying off a cliff.
  • If you go to a certain point in Paleto Bay and dive down to the ocean floor, near some plane wreckage is a briefcase containing about 12,000 dollars. If you save and reload, it respawns. Have fun grinding for the cheaper properties or gun mods. And if 12,000 isn't enough for you, there's another easy-to-find briefcase on top of a sunken submarine off the coast of Pacific Bluffs, and it's worth 25,000!
  • A minor case with this trope occurs with Trevor's hunting minigame. Said minigame has you take pictures of your kills with Trevor's phone. You're supposed to send them to Cletus, but you can actually send them to any of Trevor's contacts, which results in whoever you sent the photo to commenting on it. The Good Bad Bug in question is that whoever you sent the photo to will respond even if the character in question is dead (i.e., Devin Weston & Tao Cheng in Ending C, Michael in Ending B).
  • One glitch that was patched in February 5, 2017 has you get online vehicles in Story Mode. To do so you must go to Creator Mode, Choose to create a GTA Race, pick the online vehicle you want (for example the Armored Kuruma or the Insurgent), add the checkpoints you want and complete it. Then go to Los Santos Customs then exit and go back to the Story Mode. The vehicle used in Creator Mode gets impounded in the Mission Row police station which can be paid for $250 in order to retrieve it. However, this glitch only works in vehicles released in updates prior to cars released immediately in the Further Adventures In Finance Felony (except Lowriders Custom Classics). Attempting to do so in cars released post Pfister 811 Week event until the release of Dewbauchee Specter from the Import/Export update, the car will be despawn immediately as soon as you pay the fee to retrieve it. The glitch still worked in the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game until the shut down of the servers in December 16, 2021.

H - P

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One of the radio advertisements in the game is for a company that says it sells tiki torches that can be used if you need to form a drunken mob. After the events of the summer of 2017, in which white supremacist groups carried tiki torches while marching in several cities around the US leading to riots in which multiple people died, it doesn't come across as nearly as funny or harmless a joke.
  • The entire subplot involving the Minute Men becomes somewhat uncomfortable and extremely controversial in the wake of the Trump era, which came three years after the release of GTA V.
  • Everything about Peter Dreyfuss, a filmmaker who used his connections and influence in Vinewood to get away with genuinely horrifying crimes, was already quite unpleasant. However, it has become even more uncomfortable and unsettling following the real life revelation of film producer Harvey Weinstein's extensive history of sexual harassment. This is compounded by Weinstein's close friendship with the financier and sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein.
  • After all these years, having the game mock Call of Duty for Downloadable Content is hypocritical due to how focused on microtransactions GTA Online is.
  • Though the Turismo name is a carryover from Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Gran Turismo would be infamous for following GTA Online's microtransaction method of "purchasing in-game money for real money" for the sake of Fake Longevity in the seventh installment.
  • Trevor's antagonism towards Michael regarding his decision to move to Los Santos and become a wealthy family man in lieu of staying loyal to his friends becomes significantly more ironic and hypocritical after Grand Theft Auto Online would reveal that Trevor would eventually move to Vinewood and become a lifestyle coach, leaving Ron and his other Blaine County contacts behind.
  • The mission "Legal Trouble" became this when Warner Bros., under the helm of notorious new owner David Zaslav, cancelled several movies and shows for tax purposes, just as Devin Weston planned to do with the in-universe film Meltdown.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Trevor's insistence that he's not a hipster, when you realize that one of the DLC packs was called "I'm Not A Hipster." Even better, it has numerous additions to single player —- including very Hipster-ey clothing and car choices.
  • In December of 2013, a man was arrested for fighting off 15 police officers while high on meth and masturbating. Not only does this sound like something Trevor would do, the perpetrator looks like he could be Steven Ogg's twin brother.
  • Now that the eight-gen versions of the game are out, this bit with Ricky◊, especially when you factor in how the seventh-gen versions just barely fit on the discs^note with the Xbox 360 version requiring two discs, the first to install data to the hard disk and the second to run the game and all the new features added in next-gen. It's enough to make you wonder if it wasn't cheeky Foreshadowing on Rockstar's part.
  • Trevor Phillips is frequently seen smoking and selling methamphetamine as part of his criminal enterprise that he runs from his home in the desert of Blaine County. Steven Ogg would go on to have a minor role in Better Call Saul, which is the prequel to a show all about making meth out in the desert. Bonus points in that Sobchak, Ogg's actor, has quite a lot in common with Trevor.
  • This fan-made trailer, released on August 30, 2013. What makes it this is that in the Next-Gen versions of the game, Midnight City is one the new songs added.
  • Trevor being introduced brutally beating a beloved GTA protagonist to death. In 2016, Steven Ogg, Trevor's actor, appeared in The Walking Dead as The Dragon to Negan, who makes a similarly grisly entrance. Even better, Simon eventually meets his end to Negan in the penultimate season 8 episode by a beatdown and strangulation.
  • There are several minor throw away jokes on the game's radio to "Combat Yoga" and "Darwinian Yoga", which take out the meditative aspects of yoga in favor of a more modern and aggressive approach. Fast forward to 2016, and Rage Yoga is now a thing.
  • Franklin's phone is said to be a Bittersweet device that looked like a Samsung Galaxy and running Drone OS, a parody of Blackberry and Android respectively. At the time the game was first released, Blackberry devices ran the proprietary Blackberry 10 OS with an Android Runtime tacked on, and there were rumors circulating of Samsung planning to buy Blackberry and use that branding for a line of business phones. Frame step to 2015, and not only did the buyout not happen, but Blackberry had also started making true Android Blackberry phones starting with the Priv, in a bid to Win Back the Crowd due to Blackberry 10 being perceived as lacking in desirable software and the Android runtime being dodgy and not fully compatible with all apps.
  • The San Andreas gubernatorial race is between Democrat Sue Murry (a condescending, overly politically correct, "know-it-all shrew") and Republican Jock Cranley (a hateful, bigoted, dangerously ignorant, jerkass celebrity with no prior experience in politics), the candidates reflecting every negative stereotype of 2016 Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump — three years before the 2016 election. While Clinton being the Democratic nominee that year was seen by many pundits and political writers as a Foregone Conclusion even in 2013, Trump running for President came out of nowhere and surprised everybody.
  • On a similar note, the Republican Space Rangers episode included on the in-game TV, while intended as a parody of the contemporary Tea Party movement, was also incredibly prescient in anticipating Trump's appeal. The episode ends with the Space Marine Dick eating some bad chicken wings and taking a giant diarrhea dump on a model of the Capitol building at a right-wing rally, which gets mistaken for an Excrement Statement by a crowd that roars with approval, leading to a pair of shadowy alien financiers (transparently based on the real-life Charles and David Koch) choosing him as the vehicle through which to enact their hard-right agenda. Trump, of course, would campaign on overt scorn for the political establishment, comparing it to a swamp that needed to be drained, and while he never went so far as to literally defecate on the Capitol steps, he did gain notoriety for his flouting of political norms and his Controversy-Proof Image.
  • The Republican Space Rangers became this themselves once the Trump administration proposed the idea of having a Space Force, a separate 6th branch of the armed forces to have control over military operations in outer space.
  • Samantha Muldoon's transparently commercial shift from being a socially aware pop singer to a down-home, flag-waving country singer, mainly to profit off of the older, conservative white demographic that still spends money on lucrative physical CDs as opposed to streaming, can be seen as this in light of Miley Cyrus' shift from raunchy, rap-influenced pop music on Bangerz to a more country-influenced pop-rock style on Younger Now. Said shift was widely criticized, with many interpreting Miley's comments about her Genre Shift as indicating that her Bangerz-era Hip-Hop influences, and her subsequent abandonment of them in favor of a country sound, were done for commercial reasons.
  • Seeing Steven Ogg advertise Old Spice products, considering that Trevor is notoriously unkempt.
  • During the Doomsday Heist missions, Avon Hertz offers to pay for the job in cryptocurrencies and Lester tells him to keep them because "cryptocurrencies are a bubble". Avon smugly replies "spoken like someone who got off too early", with Lester's tone implying that it is in fact the case. Less than two weeks after the Doomsday Heist's release, said bubble popped.
  • The look of the Insurgent Pick-Up Custom is impressive since Streit Group is marking the Python, a 4x4 armored vehicle that has the same looks as the Pick-Up.
  • What was Trevor's name in the "Rush" casting call? Simon.
  • The Jester Classic emits a 4-cylinder exhaust note, even though the car it's based on, the fourth-gen Toyota Supra was only available with an inline-six engine. Skip forward to 2019 and the debut of the fifth-generation Supra, which shares not only shares a platform with the third-gen BMW Z4, but also its engine options, one of which is BMW's B48 engine, a turbocharged inline-4. This went further when the Tuners update dropped during the Summer of 2021, which saw the A90 Supra be introduced into the game as the Jester RR, as the car emits a 4-cylinder exhaust note as well.
  • Molly Schultz sharing a name with Molly McIntire, one of the main Historical Characters in the American Girl franchise, could be dismissed as a mere coincidence, but anyone who has read Spy On The Home Front would notice that Molly befriended a girl named Anna Schulz and her family, whose father Fritz worked at a garage in a town named Weston. Not to mention that both Mollys are brunettes and wear glasses, if that's any indication.
  • Pride Not Prejudice, the hardhitting, violent video game set in the Deep South, is a little humourous considering Rockstar's next game was Red Dead Redemption II, a hardhitting, violent video game largely set in the Deep South.
  • Peter Dreyfuss (two "L"s), a legendary filmmaker of the New Hollywood era who brutally murdered a young starlet named Leonora Johnson as part of his "art", is a transparent parody of Roman Polański, a legendary filmmaker of the New Hollywood era who left the US for France after he was convicted of statutory rape and has since been accused of other cases of such. In 2019, Polański wrote and directed An Officer and a Spy, a film about the Dreyfus affair (one "L") in fin-de siècle France in which a Jewish officer in the French Army was falsely accused of espionage and treason, a story that struck many critics as Polański commenting on his own legal problems and allegations.
  • The Beat Off headphones advertized in-game are a dig at Dr. Dre's range of Beats headphones. In December 2020, Dre himself makes a cameo appearance during the introductory mission for the Cayo Perico Heist and then plays a prominent role a year later in The Contract update.
  • During the mission "Father/Son", Michael dryly tells Franklin to never have kids. Fast-forward to 2021 during Online's The Contract update and it looks like Franklin never took that advice to heart.
  • Lamar boosting gas tankers was a subject of mockery Franklin brought up early in the story...except that, in 2022, the Criminal Enterprises update revolved around a gas shortage and high gas prices; Looks like Lamar had the right idea, but just at the wrong time.
• Ho Yay: The homoromantic subtext was pretty thick with Michael and Trevor, which's brought up more than a few times in the game. Most of it came from Trevor, which, considering who he was, wasn't all that surprising.
  • Trevor seemed to be genuinely heartbroken after Michael's faked death. He even had his friend's name tattooed on his left upper arm as a gesture of mourning. No, he didn't do this for Brad, his brother, or even his mother. Only for Michael.
  • He's also implied to be extremely resentful and borderline jealous of Amanda, viewing her the same way as a bitchy ex-girlfriend would view the new girlfriend of the guy who dumped them.
  • It's not all one-sided, either; Michael listed "selling out everyone you love" as a consequence of achieving the life he had. And when Trevor shouted that "nobody cares about me", Michael just looked Trevor in the eyes and calmly said "I do".
  • Not helping was the fact that they were constantly mistaken for a gay couple. In the first mission where they reunited ("Fame or Shame"), Lazlow mistook them for the fathers of Tracey. The Chinese gangsters later thought Michael was Trevor's boyfriend and "soulmate" (to quote their own words).
  • Their constant bickering when they temporarily lived together in Trevor's trailer sometimes crossed into the territory of making them look Like an Old Married Couple.
• Hollywood Pudgy: Michael is regularly mocked because of his weight. While he has a bit of pudge around his midsection, he's actually in good shape for a middle-aged retiree, and he even starts with the most stamina of the three characters.
• I Am Not Shazam: Quite a few people are calling the Epsilon Program KIFFLOM due to their overuse of the word.
• I Knew It!:
  • Fans were predicting that the game would have multiple playable characters not long after the first trailer came out, going by said trailer's focus on different people at different points. It was nearly a year later when Rockstar confirmed this.
  • On GTAForums, an entire thread (warning: the thread is hundreds of pages long) was devoted to mapping out the game's play area, going by what information could be gathered from screenshots and trailers. What they came up with turned out to be quite similar to the snippets of the map that were revealed with the announcement of the game's special editions; compare the last map made before the reveal to this semi-official map◊ (put together from the aforementioned snippets). Likewise, their guesses as to the layout of the countryside were confirmed◊ when the full official map (taken from a strategy guide) was leaked.
  • Fans were expecting the game's multiplayer component, Grand Theft Auto Online, to be somewhat similar in style to an MMORPG, with more robust character customization than the last game's multiplayer, a free roaming "lobby" similar to the multiplayer of Red Dead Redemption, the ability to customize and store cars, and multiplayer heists. This and more has all since been confirmed.
  • The PC version. For around 9 months, GTA V was the Holy Grail and the forbidden fruit of PC gaming... until E3 2014.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Michael is seen as this by some fans when he actually trying to be a good father despite his questionable actions and criminal activity. Especially later parts of the game and his missions. The fact that his family (especially Jimmy) responds to all of his early attempts to be a good father by flinging insults at him and rubbing his face in his criminal past doesn't help.
  • Trevor Philips, who was, apparently, abused by both parents (probably sexually by his mother), was permanently grounded from the Air Force because he was mentally unstable, met his best friend, Michael, started drifting away from Michael before he was apparently killed in a bank heist gone wrong, found out 10 years later that not only was Michael alive but living in the same state, meets up with him again, their relationship slowly frays more and more over the course of the game... and 2 of the 3 endings are downers for Trevor. In ending A, he's burned alive. In ending B, Franklin kills Michael, meaning his dearest friend is dead and one of the few people Trevor completely trusted betrayed him, and he cuts off all contact with Franklin. Of course, there's still one way to get Trevor a sort of happy ending, but when all of that shit's happened to you, it's really not that surprising that Trevor became a batshit insane meth dealer/addict and black market weapons peddler.
  • Franklin. He was born in a Big, Screwed-Up Family, was orphaned at a very young age, his friends are a bunch of incompetent idiots who live in the past, his aunt is an unpleasant woman, and by the end of the game, he ends up being rich, but in the same way a lonely person with very few friends.
  • Michael's family as well, sure they may act like jerks a lot of the time, but he isn't exactly nice to them either and considering that he's a career criminal, you can't help but feel somewhat sorry for them for having put up with Michael's issues for so many years.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Why do many people play this game? Why, for the Online mode, of course.
• Love to Hate:
  • Steve Haines, who basically has a Villainous Breakdown every other mission he shows up in, gets shot in the leg (twice!) and dies by getting sniped while filming his TV show in the Golden Ending.
  • Likewise, the Laughably Evil Corrupt Corporate Executive Devin Weston, who has some of the funniest interactions with the player characters during his missions, and dies a fittingly humiliating death in the Golden Ending.
• Low-Tier Scrappy: In the early stages of the game, Franklin. The worst shooting and stealth stats by a wide margin, a special skill that only works when he's in a car, and alot of early shoot-out missions where you're forced to use him. He's meant to be the Badass Driver of the team, but pales in comparison to Michael or Trevor when he's on foot. Fortunately, doing the gun challenges with him can help grow him out of his early weakness.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Lester Crest is the crippled yet brilliant criminal mastermind that planned every complex heist that Michael and his crew ever successfully pulled off. A computer genius and skilled hacker, Lester always plans ahead and gives his associates multiple ways to complete the heists and always delivers a diverse array of crew members to provide for every vital role. A defender of the downtrodden, he has Franklin perform assassinations on corrupt officials that abuse their power, all the while using the deaths to manipulate the stock market for his own gain. During the Doomsday Heist, Lester outplays the omnicidal Avon Hertz and even outwits the Artificial Intelligence Clifford to bring their apocalyptic plans to ruin. Ultimately, Lester comes out of retirement to rob the Diamond Casino to impress Georgina Cheng and improves his style and and social skills to have her fall in love with him.
  • Paige Harris is Lester's snarky goth protege whose outward social skills and supreme hacking far surpass even her mentor's. First working as Lester's assistant by helping to set up the Online heists, she quickly proves her mettle by being the only competent hacker Michael can hire for his heists and always works wonders under pressure to keep the crew's jobs running smoothly. Later branching out on her own, she singlehandedly designs and builds the Terrorbyte mobile command center and uses its built in hacking software and drone platforms to mastermind her own complex jobs and make her name in the criminal underworld.
  • Eddie Toh is widely considered the best getaway driver in the business and works with veteran criminals to help support his family and put his children through college. When chosen, Eddie always plans out his routes and chooses the perfect vehicles for the heist, including bringing Sanchez motorcycles to ride smoothly through the muddy construction of the Los Santos sewers and providing an ambulance to get the crew out undetected following a fierce shootout with police. Utterly reliable and absolutely professional, Eddie is always the smart robber's choice in any job needing fast cars or a clean getaway.
  • Dave Norton is a corrupt FIB agent and the brains of Steve Haines' unit. Making a deal with Michael to get him into witness protection if he betrays Trevor and Brad, Dave successfully kills Brad and uses him to fake Michael's death and then poses as Brad through emailing Trevor to keep tabs on him for the next 10 years. In the present day, he plans out the majority of the FIB's secret missions that involve raiding other government buildings and stealing valuable cargo that the protagonists take part in. Being the last member left of his unit by the end of the game, Dave gets away with everything he does and even reaps a couple of benefits through the death of Steve, ending things off with Michael by telling him to live his life and not return to being a criminal.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Trevor. He is a man that will ride a motorcycle along the top of a train, take on a gang of bikers single-handed, and commit crimes in just a pair of sweatpants and a dirty tanktop.
  • It doesn't matter who or where you are, Lamar will find you and he will roast you.
• Memetic Loser: Due to the infamous roasting scene from “Franklin and Lamar”, Franklin ends up being constantly roasted by not only Lamar, but just about any fictional character. It gets to the point where Lamar mentors multiple fictional characters on how to roast Franklin.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Wasted in Real Life.
  • "You know, chainjahn?"^ExplanationIt's a mishearing of the Korean phrase 이런 젠장, which means "Goddamn it!" and is properly pronounced as "E-run Jehn-Jang".
  • Nigga~^ExplanationAfter the first mission, Lamar goes into an epic mini-rant and ends it with an operatic n-bomb. His final word is a fun in-joke for the fans. Hell, even Japanese streamers like it.
    • Lamar Roasts Franklin^ExplanationFrom the aforementioned scene, Lamar rants about Franklin's "yee yee ass haircut" preventing him from getting girls, causing Frankin to mutter a Flat "What". The scene saw a huge surge in late 2020 spawning numerous parodies and remixes with the scene being replaced with various models such as those of Kermit the Frog, SpongeBob, Darth Vader and even Snow White of all people! Culminated in a Massively Multiplayer Crossover collectively roasting Franklin, and a prequel where Lamar teaches said Massively Multiplayer Crossover how to do it. The voice actors themselves even did a live-action version of it
  • "You're a genius, you moron!"^explanationTrevor says this to Wade when the latter manages to find Micheal. Frequently used in reference to school exams like getting the hardest question right despite failing at the easier ones.
  • "I want to apologize"^ExplanationThis one started with two videos have Franklin come up to an NPC, start insulting him, and as soon as the NPC tries to start a fight he pulls a gun on him, prompting the line in question. Often used to parody immediate retractions.
  • Yellow plates.^ExplanationThe controversial Expanded and Enhanced trailer garnered a ton of backlash due to failing to show any notable changes that would justify a re-release, however, it did have some glaring graphical glitches, such as all vehicle plates being yellow due to some rendering bug. As such, many players who are disappointed with the new edition like to point out the yellow plates as a way to make fun of the 9th gen re-release.
  • Seamless Character Switching^ExplanationA line taken from the Expanded & Enhanced trailer which showed off the character switch going much faster due to the new version taking advantage of the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles' SSDs, which have faster loading times. When the game was released on said consoles, however, the character switching turned out to be anything but seamless.
  • Press [Enter/exit vehicle button] for [Desirable action].^ExplanationMany a streamer has been trolled by their own chat into pressing the default enter/exit vehicle button after being told that it does something other than what it's supposed to do. Taking the PC version for example, which uses the F key by default for this action, these messages are usually in the form of "Press F for autopilot", "Press F to fly faster", etc. Cue streamer pressing the button thinking it does what the chat is telling them it does, resulting in their character bailing out of the vehicle to the absolute amusement of the chat.
  • Trevor Philips is the French Prime Minister^explanationA meme in the French player base. Between 2017 and 2020, the Prime Minister was Édouard Philippe, who has a similar surname and at the time of his nomination looked eerily like a clean version of Trevor (he changed quitte a bit since due to vitiligo and alopecia)
• Misaimed Fandom: Trevor Philips. He's extremely popular but he's also the most psychotic character and was made to intentionally be a deconstruction of your standard GTA protagonist.
• Misblamed:
  • The soundtrack was a common criticism of the game, saying it was too repetitive and that Rockstar made bad choices with each station. However, each station was actually curated by their respective DJ, not Rockstar. Which means if you don't like a song in the game, your blame goes to the DJ of the station, not Rockstar. It was lightened up with the next-gen version, due to there being much more songs in the game.
  • With the take down of Open IV, a lot of people have been bashing Rockstar for the take down instead of Take-Two, despite Rockstar supporting modding as long as it's single player only and isn't used in Online, and it's Take-Two who has the stance against modding.
• Moe: Wade, according to some.
• Moral Event Horizon: See here.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The mission passed sound effect.
  • The sound of your Orbital Weapons System obliterating a target.
• Narm:
  • A lot of Trevor's antics, like his murderous personality, his appearance (complete with tattoos), his "screw the authorities" lifestyle, choice of music (namely punk) and behavior around other characters make him seem like Rockstar tried really hard to make a character appeal to teenagers, or at least, created a character so edgy many people couldn't begin to take seriously. Still that doesn't excuse murdering the Lost's former Alderney chapter, and he can still be a Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant in some instances.
  • Looking at how Trevor behaves around characters (namely having no respect around anyone) and NPCS, it can be pretty funny seeing him thanking a store clerk, a hairdresser or a cab driver, or even being nice around people on random events, like saying "I'm just doing my job". Yup, that's right, Trevor being a Humble Hero.
  • If Franklin kills Trevor, the latter's rant sounds a lot like the "Everybody betray me!" complaining by Johnny in The Room (2003).
• Narm Charm: Non-Stop-Pop FM is clearly based more on European hits than songs that were considered Top 40s in America, even when the next gen versions added some American hits, it still added more songs that were more popular in Europe. At the same time however, between the fact that it plays music from the 80s to mid/late 2010s as well as having a good mix of songs, it is definitely one of the more popular radio stations in the game and pre next gen, one of the few that was consistently praised.
• Nausea Fuel: When Haines shoots Sanchez in the head, we're treated to the lovely sight of the latter's exposed brains.
• Nightmare Retardant: You know the ghost at Mount Gordo? It's not that scary when you get a good look at it, and it's revealed to be just a still image bobbing up and down.
• Older Than They Think:
  • All three special abilities. Michael obviously has Bullet Time, while Trevor and Franklin's abilities (being able to deal more damage and take less/slowing down time in vehicles) are derived from the Aggro and Zone abilities from Midnight Club.
  • Michael's ability is almost like dead eye, except that he doesn't have the tagging ability.
  • Many of the random encounters in this game were lifted straight from Red Dead Redemption. The difference is that in that game the encounters had the purpose of keeping the players entertained while they rode from one place to another, while in this game they exist because... well, because they were in RDR.
  • Many of the side activities were lifted directly from Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony, which had golf, racing, parachuting (either from helicopters or large buildings), helicopter missions, dance minigames and booty calls among others. About the only minigames that weren't lifted from that game or from previous entries are scuba diving (mainly because on the IV-era you could only swim at surface level) and tennis.
• One-Scene Wonder: Sapphire only has one cutscene in the main story where she gives Trevor directions without noticing how he's drenched in blood, all while looking as stunning as ever. Additionally, she gets to make one more cutscene appearance online where she celebrates with the crew after a heist, serving them drinks and taking a shot herself.
• Or Was It a Dream?: Exiting a peyote hallucination in the Next-Gen versions of the game will remove any wanted level gained while an animal, but objects spawned during the trip, like police cars for instance, will remain in the world.
• Padding: The game claims to have 69 missions, but a number of these are extremely short or simple. The absolute worst examples are during the preparations for Blitz Play, where buying three boiler suits and buying three masks each count as a mission.
• Pandering to the Base: The game's primary focus on heists was Rockstar's response to the overwhelming praise towards the Grand Theft Auto IV mission "Three Leaf Clover", which featured a bank robbery followed by a massive shootout.
• Player Punch
  • Johnny Klebitz getting killed by Trevor.
  • When Franklin gets the choice as to whether kill Michael or Trevor (or Take a Third Option), killing either character is a huge punch, if the player have grown attached to them. Even worse with Michael, as he has finally gotten his life turned around.
• Poe's Law:
  • Many of the other topical issues in the game count as well. Does the game mock consumerist, materialistic, hedonistic, sexist, and homophobic US culture - and we as the players for participating in it - or revel in it? Just who is the joke on, exactly?
• Polished Port: While it's not perfect, the PC port is generally considered to be miles better than what its predecessor received. In addition to consistent 60 FPS, faster loading times, and modding functionality, it also includes the surprisingly powerful Rockstar Video Editor which makes it far easier to record and edit game clips. GTA V, alongside Max Payne 3, is believed to set a new standard for Rockstar PC ports after a string of either sub-par or non-existent ones.
• Porting Disaster: Despite the aforementioned, the PC port is still very buggy and came out with over a year of delays.
  • On various cards and processors, despite having decent frame per second during benchmark, the game will eventually stutter badly.
  • There's also the reintroduction of Rockstar Social Club with barely any improvement. Live somewhere like a college campus with controlled internet access? You might not be able to play this game without paying through your nose for your own mobile broadband subscription.

R - W

• Rated M for Money: The game pushes the M rating to its very limit, and it made $800,000,000 in just one day. It went on to make just over a $1 billion within three days, faster than Call of Duty: Black Ops II.
• Realism-Induced Horror: In this game known for its crazy, over-the-top action and setpieces, just about everyone agrees that the most harrowing part is the level where Mr. K is brutally tortured for information. Not only is it played with dead seriousness, it's something that can and does happen in real life, and has even been known to be done by supposed "good guys". What makes this even worse is the fact that he's both perfectly willing to talk and innocent of any wrongdoing besides happening to be acquainted with a suspected terrorist, which underscores Trevor's point that for all the justifications that get used for torture, it's more often than not done simply to give the torturer some kind of satisfaction.
• Replay Bonus: Watching the prologue knowing Michael had planned for the heist to go bad makes several things such as the small amount of money stolen and him staying out in the open after Brad gets shot make more sense in hindsight.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Taliana Martinez is a minor character introduced as an optional heist crew member. Her voice actress is Carolina Ravassa, who at the time was extremely obscure. When you hear her now however, it's almost impossible not to think of Sombra.
  • Trevor's gunrunning buddy Oscar Guzman is played by Gabriel Sloyer; he'd later replace Antonio Jaramillo as Javier Escuella in Rockstar's own Red Dead Redemption II.
  • Cara Delevingne as the DJ of Non-Stop-Pop FM. At the time of the game's release she was well-known as a model, but this was among her first acting roles, something she would focus on more in the years after.
• The Scrappy:
  • Though she doesn't get much screentime, Tanisha has gotten on the wrong side of some people. On one hand, her concerns with Franklin and reasons for not staying in a relationship with him are well founded, and she's one of the few characters with a greater sense of morality and a desire for a legitimate, law abiding lifestyle. On the other hand, her fiancee (i.e. the man she ditched Franklin for) just happens to be a doctor, giving one the impression that Tanisha's method toward gaining said legitimate lifestyle is to marry out to someone legitimate, law abiding (supposedly at least - this is GTA after all) and in a higher income bracket. Say what you will about Franklin, but at least he had to work and work hard in order to get out of the hood^note and not just through criminal acts, as Franklin mentions to Jimmy during "Father/Son" that he has attempted to gain lawful employment several times, whereas Tanisha (at least from what little we see of her) gives the impression that she only got out by proxy and only holds the moral high ground because she can literally afford to. And yet she's the one claiming Franklin's taking all the easy ways out, and later on preaches on the subject of friendship and loyalty?
    • She also comes across as a massive hypocrite on multiple angles. When Franklin expresses frustration with Lamar and seems unwilling to go and save him from trouble he got himself into again, Tanisha calls him out on it by giving him the previously stated lecture on how he will never change and he thus has to remain loyal to his friends in the hood, when she herself has largely stopped communicating with them as well. Furthermore, she calls Franklin a murderer to his face, criticizes him for being a criminal gangbanger...and immediately tells him to go save Lamar in a mission that will inevitably involve committing more acts of violence. Further searching heavily that Tanisha's husband to be is not quite as moral as she'd like Franklin to believe, and hints at marrying Tanisha for the token trophy status that she would bring.
    • Another element to this is that nobody in the hood blinks at her marrying a rich middle-aged white guy to get out of the hood and get access to his money; that's just her using what she has available, her looks, to better herself. However, during the towing missions Tonya lets Franklin know that even hanging out with Michael has led to accusations that he's a 'rent boy' who is 'servicing' a rich middle-aged white guy for money. While he's not doing that, it shows there's a huge Double Standard in place since Franklin is criticized for looking like he's doing the same thing Tanisha is lauded for doing.
  • Amanda, Michael's wife. Granted, she has very good reasons for hating Michael due being neglectful and cheating on her several times before the events of the game, but that doesn't justify her actions. She basically sets off the chain of events leading to Mike's return to crime because she slept with her tennis coach. She's later shown having another affair with her yoga instructor, further driving a wedge in their marriage. There isn't much shown about her character, other than the fact that she's selfish, short-tempered, and constantly berates Michael for his poor choices while fixing none of her own.
• Scrappy Mechanic: See here.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: With the addition of mission checkpoints, regenerating health, and special abilities, this entry has the most accessible missions in the franchise.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: Ironically, the cars are based off real-world vehicles- but due to the reluctance of R* to pay licensing fees^note Though there's plenty of good reasons - a) Automobile companies probably won't want their car to be associated with hit-and-runs or police chases, and b) When the license expires R* will need to pay money again to renew the license or spend time patching the cars out, they have slight modification to the looks and their names are often completely changed. For example, many players have noted that the Karin Futo GT is an Expy of the Toyota AE86 Trueno/Levin GT-S notchback coupe.
• Shallow Parody: A common criticism about the game is that the satire of American life comes off as clumsy and shallow by American critics. Primarily the use of stereotypes (rednecks, obnoxious celebrities, obtrusive paparazzi, etc), sex jokes and one-note gags with no substance. These various quotes from Seanbaby say it best.
  — GTA V criticizes American culture with all the elegance of a grumpy pastor watching his first reality show. Most media outlets praise the game for outrageously mocking every aspect of Los Angeles, but it mocks them without any understanding or tact. If a forensic psychologist found a poem on a suicide victim called "WHY EVERYONE IN MY HIGH SCHOOL SUCKS," his summary of that poem would be identical to any gag in Grand Theft Auto V. Satire and parody are more complicated than Scary Movie 11 would have you believe. You need to do more than point at social trends and call a dwarf casting agency. GTA attacks with no wit. And when you mock something without wit, you're just a cranky bully.
• Ships That Pass in the Night: Quite a few people ship Franklin/Tracey, despite their canon interactions amounting to Franklin briefly overhearing Tracey having a conversation on the phone while he sneaks into the De Santa house.
• Song Association: A lot of people were introduced to Kamtin Mohager, aka The Chain Gang of 1974^note he also has a side project with Marshall Gallagher of Swing Hero called Teenage Wrist through this game, specifically through the song "Sleepwalking".^note Kamtin has released an album, Wayward Fire, prior to this.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In the mission "The Paleto Score", Trevor shoots a security camera with a Sawed-Off Shotgun at point blank range. Said camera is completely undamaged.
  • Vehicle interiors, which have a lot of detail to them and look great in first-person, unfortunately suffer from a large amount of "copy-pasting". It's not unusual to see a Lamborghini-esque car having the same interior as a BMW-esque car half its price. In said interiors, looking behind can reveal backseats that are noticeably more low-res than the front seats.
  • Since some buildings don't actually have interiors since you never have the chance to go inside them, one trick used is to simply have still images of rooms (especially in hotels) be placed in the windows so the building looks inhabited. Unfortunately, if you look close you can see that it's an obvious photograph, and that's not assuming you notice everything seems to be copied.
  • Since moving from PS3/Xbox 360 to PS4/Xbox One, liquid effects had been janky when you have Michael and Trevor doing something that involves it (Michael washing his face and Trevor vomiting in a fountain) which for some reason leaves a large trail of water/vomit once the transition completes to the player's control.
• Spiritual Successor: Of Heat, the film the game seems to most directly take its influence from.
• Squick:
  • The deaths of Debra, Floyd and Molly.
  • Trevor jerking off in his bathroom and smearing it on the wall.
  • Most of the stuff involving Trevor actually. Aside from jerking off, he also takes loud and noisy shits on the toilet (or in one cutscene, just behind a dumpster), vomits violently (with the implication part of the upchuck used to be a living person he made unliving), to occasionally wearing women's clothing, or his underpants. Oh, and brutally killing Johnny, Terry, Clay, the Lost MC, Debra and Floyd, etc., etc., etc.
  • Steve Haines shooting Andreas Sanchez; you can see his brain and everything!
• Starboarding: Quite a few people think Trevor has feelings for Michael, but Michael doesn't return them because he's exclusively heterosexual.
• Strangled by the Red String: Tanisha being revealed to have married Franklin in The Contract expansion has confused people familiar with her, given that her character arc previously ended with her downright spurning Franklin for his attempts to escape gang life while planning to marry a doctor instead.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • Trevor's constant carping about how the crew doesn't need Lester and they should just save the 20% by planning the heists themselves is meant to be just more evidence of what a dick he is. Except...both he and Michael demonstrate, in "The Merryweather Heist" and "Blitz Play," that they are perfectly capable of planning their own scores without Lester's help. Sure, they don't get paid for either job, but not because said jobs were poorly planned. In fairness, when the crew does make a score that isn't money Lester's the only one who can fence the stolen goods without drawing attention. This is mentioned as pretty much the only reason Trevor can't make off with the portion of gold he carries in the big score even though he wants to. Of course, in every case a heist was planned without Lester something wound up going wrong... ^{A full list}North Yankton got Brad and the driver killed, the Merryweather Heist saw the crew having to return what they stole before they got killed by the government, the Merryweather arms plane got shot down, and Blitz Play saw a whole lot more resistance than expected and only succeeded because the FIB was covering for them... and even that didn't work because Haines was working with a mole, which necessitated the Bureau Raid.
  • After "Caida Libre", Michael tries for a while to make peace with Madrazo so that Madrazo doesn't get him and Trevor killed, but Trevor isn't willing to do so. Although Michael is portrayed as the sensible one and Trevor the crazy one, it just doesn't make sense to see Michael so scared of Madrazo after putting on successfully the Paleto Score (with involved a fight against the army, including tanks) without doubts or fears. After getting out of that alive, it's pretty reasonable for Trevor to be confident on their abilities and think they can fight back against Madrazo with success. This is reinforced when Trevor brings back Patricia to Madrazo and it's obvious Madrazo is terrified of Trevor.
  • At the end of "Lamar Down," one of Lamar's litany of (otherwise completely spurious) complaints is that Franklin never cuts him in on any of the big jobs he does with Michael and Trevor. He's right, and he's easily as qualified to do those job as the lower-quality drivers and gunmen available are. Furthermore, in order to mollify him, Franklin promises that he'll cut Lamar in on the next big job he does. He never keeps that promise and, to add insult to injury, the next job is the biggest heist of the game! In fairness, Franklin openly considers Lamar to be uncivilized and delusional of his skills, telling him he'd get work if he were to stop living the fantasy of a "gangbanging mad dogging asshole." In Franklin's eyes, bringing Lamar along on organized, high-stakes gigs is far too risky (and Lester doesn't work with amateurs). That said, Lamar could have helped in stealing the Gauntlets for the heist, considering he does have experience in car stealing and it's much less risky than the actual heist (not to mention Lamar stole the Monroe for Devin Weston in Pack Man, albeit unprofessionally, but still, Frank, Pet the Dog every once in a while).
• Take That, Audience!: Self Radio has one to music pirates; one of the station call sign goes something like this:
  "Music that speaks to you. And it's saying that you didn't pay for it".
  • The second highest value Shark card is the Whale Shark. While it fits the naming convention, 'whale' is also gaming industry slang for a wealthy player who spends a lot of real money on ingame items - The exact kind of person who would buy this card.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Anyone who is absolutely mad that Rocco from The Ballad of Gay Tony became a Karma Houdini at the end of the game will be absolutely thrilled to see that he gets reduced to a Butt-Monkey in this game, being soundly defeated in a fistfight by Michael in his first appearance and getting killed, again by Michael, in his second.
• That One Level: Has its own page here.
• That One Sidequest:
  • The Epsilon chain as a whole. It's notoriously buggy, with some missions and objective requirements not appearing on the map when they're supposed to.
    • There's "Assuming the Truth", which requires you to deliver five specific vehicles. Sometimes the vehicles will rarely spawn while you're looking for them, and there's a possible glitch where if you save anywhere in the middle of it, then the mission will no longer register and the entire chain will be impossible to finish.
    • One of the Epsilon missions, "Exercising the Truth", requires Michael to run a total five miles in the desert while wearing the robes. It can take at least 20 minutes and is very tedious, and your thumb will quickly grow sore from mashing the Sprint button repeatedly, most players deal with this mission by strapping a rubber band over the Analog stock and sprint button and hoping they don't get eaten by a mountain lion. Rockstar themselves must have realized how much players would hate it, as it's one of the only missions in the game which has no gold medal requirements.
    • And after you've completed the whole chain, you're rewarded with a scavenger hunt for nine pieces of the Epsilon Tract, with your only guidance as to their location being cryptic riddles that Marnie sends to Michael. While a few of the riddles can be solved with a little ingenuity, most either make absolutely no sense or fail to narrow the location down by any meaningful degree. The worst part is that, unlike the UFO parts and confession letter scraps, the Rockstar Social Club won't help you here. Hope you're ready to whip out a walkthrough.
  • The Coyote Cross Country Triathlon has a similar problem. It is a thirty minute long button mash through swimming, cycling and running with no reward. And unlike that Epsilon mission, it does have a gold medal requirement. Got in 2nd place? Too bad, time to waste another half-hour!
  • Some of the item collecting can be this as well, the nuclear barrels are the worst, even with the sonar app it can be tough to find all 30 as some can be miles apart, if you try to get them all in one run, good luck doing it in less than two hours, as the submarine is painfully slow and awkward to control.
    • The nuclear barrels at least give you a good amount of money, and it's next to impossible to die in the sub (unless you don't realize you're supposed to resurface and climb out of said sub at least once every 24 in-game hours to avoid running out of air). The mission to search for submarine parts only gives you $5 and requires a whole lot of scuba diving in shark-infested waters.
  • One of Franklin's Strangers and Freaks missions requires him to collect 50 spaceship parts, most are fairly easy to get, but a few are tough. One is high on the cliffs and can be tough to get to it due to the slippery slopes you have to climb up to get to it. The most annoying one is on top of a girder that's directly underneath a bridge, you can't climb to it at all, the only way to get it is to somehow land a helicopter directly on the girder without it falling off and carefully walk over to it(or try and bail out of the helicopter and parachute on top of the girder), easier said then done as the space you have to land on is very narrow even for the smallest chopper and it's way too easy to accidentally smack the blades into the girder and damage the helicopter to the point where it's unusable, suffice to say you'll be using quick save a lot just to get that one part.
  • Getting Gold in "Targeted Risk" is an exercise in pure frustration. The mission itself is simple enough; base jump from the Maze Bank tower onto a moving flatbed truck. However, one of the Gold requirements (arguably the Gold requirement, seeing how the other one is simply to make it onto the truck - in other words, the entire point of the mission) is to be in freefall for a full eight seconds before activating your parachute. Problem is, due to the relatively low height from which you jump, you don't have much longer than that before you become a human pancake on the streets of Los Santos. Getting this down pat requires literally pulling out a stopwatch and timing your parachute just right, and the margin for error is within mere tenths of a second; pull the cord even a split second too late, and you'll be too close to the ground to reach the truck. And, of course, thanks to the finnicky parachute controls, landing on said truck isn't a guarantee even if you time it just right. The one saving grace is that this mission is extremely short, so you won't have much to repeat if you get it wrong. Even with that, if you haven't completely mastered skydiving, get ready for literal hours of trial and error, praying you get it right the next time.
  • Another gold-medal nightmare is the final mission for Nigel due to the "Skin of Your Teeth" requirement, in which you must get out of the car at the precise moment before the train hits it. When they say "precise", they aren't fucking around: the timing window for it to pop is in literal frames of gameplay. You can be so close to impact that Trevor gets thrown aside from the resulting explosion, and it still won't count if you're so much as a single millisecond too early. And unlike the mission above, you don't have the saving grace of it being a short mission, either; if you just can't get it right, get ready to sit through the loading screen / autosave prompt, reselect the mission from the pause menu, and make the five-minute drive from Los Santos to the train tracks... over, and over, and over.
    • There is a trick to making it a smidge easier: by driving the car towards the train and bailing out, it widens the timing window ever so slightly, downgrading the difficulty from "insane fever dream" to "exceptionally difficult". Good luck figuring that out on your own, though, especially with how the game goes out of its way to encourage you to park the car on the tracks at the spot it tells you to.
  • The gunrunning missions where Trevor has to fly a plane. No checkpoints, at all, ever. If you screw up in any way, you have to do the entire mission over again. Miss with one drop too many? Do the mission over again. Get shot too many times by the guys you're trying to bomb? Do the mission over again. Smack the wing of the plane into something on the airstrip as you are taxiing in for a landing, with literally 15 seconds to go before you're done? Do the entire mission over again. And again. And again!
    • Oh, and the best part is that occasionally the timed version of the bombing mission will have it be literally impossible to actually complete within the given time frame due to placing the targets on opposite sides of the map.
  • If you've purchased The Hen House and you're hanging around Blaine County, you'll probably be asked to deliver a truckload of booze. The truck usually spawns in Harmony, the bar is in Paleto Bay, and the suggested GPS route is over steep, treacherous terrain, which means you'll run down the seemingly-generous time limit very quickly trying to drive safe and avoid damaging the fragile truck. The odds are also pretty good you'll come across some Lost bikers on the way there; if you're spotted while playing as Trevor (or accidentally run them over, which is fairly easy to do), you'll instantly come under fire and probably lose the goods as a result, while driving slowly and staying behind them to avoid drawing their attention just runs down the clock even more. There are slightly less dangerous routes you can take (although they're longer), and if you're playing as Franklin, his Bullet Time ability may help slow the clock down and allow you to avoid obstacles more easily, but otherwise, good luck collecting your meager $920 profit for that week.
  • "Grass Roots - The Pickup" consists in Franklin finding a weed-loaded truck parked in a small area and bringing it back to Barry. This is a timed-mission (timer starts once you get into the truck), but this wouldn't be so bad by itself if the mission didn't also require to lose the cops chasing you, while driving a relatively slow and relatively large vehicle.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Floyd is suddenly Killed Offscreen about towards the end of the second act; it might have been interesting for him to actually be corrupted by Trevor's abuse and degenerate into a total maniac much like Mr. Phillips himself, giving his torturous ordeal actual payoff.
  • The advertising made a big deal about Michael's family, and while they're important characters and some of the story's larger roles, they still exit the narrative fairly early on, come back somewhat late, and once they return, they make another exit shortly afterwards before coming back after the final story mission. Tracy gets it the worst, as she has the least characterization and screentime of them all, and doesn't get to hang out with any of the three protagonists, not even her father. On the topic of hangouts, while Jimmy gets to hang with all three, Amanda is only available for Michael, meaning Jimmy is the only one who can consistently appear throughout the game due to hanging with Franklin and Trevor.
  • The stripper system only lets you sleep around with four. While it's realistic that not every stripper would want to sleep around, if your favorite is one of the other four, then you'll just have to settle for dances. Additionally, all you can do with the available strippers is sleep with them, with the more complex dating system of the previous entry being thrown out the window.
  • Many wish that Lamar got to join up to help with the heists. He's already friends with Franklin and Trevor, there's some setup for him to meet formally meet Michael, and while Lamar may not be the most qualified person for the job, the same can easily be said for many of the cheaper crew members. The fact that Franklin promises to let him in on the next big heist but never actually does makes it even more noticeable. In this case, Lamar originally was supposed to have a larger role in the story, but his voice actor Slink Johnson got caught up in a case in real life and Rockstar had to move on from what they originally planned for him to release the game on time while keeping Johnson as the voice of Lamar.
  • Johnny Klebitz from The Lost and Damned goes from a Badass Biker to a washed-up meth addict who gets abruptly killed by Trevor in his sole appearance. Fans were disappointed to see such a beloved character go out so easily when he could have made an interesting rival to Trevor considering their similar natures and the Lost MC's apparent territorial disputes with the latter, or even a possible heist member alongside fellow GTA IV character Packie.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Considering they all are conspiracy theorists, it's a shame we never got a triple debate between Lester, Ron and Chef.
  • Franklin is the only one of the main characters who can avenge the death of actress Leonora Johnson, when Michael would make more sense for this role given he's an enormous cinema lover and would likely have a great interest in Jones' murder and would have loved to solve it.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The game was initially released and set in 2013, and while Online DLCs take place the year of their release, the game is clearly inspired by American politics and pop-culture in the early 2010s:
  • A major plot point of the game is the the usage of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and espionage by government agencies, alongside the heavy presence of Merryweather Security, a clear allusion to two major political controversies that began in the early 2010s and Blackwater respectively.
  • The impact of the Great Recession is evident in Los Santos - several foreclosed homes and homeless tent cities can be found (an example of the former can be seen in the first trailer). Paleto Bay has a large homeless camp with imagery based on the Occupy movement, which is referenced by one of the Bail Bond targets who happens to be found there. Simeon's car dealership sells expensive cars on credit to people who can't fully pay them back, a reference to one of the main causes of the recessions.
  • Franklin is able to purchase a medical marijuana store and do a sidequest revolving around a man pushing for the legalization of the drug. Both are now dated as California legalized recreational marijuana use in 2018.
  • The San Andreas gubernatorial election features parodies of Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Jock Cranley, a former stuntman and jingoistic conservative) and Hillary Rodham Clinton (as Sue Murry, a former schoolteacher with burdening liberal policies). Schwarzenegger retired from politics two years before the game's release and is still more widely known as an actor, whereas Clinton faded as a political power-player after her loss in the 2016 presidential election.
  • Much of the in-game pop culture references several trends of the early 2010s, such as an In-Universe Franchise Zombie FPS series clearly based on Call of Duty, FarmVille, Fifty Shades of Grey, the New Atheism movement, Hipsters, and electronic cigarettes. This makes Grand Theft Auto Online updates supposedly taking place during the year they were released jarring, as while the radio gets updated with recent music allowing the citizens of Los Santos to listen to artists whose careers started after 2013 like Megan Thee Stallion, there's an occasional glimpse at a Windows 10-esque desktop, and The Criminal Enterprises included a Weazel News broadcast mentioning a heat wave and rising gas prices, they're still stuck on Righteous Slaughter 7 (despite the series being said to get sequels at an even faster rate than Call of Duty, ironically) with no Hero Shooters or Battle Royales taking over the shooter market.
  • The in-game internet is dominated by LifeInvader, a Facebook parody that nearly everyone in Los Santos in-game uses. Bleeter (the in-game equivalent of Twitter) is only just as popular as it, while Grand Theft Auto IV's MyRoomOnline has went defunct, referencing MySpace falling in popularity because of Facebook. The game also references Facebook's HTC First phone, which had failed six months before the game's release.
  • The popular game console in-universe is the Exsorbeo 720, a possible reference to how people thought a successor to the Xbox 360 would be called the "Xbox 720". V was released the very year the 360's successor was announced, and it was called the Xbox One instead. And even if it wasn't, it still dates the game to the days when the seventh-gen consoles were the latest.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Trevor abandoning Michael and allowing him to get captured by Wei Cheng is treated as Trevor's Moral Event Horizon. Though when you break down what just happened, it's hard to disagree with Trevor. For the record, not only had Trevor just learned that Brad was dead and buried in Michael's grave, but also that Michael had arranged the ambush in the hopes of killing Trevor. Considering how Trevor normally reacts to something like this, it really feels more like he's underreacting rather than crossing the line.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Regardless of the platform you are playing on, Grand Theft Auto V is a good looking game, period. When you also take into consideration the sheer scale and scope of that detail in such a massive game world, it's an astounding display of graphical prowess.
  • The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions push their respective consoles to their absolute limits. While there are some instances of texture loading problems and the game freezing, the fact that Rockstar gave gamers a game that can pass off as an early next-gen looking title on almost 10 year old hardware is an amazing feat nevertheless.
  • Then there is the rerelease that came out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, and the PC version of the rerelease will turn out to be the utmost superior version.
• Wangst: Some players get sick of Michael and/or Trevor angsting about their various problems, especially near the end, when just about everything they say to each other is argumentative. Even within the game Franklin gets pretty tired of it, and delivers a few monologues calling them out on their behavior
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: The game has had a boatload of controversy, like most GTA games, but this time over accusations of promoting torture and misogyny. It should be noted that at least in the former's case, the game immediately talks about how worthless torture is thereafter.
• Win Back the Crowd: After a slew of updates which were nothing but more PvP content, overly expensive cars, and copies of one another except with different premises, the Doomsday Heist update delivers what many fans have been asking for a long time, mainly new Heists and PvE content, the return of many fan favorite vehicles such as the Deluxo and the Hermes, the long-awaited addition of the Jetpack, the fact that it isn't another Business-related update, reasonable prices on the vehicles introduced and a actual story line for Online. There's also the addition of starter packs for newer players as alternatives for the widely-reviled Shark Cards.
• The Woobie
  • Wade's clearly not...all there in the head. Having him spend his time hanging around an abusive maniac like Trevor really makes you feel sorry for the guy. At least until Trevor takes over the Vanilla Unicorn and he appears to reward Wade's loyalty by getting two strippers to lavish attention on the guy.
  • Floyd (See Butt-Monkey, Main Page). While all the other characters are either criminals, corrupt law enforcement officials or just general sleazebags who deserve whatever fate befalls them, Floyd is a meek, hen-pecked, blue-collar guy with no criminal connections and no desire to be part of the criminal underworld. Trevor shows up, invites himself to stay and then systematically destroys his apartment, his job and his personal life. He leaves Floyd to get beaten to a pulp as a distraction during one heist set-up mission, and it's heavily implied that Trevor repeatedly molests/rapes Floyd during his stay at the apartment. Floyd, meanwhile, has done nothing to deserve any of this, apart from having the bad luck to be related to Wade and to be living in a city Trevor wanted to relocate to...Making the fact that he was brutally murdered by Trevor or his cheating girlfriend, Debra, for standing up for himself even more tragic.
  • Mr. K., the poor bastard you have to torture to get information from. He seemed like a normal guy with a family, and he receives one of the most visceral beatings in the franchise's history, going from being battered by the IAA, only to be gruesomely tortured by Trevor and Steve when he thought he was being rescued. He also has little to no hope of seeing his family again; he's left at an airport without a passport or identification, not that either would do much other than get him taken into custody again. And that's assuming he didn't die of his wounds or when he fell down the stairs.
• Woolseyism:
  • One of Trevor's rampages is triggered when someone makes fun of his Canadian accent ("aboot"). The game has no foreign dubs (localizations only translate dialogs' subtitles). As a plot point based on pronounciation diferences between two English dialects wouldn't work in written form in another language, in the French localization Trevor snaps when the other guy tells him "tabarnak", a Quebecois very vulgar word^note Depending on context, it can either be used as an expletive ("goddammit!"), an adjective ("fucking") or a noun ("dick" as in a person) which in France is both considered emblematic of the Quebecois French dialect and funny^note In general, French people tend to find Quebecois swear word hilarious, due to them being based on religious vocabulary, and especially names of Christian liturgical objects (Tabarnak itself is a deformation of "tabernacle", which means the same thing in French and English).
  • In the French localization, the "Bury the Hatchet" story mission is renamed "Tête d'enterrement", an idiom-based pun. It idiomatically and literally translates as "long face" and "burial head", respectively. Both meaning are relevant in context, as: A) idiomatically-themed, the mission marks the point where Michael and Trevor's relation goes drastically worst, and B) literally-themed, one cutscene of the mission has Trevor breaking open a coffin and finding Brad's decaying face.

---