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Index: All Games | Saints Row (2006) | Saints Row 2 | Saints Row: The Third | Saints Row IV | Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell | Agents of Mayhem | Saints Row (2022)

The following entries have their own pages:


  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Shogo Akuji - an incompetent and idiotic gang leader whose father has to come in and clean up his mess, or a "Well Done, Son" Guy who wants his father's respect in his own way? Even his attack on Gat and the Boss at Aisha's funeral is only after he crosses an apparent Despair Event Horizon when his father not only mourns the death of Jyunichi, the man who basically replaced Shogo as a son to him but mourns because it leaves him with no one but Shogo to call family.
    • Dane Vogel, CEO of Ultor - Corrupt Corporate Executive or Well-Intentioned Extremist? His Evil Plan is to arm the various gangs of Stilwater and sucker them into killing each other off. Then he could move in and gentrify the projects district, making it a place people would actually want to live and making millions in real estate. However, his Masako mercenaries end up causing just as much damage as the Saints in the process, he has the board of directors killed for disagreeing with his plan, and his ultimate plan is to remove poorer "undesirable" people out of the projects.
    • The Boss - An incredibly badass Sociopathic Hero who truly cares about their friends and would risk their lives for them, or a plain and cruel sociopath? Fan reactions are varied. It's telling that their Jerkass behavior was toned down for the subsequent games.
    • Are the Saints still true to the ideal of being a lesser evil compared to the gangs they pit themselves against, or are they no different? Julius even points it out.
      Julius: Don't you get it? The Saints didn't solve a goddamn thing. Drugs were still being pushed, innocent people were still getting killed...all we did was turn into Vice Kings that wore purple.
    • During "Corporate Meltdown" in the Corporate Warfare DLC, Dex tries to reason with the Boss by saying that Eric Gryphon's "not who you think he is". It's left ambiguous if Gryphon is actually more nefarious than he appears, or if Dex is simply trying to save his own skin.
  • Alt-itis: You can replay missions in the game, or go back and perform any number of side missions and diversions. Why is this important? As well as customizing your character's looks, you can also change their voice, and in game dialogue and reactions change depending on your choices, so the Boss can come across as aggressive, tender, or funny in the same scene, depending on how they look and sound.
  • Annoying Video Game Helper: For the most part, your recruitable AI buddies do a decent job at fighting alongside you... until they pick up an RPG. Then it's just a matter of time before they kill themselves (or you) with a rocket fired at somebody from point-blank range. They also automatically try to shoot through Human Shields, which properly screws you in the fight with Veteran Child.
  • Anticlimax Boss: In any given mission with a Boss Fight, the hardest part is going to be actually getting to the boss, past his waves of Mooks (and, in several levels, attack choppers with missiles and depth charges or more mooks filing in at random intervals during the fight). The actual bosses are fairly easy to gun down, including the final boss, Dane Vogel. The lone exception is Veteran Child, and then only because he has Shaundi as a Human Shield, meaning you fail the mission automatically if she dies.
  • Awesome Music: Literally a game with music for almost everybody, including genres spanning from Emo, to Gangsta Rap and early Trap Music, Indie Rock, Dance-Punk, New Wave, Metalcore, modern day Thrash Metal, and even classical.
  • Critical Dissonance: Critics tend to regard the game as being So Okay, It's Average at best and outdated at worst, often preferring the off-the-walls style of the later two games. In contrast, the fandom regard this as the best game in the series for its vast amount of features, particularly in its much more vast clothing options, and having a middle ground between realistic and wacky.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Yes, some of Boss' actions in the sequel are pretty bad, but like the rest of the game, they're so over the top you can't help but laugh and/or cheer.
    • One standout example in the story is Mr. Sunshine's Rasputinian Death. Sunshine refusing to die even after he's been riddled with bullets? Not exactly that funny. Boss becoming exasperated and annoyed at Sunshine's refusal to die? Okay, that's a well-earned chuckle. Boss decapitating him and promptly disposing of his head on the assembly line of a slaughterhouse? Now it's hilarious!
    • This bit of dialogue in Good D after Gat buried Shogo alive in the previous mission:
      Gat: (Armed with two SMGs while Boss is merely using a pistol; he reloads them after unloading the magazines on some cans for target practice) I hope that fucker's still screamin'...
      Boss: I'm pretty sure Shogo's dead by now...
      Gat: (Not satisfied, he pulls out a light machine gun out of Hammerspace) A guy can dream, right?
  • Designated Hero: The Playa's handling of the Brotherhood arc is... questionable. While there wasn't much doubt that there would be bloodshed after rejecting Maero's offer, Playa draws first blood - in unusually personal ways, first by kidnapping Donnie and forcing him to sabotage Brotherhood trucks, something which both damages the friendship he has with Maero and which almost gets Donnie killed - only to then horrifically scar Maero's face with radioactive ink, after going to fairly extreme lengths to get it to boot. Mind you, there hadn't been any actual gang warfare at this point, this was all petty revenge for feeling slighted by Maero's offer.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • Tornado attack helicopters. They have homing missiles that will destroy most vehicles in one hit and anything less formidable than a Bear APC in two. They are perfectly capable of firing said missiles at the Boss even when they aren't in a vehicle (such hits are universally fatal), and (even assuming you have a weapon capable of taking one down) you usually won't even be able to see the damn thing until it's already fired off at least one of them at you. As of this writing, there are five missions listed under That One Level on this page, and three of them are so designated because they involve being attacked by Tornadoes.
    • Any enemy in cars. They will not hesitate to run you over, sometimes several times in a row. And no matter what you do or how much you upgrade, you can always be killed by being knocked on the ground by a Brotherhood truck and shot by their buddies. Don't think you can hop in a car and get away either, because most of them are just as good a driver as you are. Feel like trying to go man to man with a carful of homies? Too bad, because they've got forty cars with at least two gunmen each.
    • Some missions will have enemy cars (police or otherwise) do a suicidal crash into yours in an attempt to run you off the road and even in an improved Bear (which is tough but fairly slow), this can be incredibly obnoxious.
  • Even Better Sequel: The series pretty much just went from Grand Theft Auto clone to rollercoaster ride of gangbanging fun with an improved story, more to do and much more customization.
  • Evil Is Cool: Arguably the main draw of the game; it's a Denser and Wackier take on the typical trappings of idealized gangsters in fiction, and the game encourages players to abuse Video Game Cruelty Potential in as many ways as possible. Yahtzee claimed that the player character is basically a Batman villain.
  • Game-Breaker:
    • It's very easy to get a Bear, an armored vehicle with mounted minigun, early in the game, and mod it for extra durability and speed. This becomes an infinity+ 1 ride for the many situations it's available in.
    • Get through the Red Light District Escort mission, and you'll gain the ability to have any vehicle in your garage delivered to you, even during some activities like Drug Trafficking and Mayhem. On its own, useful. With an APC in your garage, it's practically cheating.
    • It's pretty easy as soon as you finish the tutorial to go do the "FUZZ" missions and grab both the Kobra (read: automatic pistol) and unlimited ammo for it, effectively turning it into a Disc-One Nuke. It becomes even more of a Game Breaker once you're able to dual-wield them, mowing down anything but bosses in just a few shots.
    • Though it will take quite a while, completing every single assassination request in the hitman activity will grant the player unlimited rifle ammo. While this already makes most early missions a breeze, once you get either the AR-50 XMAC or the AR200 SAW you'll be ready to take on pretty much any mission in the game. What's more, this actually also applies to the sniper rifle, despite being in the heavy weapon slot.
  • Good Bad Bugs: Sometimes, in the final mission, "...And a Better Life," if you don't lift off in the helicopter and instead run around resolutely refusing to engage with the attack chopper that comes for you, said chopper will eventually just fly away and not be replaced with subsequent versions when you get back into your helicopter and attack the Phillips Building. Again, the effectiveness of this is hit-or-miss: sometimes, the choppers go away for the rest of the mission, sometimes only for a couple of minutes. Either way, a teeth-grindingly difficult level may be somewhat eased.
    • There's another bug where said helicopters may just blow themselves up in some manner.
    • During the final Ronin mission, the game expects you to fight Kazuo Akuji in a climactic swordfight in a burning boat. That said, the player can also lure Akuji into areas of the ship that are on fire, where he'll quickly burn to death and end the mission. For those who dislike the swordfighting mechanics exclusive to the Ronin missions, this can be a huge relief.
    • In the Fight Club activities, the player is prevented from grabbing ahold of enemies who will push them away in order to facilitate a fair fight, as said enemies cannot grab them, either. However, should an enemy be holding a weapon when this happens, they will drop it leaving them wide open for rush attacks when they would likely clobber you otherwise.
  • Growing the Beard: The first game, while generally seen as good, is often seen as a Narmier version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The second game has much better gameplay (think San Andreas 2.0, compared to Grand Theft Auto IV's realism) and a very creative flow to its side missions, and watching your player character change from a blank-slate yes man to an over-the-top sociopathic leader is very engaging.
  • He's Just Hiding: Some fans needed a lot of convincing that Aisha really did get decapitated. Despite the fact that Gat giving Shogo Akuji the chance to walk away from her burial service would be extremely out-of-character if he wasn't truly bereaved. This seems to be a theme among some fans given the same can be said for Julius (who gets shot in the head on-camera), Lin (who drowned in the trunk of a car in the last game), and even Shogo (who gets Buried Alive) and his father (who's left with a sword through his shoulder, pinning him down on a boat moments before it explodes).
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ho Yay: The General and Mr. Sunshine. There is also The Boss and any of the lieutenants, depending on their gender.
  • Jerkass Woobie:
    • Shogo Akuji to some fans. While he is an incompetent gang leader and a Smug Snake at times, all he wanted to do was impress his (even more so incompetent) father, who outright shows disdain for him and favors. Then he decided to attack Aisha's funeral.
    • Same can be said for Maero throughout the Brotherhood storyline. He was content to engage in petty thievery to fund supping up his monster trucks, getting tattooed by his guitarist best friend, and had a girlfriend he could rely on. Then he decided to make that 20-80 offer...
  • Memetic Loser:
    • The Quasar is an SUV in the game that, while it is a well-performing car, is infamous for being very rare to find, since it has a small chance of spawning only in the Downtown area.
    • Donnie. The guy can't catch a break. First he gets a gun in his face while mourning Lin. Then he's forced to sabotage his own gang's vehicles, almost getting him killed. Then he's cornered by the Boss again, being beaten to a pulp for information about Carlos.
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "Equip the detonator."Explanation 
    • I have some pictures that I would like to show your audience if you don't mind.Explanation 
  • Moral Event Horizon:
    • For the Player Character after "Revelation". Before that point, you can easily convince yourself that you're doing it to stop the violence, return order to the streets, and potentially slow down or stop the drug trade. After the player murders Julius, though, it really sets in that your character does not care about any of this - the city is theirs, and they're going to keep it no matter what. And to top it all off, before you kill him, Julius basically tells you that you've become just as bad as the gangs you fought in the previous game, which is why he dismantled the gang in the first place. Oh, and if you didn't do that, you throw a random bartender into gunfire and blow her corpse up to escape a Masako hit squad.
    • Dex also counts, as he decides to try and do both of them in.
    • Shogo Akuji crosses it when he orders Jyunichi to kidnap Aisha, who winds up killing her when she tries to warn Johnny and the Boss. To make things worse, he betrays Jyunichi in a fit of pique and tries to personally kill the Boss and Gat at Aisha's funeral. He fails and winds up being buried alive for his troubles by Johnny and the Boss... not before being on the receiving end of a vicious No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Gat.
      • Likewise, everything after "Deal with the Saints" was left up to Jyunichi, and Shogo only betrayed him to the Saints after his father all but removed Shogo from power and placed himself at the head of the Ronin with Jyunichi as his right hand.
    • The Brotherhood's crossing of the horizon is an interesting case. They kidnap Carlos, and chain him to the back of one of their trucks and drag him across town, face-first, which definitely gives you motivation to wipe them out. However, it's the main character who drew first blood by putting radioactive waste in Maero's tattoo ink and making him Two-Faced. Had he not pulled that little stunt, this could have never happened. Granted, Maero's offer was a terrible, terrible deal for the Saints, but still... Oh, and you avenge Carlos by kidnapping Jessica and locking her in the trunk of her car, driving the car to a monster truck rally that Maero is participating in, and parking the car so that he unknowingly crushes his beloved girlfriend by landing on the trunk after a jump. And if that wasn't enough, the Boss shows up as soon as Maero gets out and tosses him Jessica's keys so that he can open the trunk and see her mangled corpse for himself, all while sneering "When you look in the trunk, just remember that you should have offered me more than 20 percent."
      • The Boss cripples a tattoo artist's hand with fireworks, ruining his livelihood as a scrimshaw and a musician, even though he isn't involved with the Brotherhood in any way save being a scrimshaw for Maero. He even explicitly says that Maero doesn't tell him anything because he doesn't want his best friend to get mixed up in gang violence.
    • And so we have one from each gang, there's DJ Veteran Child from the Sons of Samedi. He was already a talented, award-winning DJ, but because he wanted some good weed, he became one of the top members of the gang. He didn't seem all that violent initially (even confused) but was more than willing to remorselessly abuse and kill his ex-girlfriend Shaundi as well as the Boss so he can save his own neck. As Shaundi so succinctly puts it after the Boss kills him:
      Shaundi: My ex-boyfriend's a dick.
      • When you go and rescue Shaundi the various Sons will scream to kill the girl, further enforcing that of all the gangs are much, much worse than the Saints, and Shaundi's fears of them are very valid.
  • Narm Charm: Most of the Boss' actions in the second game are so over-the-top you shouldn't be able to take them seriously, but they are also so unflinchingly brutal that they manage to be effective nonetheless.
  • Never Live It Down:
    • Carlos' death and other Saints that have died even when Boss had nothing to do with it are laid at their feet a lot.
    • It is almost impossible to discuss the Boss without bringing up their more infamous actions, such as having Jessica kidnapped and crushed to death, and whether or not they count as a sociopath because of it. This caused The Third to make the Boss more Affably Evil in nature as well as poking fun at the Boss' previous nature in future games.
  • One True Threesome: Female 2 seems to ship Boss/Pierce/Shaundi.
  • Player Punch:
    • Aisha's murder during the Ronin arc, especially if you played the first one. The little... game... the Brotherhood plays with Carlos during their arc. Veteran Child taking Shaundi hostage during the Samedi arc. This game loves cleaning the player's clock.
    • Killing Julius in the hidden mission. Granted, The Boss had good reason, but so did Julius for doing what he did. It's not like he was trying to kill The Boss after they woke back up either. The whole dialogue that transpires before you put a bullet in his head will probably make a lot of players feel a bit of Heel Realization.
  • Porting Disaster:
    • The game was ported to the PC by a subsidiary of CD Projekt RED, before they were well-known for triple-A games. The game suffered from enormous draw distance issues - try driving a regular car at top speed and one may almost immediately get stuck in an area that hasn't loaded yet. None of the DLCs made it to the PC, either, because by the time any of it even came out for consoles, Volition had essentially fired the porters from the project and declared it hopeless. The controls (where keys can and will become sticky if held) and audio quality in this port are also really poor. Luckily, there are mods to fix many of these issues (Gentlemen of the Row is very popular) and improve the audio quality, but even the mods can't guarantee that the game will run on any particular set-up, with even high end hardware made years after the game's release didn't help. The PC version was then ported to Linux, with the exact same problems as above.
      • However, during an 11th-Anniversary stream for the game in October of 2019, Volition announced that they had found the source code that had been lost and are working on a patch/rerelease to try and turn the porting disaster into a Polished Port, fixing many performance issues, integrating several features of the Gentlemen of the Row mod (since its creator was one of the people involved with creating the patch) and even adding the DLCs to the game. As the project is a two-man job working outside of office hours, with one of those two having since passed away two years in and Volition itself being shuttered another two years after that, time will tell if the Author's Saving Throw works.
  • Sacred Cow: Widely considered the best Saints Row game, being a Surprisingly Improved Sequel to the original and differentiating itself from GTA by being Denser and Wackier, while still remaining reasonably grounded and serious at times (unlike Saints Row: The Third and Saints Row IV, which pushed the wackiness to ridiculous levels and dropped any pretense of realism, to divisive results). As such, fans will often not take kindly to criticism of this game, unless the complaints are specifically about the disastrous PC version.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • The radio station "99.0 The Underground" is a college radio, so it has a limited range. Unfortunately, said range is incredibly tiny, with a clear signal only covering about a quarter of the map, making it impossible to listen to it on a consistent basis. Luckily, Scratch That sells the songs that play on the station, allowing you to create the playlist yourself.
    • Some of the NPCs' comments can get highly annoying, but the ones that stand out are how much your character smells if you wear a particular outfit too often. While this is a means to get the player to change clothes often, this also means that you can't have any favorite outfits often as you can't seem to wash them in the game. It gets annoying being told that you stink and you can't change that in game.
    • Sidequests having six stages in them is tedious at best, especially for the more difficult ones such as the Heli Assault sidequest. The sequels did away with it by breaking up single sidequests of six stages into two separate versions of a single sidequest with three stages each, making it much more convenient.
  • Serial Numbers Filed Off: The first was noted for being a total GTA clone. Yet the second game got praised for doing it well, and taking some of the elements further.
  • Sequel Displacement: Number aside, the first game was given average reviews and is only available on one console (even later attempts to rerelease it are solely in the realm of backwards-compatibility for future Xbox models). This game grew a ZZ Top beard and went multiplatform, thus expanding the fandom.
  • Signature Scene: The ending cutscenes to “Red Asphalt” and “Rest in Peace”, with the former having the Boss do a Mercy Kill on Carlos after being brutalized by the Brotherhood and the latter having Gat peforming a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Shogo and then burying him alive with the help of the Boss. These are often used as examples for the first two games’ tone compared to later entries in the series, with the former being a massive Player Punch and Tear Jerker and the latter being both cathartic and horrifying.
  • Special Effect Failure: The nurse in the opening cutscenes' shirt doesn't stay consistent between the cutscenes played before and after the Boss is customized.
  • Strawman Has a Point: Julius. Did Troy really expect him not to be killed if he tried to convince The Boss, his protege, to stop? Though given the Boss just shrugged and let Troy off for being The Mole, it seems it was the fact that Julius personally betrayed them that offends the Boss. Troy also made up for this to an extent by keeping Boss on life support for 5 years and stopping the prison guards from regularly beating up Johnny.
  • Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Although SR1 got mostly decent reviews, it was generally regarded as "just another GTA clone", with an overall reception split between "This is a cheap GTA ripoff" and "This is a cheap GTA ripoff... but they made some improvements and it's actually not that bad." In contrast, the sequel has gained almost universal critical acclaim (even Yahtzee absolutely adores it) and been regarded as not only far better than the original, but also a worthy rival to the GTA series by many. This was no doubt helped by SR2 happening to take the batshit insane route at the same time GTA IV started to divide critics for taking a more restrained approach to the Wide-Open Sandbox "crim sim".
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: The theme of FUZZ sounds a lot like Bad Boys.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Corporate Warfare storyline ends up with the Boss vowing to track down Dex and eliminate him for his treachery. Many fans were disappointed that The Third ditched this storyline with nary a mention of Dex, only resolving it with a sidequest that involves continuously killing Dex's husk in Gat Out Of Hell that many felt was anti-climatic. Half the problem here is that the storyline was supposed to conclude with Saints Row: Money Shot, which would have included a mission where you assassinate Dex - the problem being that Money Shot never came out.
  • Tough Act to Follow: Saints Row 2 is seen as the best game in the series, due to it being seen as a Surprisingly Improved Sequel, how vast and diverse Stilwater is, the numerous side activities, its massive customization options, and for being Denser and Wackier than the competing Grand Theft Auto series as it was in the middle of a controversial turn towards more realism. While the following games in the series are generally seen as good in their own rights, many argue that they cranked up the wackiness too much, cutting out the moments of genuinely dark drama that made the story of SR2 so compelling. Other complaints include the removal of the brief story cutscenes before activities and side-missions (leaving them devoid of in-universe context or explanation) and moving the series to the less-diverse and smaller city of Steelport.
  • Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Not as bad as other examples, but there are people who are put off by the Boss being a violent Jerkass throughout most of the game, and openly wondering whether they're still worth rooting for. The scene where they confront Julius solidly highlights this, when Julius calls them out for their antics and states that the Saints have become no better than the other destructive gangs they were originally founded to oppose. The Boss just states that they don't care, because Stilwater is theirs, and they'll do whatever they want, before shooting Julius in cold blood. That said, it's worth noting that Volition took note of the fans' complaints and replied by making the Boss increasingly less sociopathic and more comedic in later games, to solidly establish their series as the Spiritual Antithesis to Grand Theft Auto, which also suffers from this problem.
  • Unintentional Period Piece:
    • The game canonically takes place in 2011 (five years after Saints Row), but because it only actually came out two years after Saint's Row, the setting feels more like 2007-2008, especially with the fashion, music and cultural references.
      • The inclusion of emos, Hollywood Homely nerds, and scene-esque punks as random pedestrians around Stilwater.
      • In-game music is bought from Scratch That, a record store chain battling against illegal downloading, and civilians can be heard commenting about new cars having CD players.
      • 89.0 Generation X's playlist is mostly emo rock, a genre that heavily fell out of favor in the public eye in the early stages of The New '10s. Several of the bands featured on the station, such as My Chemical Romance, Hot Hot Heat, Minus The Bear, and Panic! at the Disco have split up over the years, although the first reunited in 2020.
      • One of the artists featured on The Krunch 106.66 is As I Lay Dying, a band who would eventually wind up in controversy six years later, when its frontman was arrested for attempting to hire an undercover police officer to murder his ex-wife, and break up for a few years as a result; had that happened before the game came out, it would have been impossible, especially for a game like this, to include one of their songs without the controversy getting at least a mention.
      • The technology as well fits the mid-2000s. The Boss owns a blocky, first-generation smartphone with limited internet access (with a Goldenpages Expy being featured as a way of contacting businesses, and the only other extra use they get for it is as a GPS), while other characters, including Shaundi, are seen holding flip phones. Blocky laptops and computers are also seen around Stilwater. One sidequest also has the Boss enter an internet café, which were already on their way out by 2008.
      • The War on Terror is referenced various times in weapon stores, with the Brass Knuckles commercial referencing the term 'freedom fries' and post-9/11 patriotism.
      • The presence of the AR-50 XMAC can be seen as a dated aspect, as the XM8 was ubiquitous in games (and occasionally movies) made between the mid-2000s and early-2010s before game developers started looking to even more recent and actually-produced and adopted weapon systems like the FN SCAR and Kriss Vector as a quick and easy way to symbolize "the future".
    • The Company of Gyros restaurants, as Company of Heroes and Saints Row are no longer under the same publisher following THQ's bankruptcy (Relic going to Sega while Volition was acquired by Deep Silver).
    • Tera Patrick's inclusion in the Ultor Exposed DLC and promotions for the game. Patrick retired from porn shoots later the same year. It's especially apparent for PC players, as the DLC was unavailable on PC except via bare-bones porting attempts which didn't include cutscenes or characters for well over a decade, meaning by the time the upgrade patch actually comes out most players probably won't even know or remember who Tera Patrick is.
    • One of the sidequests involves the Boss impersonating a police officer for a parody of COPS, a show whose popularity was waning during the time period. In one case, the Boss does it to highlight Police Brutality for a lawyer, before the 2010s would see several high-profile cases of police brutality and 2020 would see the cancellation of the show for this very reason.
  • Unintentionally Unsympathetic: In the epilogue level, the Boss' shooting of Julius, right after Julius states that he tried to kill the Playa back in the first game because he saw that the Saints were becoming just another terrorizing gang instead of cleaning up the city as he'd intended is supposed to be the Boss crossing the Moral Event Horizon by shooting their former mentor, and we're supposed to sympathize with Julius. However, looking at the events of the first game closer, Julius' antics come across as less well-intentioned than he presents them. He never tried to kill any of the Saints apart from the Playa - not even Johnny Gat, who you'd think would be the Saint who most warranted being killed, instead getting sent to jail for trying to kill Troy. Also, for most of the original game, the Playa had no visible influence on the direction the gang took in its entirety, apart from in the loosest sense of propelling the Saints upward by pulling the other, more overtly evil gangs down while doing what other people told him to do. Also, despite Julius naming the Playa his right-hand man towards the end of the game, everything they did after that they were forced to do because Julius was arrested in the same cutscene he promoted the Playa in, and Alderman Hughes manipulated them into murdering his political rivals in exchange for Julius' freedom. At that point, Julius' actions look less like I Did What I Had to Do by killing a psychopath before he destroyed the city, and more like having a predetermined notion of what the Playa was like without Julius' influence, and then, when the Playa proved that they still cared about other people than themselves, blowing them up for not following his script. In other words, Julius was blaming the Playa for being railroaded, and the Boss shooting him is more justified revenge - indeed, their betrayal at his hands in the first game may have been what turned them into a more ruthless gangster in the first place.
  • The Woobie: It's hard not to feel sorry for Donnie. After losing Lin in the previous game and still mourning her death, he's then forced at gunpoint by The Boss to betray Maero as part of a massive Cycle of Revenge that already isn't painting The Boss in a positive light.

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