Video Game / Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony

Due to this game's plot coinciding with both Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, Late Arrival Spoilers for both games will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

The nightclub trade is not what it used to be.

"Gay Tony will always be the king of this town. You are this town."

—Luis Fernando Lopez

Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony, released on 29 October 2009, is the second of the two Episodes from Liberty City expansion packs for Grand Theft Auto IV (the first being The Lost and Damned), and is the finale of the GTA IV trilogy.

The protagonist this time around is Luis Fernando Lopez, a part-time hoodlum from Northwood (Liberty City's version of Inwood) who works as a bodyguard for "Gay Tony" Prince, one of Liberty City's top club entrepreneurs with a drug habit. However Tony is indebted to the following people and a newcomer who threatens the fragile situation:

• Rocco Pelosi, who works for Tony's associates, the Ancelotti family. Rocco uses the debt to make Tony do unsavory tasks ranging from mob work to making use of Luis'... "talent" with women.
• Mori Kibbutz, an entrepreneur and older brother of Brucie who loves talking big and pushing his little brother around, and has the intellect and fitness skills to back it up.
• Yusuf Almir, the son of an Arab tycoon who wants nothing more than to have a good time and steal things he isn't legally allowed to own.
• Ray Bulgarin, Niko Bellic's former employer who is searching for his stolen diamonds.

As opposed to the slums and poverty-stricken protagonists of IV and The Lost and Damned, The Ballad of Gay Tony focuses on Liberty City's upper-class nightclub culture. However as debts rack up and the collectors come looking for their cut from a debt-ridden club owner, Luis must decide if sticking around with the king of Liberty City's nightlife is a good idea or will it kill him faster than the debauchery of the nightclub life.

It also marks a return to the completely over-the-top missions of the previous games, with the action growing steadily more insane with each mission (in competition with Saints Row and Just Cause). It also marked the final chapter of the GTA IV story (although like The Lost and Damned, it largely takes place at the same time as the main game); the last mission finally ties up what was one of IV's biggest loose ends.

As with The Lost and Damned, you can get it either online through Xbox Live or PSN, or at retail in the Episodes from Liberty City two-pack that includes TLAD. The Steam version was also part of the standalone EFLC pack, but both the vanilla game and the Episodes were combined into one single game as the Complete Edition in 2020.

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I keep on tropin':

• Aborted Arc: The Ancelotti family's unresolved fate raises a big question. Close to the end of the game, believing that Luis and Tony are to blame for losing the diamonds, they strike a deal with Bulgarin to deliver to him either Luis or Tony's corpse. They have Rocco inform Luis of the deal and goad him into betraying Tony; Luis responds by chasing Rocco off. Their vendetta against Luis and Tony is never brought up again.
  • This leads to some possible Fridge Horror, seeing as how Tony is implied to have skipped town, Luis is left in Liberty City with one of the most powerful criminal organizations out for his blood and ready to threaten his loved ones. Of course, that's never been too big of a problem for him, but still.
• Amoral Afrikaner: Frickie Van Hardenburg is a South African businessman who is secretly an arms dealer responsible for selling weaponry to brutal regimes and conflicts. He's also a drug trafficker and slave trader. Luis kills him to steal his attack helicopter and give it to Yusuf Amir.
• Amusement Park of Doom: The final mission begins at Funland.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Compared to GTA IV:
  • Like in The Lost and Damned, you can hang out with all your friends at once instead of one at a time.
  • After the final mission is over, you can freely access all missions with your phone to replay them any time and in any order you like. In GTA IV and The Lost and Damned, the only way to replay a completed mission is to load an old game or start a new game.
  • This game brings checkpoints into missions, a concept later expanded upon in the next game in the series. You'll need to retry the mission to upload your scores, but this is quite a useful feature if you're struggling to get past a particular point.
• Artificial Stupidity: Subverted. While Armando and Henrique can be idiots and wander in front of you while you're shooting during a Drug War, they know how to take cover and use weapons most of the time. The game is also not so cruel as to punish you if one or both of them get killed during a Drug War mission; if one dies, the other simply says something, and if both die, Luis says something.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Advanced MG; while it has an incredible firing rate and magazine size its stopping power is low, the effective range is limited, accuracy is pretty bad for something in the assault rifle slot, and because there isn't any ammo limit increase with this weapon you can't really go crazy with it and spray an area with bullets without running out of ammo very fast. The Buzzard is also one since unlike the hunter of previous games you have to manually aim every weapon which thanks to clumsy helicopter physics and controls is a lot more trouble than it's worth. In addition, it lacks the weapon-switching mechanics brought in Grand Theft Auto V, with the two-button weapon controls annoyingly clunky to work with when you're trying to maneuver the helicopter into position.
• Awesome Personnel Carrier: After a conspicuous absence in the main game and the previous episode, this episode marks the long-awaited return of blowing stuff up in a tank. A SWAT tank, that is — its cannon only fires rounds that have the strength of the Explosive Shotgun and it's not nigh invulnerable like previous tanks in the series, but it's still a blast to use.
• Ax-Crazy: Ray Bulgarin. He's extremely impulsive, violent, aggressive, and paranoid, to the point of shooting his own sister unprovoked, possibly killing her. Later, he beheads the cook who stole his diamonds and presents the disembodied head as a death threat to Luis.
• Backseat Driver: One club management side mission has Luis drive, Cloe Parker, back to her mansion, while she grabs the steering wheel from time to time as she sexually advances on Luis.
• Ballad of X: Specifically, of Gay Tony.
• Big Applesauce: Like GTA IV and The Lost and Damned the game takes place in Liberty City, which is based on New York City.
• Big Bad: Ray Bulgarin
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Gracie Ancelotti. If you didn't hate her in the main game, this game will rapidly change your mind.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: One of the weapons is a gold-plated Uzi, a gift from Yusuf. He also has a golden attack chopper.
• Book Ends: Not within the game per se, but for the Grand Theft Auto IV era as a whole. The main game's introductory Cut Scene features a cook aboard the ship that ferried Niko Bellic to Liberty City holding up a diamond (from the batch the protagonists would later fight over) before dropping it into a cake mix to be smuggled into the city. After Ballad's final mission, Luis accidentally bumps into a hobo who discovers the diamonds in a trash can and examines one the same way the cook did.
  • In addition, the final mission contains another bookend for the GTA IV trilogy. In the second or third mission (depending on whether you date Michelle first or save Roman from the loan sharks first) of Niko's campaign, Niko attempts to take Michelle to the "funfair" only to find it closed. The final mission of Ballad has Luis go to the same carnival in order to hunt down Ray Bulgarin and Timur, and in the process, destroys the Russians' heroin, which was also smuggled aboard the Platypus.
• Brick Joke: When Yusuf sees the helicopter that's transporting the Noose APC over the city, he says he must have it. Luis begs him to buy it legally to which Yusuf says he will consider it. In the mission to steal the subway car, Yusuf retrieves it with the same model of helicopter, having listened to Luis' advice.
• Bring My Brown Pants: The Celebinator defecates his white pants after he's thrown off a helicopter and caught by Luis with a parachute leaving a large brown stain.

• The Cartel: The Northwood Dominican Drug Dealers.
• The Casanova: Luis himself puts it best: "You know me. Quantity, not quality, bro."
• Caught Up in a Robbery: Luis gets caught in a bank robbery in the opening scene of the game, which happens concurrently as the Grand Theft Auto IV mission "Three-Leaf Clover", in which Niko, Packie, and Derrick successfully rob the Bank of Liberty. Luis is amongst the hostages taken.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: One of Yusuf's missions is named for this trope. During the mission briefing, Yusuf is seen not wearing pants and partaking in cocaine and a prostitute's services. Before Luis leaves, Yusuf's father Abdul walks in, showing disappointment in his son's hedonistic lifestyle.
  Yusuf: Father, you taught me not to judge a book by its cover!
  Abdul: When the book is called "Guns, Drugs, Hookers and No Pants", I don't need to read it!
  • Luis himself is caught with his zipper down in "Boulevard Baby", which ends with a running gunfight through Bahama Mama that kills the owner and closes the club.
• Club Kid: Especially at Hercules.
• Cluster F-Bomb: The game has a higher rate of the usage of the word "fuck" than both GTA IV and The Lost and Damned, and the conversations between Luis, Armando, and Henrique are one giant Cluster F-Bomb.
• Color Wash: Not overdone, but noticeable if one plays this DLC after GTA IV and definitely after the other DLC, The Lost and Damned where the colors of everything are muted (especially with an optional grain filter applied). In keeping with its lighter tone, Ballad of Gay Tony has a more vivid color palette, extending right down to the map screen. As with the other games, the player can optionally crank up the color saturation level, too, but the effects of doing so are more, pardon the pun, vivid in this DLC.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Parodied with a radio show called Conspire hosted by "John Smith", a parody of Alex Jones and similar right-wing/libertarian conspiracy theorists. "John" entertains, and often voices, every single crazy conspiracy theory and a bit of paranoia and racism his listeners' phone in with.
• Continuity Snarl:
  • Attempts to make clear a chronological order for the missions in GTA IV as well as the episodes (using in-game news reports as references) proved extremely hard once Gay Tony was released. The cutscene for TBoGT "Chinese Takeout" shows Billy Grey telling the Triads to kill Johnny Klebitz in the TLAD "This Shit's Cursed", meaning "Chinese Takeout" takes place before "This Shit's Cursed". However, the introduction mission for TBoGT takes place right after "Three Leaf Clover". This is a problem because Elizabeta tells Niko after "Have a Heart" (which is a prerequisite for "Three Leaf Clover") that the cops are about to take her down, the same thing she tells Johnny after TLAD "Shifting Weight" (which is unlocked after "This Shit's Cursed"), which implies they happen at more or less the same time. The only way for this to work is to get rid of the assumption that Niko and Johnny's missions for Elizabeta happen parallel to each other, although with her telling both Niko and Johnny that she needs to stop working with them due to the cops closing in on her at the end of her last mission for both of them, it's doubtful she'd tell Niko several days before she told Johnny.
  • Averted otherwise in regards in areas being unlocked. Unlike TLAD, which broke continuity from GTA IV by allowing the player to free-roam all of Liberty City at a time when, in the main game, the bridges connecting the boroughs should be closed, TBoGT starts after the events of the GTA IV mission that open up all the bridges.
  • In-game, there's an inadvertent continuity snarl: You can complete Ray's final mission "In The Crosshairs" before you complete the tri-crossover mission "Not So Fast." The dialogue in the former mission plays as though you already completed the latter, in that Luis says he (or rather Gay Tony) has the diamonds.
• Cultural Posturing: Italian (and racist) Rocco sparring with Dominican Luis.
• Dead Foot Leadfoot: Possible effect of shooting drivers, but not guaranteed. You get the chest-on-wheel a bit more frequently.
• Decapitation Presentation: Bulgarin severs his business ties with Luis when he finds out that Luis and Tony are holding diamonds that were stolen from him. He decides to inform Luis of this by sending Luis to find the severed head of the smuggler who brought the diamonds into Liberty City in the first place.
• Disc-One Nuke: The player can get the exploding shotgun, which can blow up cars and helicopters with only a few shots, in Yusuf's second mission, which is fairly early in the game. It will appear in Luis' apartment after said mission and 30 drug war missions.
• Disney Villain Death: During the mission "High Dive", where Ahmed falls off the spine of the Rotterdam Tower to his death after being cornered by Luis.
• Downloadable Content: Or it can be bought retail in Episodes from Liberty City.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Despite ultimately losing the diamonds and nearly killing each other, both Luis and Gay Tony manage to survive, kill Bulgarin, get the Ancelotti's off their backs, and (presumably) gain new funding from newfound rich friend Yusuf Amir to reopen their clubs. Also, the bum finds the diamonds in the trash at the end.
• Education Mama: Luis' mother. However, while she constantly berates Luis for choosing the lifestyle he currently leads and keeps urging him to go back to school, she always accepts the heaping wads of cash Luis produces from his pockets every time he visits. Luis gets angry about it at one point.
• Expansion Pack: One of two for Grand Theft Auto IV, the other one being The Lost and Damned.
• Failure Is the Only Option: The random encounter with a girl named Daisie Cash-Cooze. She asks Luis' help to prevent action star Chris Hunt from publishing a video of her giving him a handjob, to disprove rumors that he is gay. After a Wild Goose Chase, they track him down at Star Junction, but too late; the video is shown on the Weazel News mega screen.
• Fan Disservice: During one of Yusuf's missions, you get to see him without pants and the camera makes sure to focus on his backside. Yikes.
• Fight Clubbing: Luis can bet on or fight in an underground fighting tournament pretty early in the game.
• Foregone Conclusion: In The Lost And Damned, Johnny bungles a diamond deal involving Gay Tony, and steals the gems off of the corpse of an associate of Tony's: a tanned, blond, muscular gay man who attempted to escape via limousine. This pretty much describes Evan Moss. When you play the mission from Luis' perspective, and Evan decides to tag along, you know what he's gonna be in for.
• Friending Network: Mocked with Bleeter. One character bleets as he is being murdered, and another mission involves chasing a guy across town while deciphering the clues in his asinine posts.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Hercules, despite being a gay club, has straight women inside that Luis can interact with.
• Genius Bruiser: Mori Kibbutz considers himself one, with his Israeli military training and Ivy League 4.0.
• Genre Shift: While GTA IV was a departure from the over-the-top action of the previous games, The Ballad of Gay Tony brings some over-the-top back into the game by having you steal entire train cars, leap out of planes and helicopters and parachute onto moving flatbed trucks.
• Get a Load of That Square: Most of Yusuf's dialogue.
  Yusuf: Let's bounce, baby! ...When I say bounce, I don't mean bouncing literally, I just mean -
  Luis: I know what it means, Yusuf.
  Yusuf: It's a term from the street meaning you have to walk. But if you don't get that, it's a bit like... "roll with me". You have to roll, but not like a fat man rolling, but just walk -
  Luis: Can we just go?
• Gratuitous Disco Sequence: The Hercules club plays disco and you can dance there, and performing an organized dance routine to The Fatback Band's "(Are You Ready) Do The Bus Stop" is a requirement for 100% completion.
• Gunship Rescue: Yusuf in the final mission.
• Hand Cannon: The .44 automag fits this quite nicely. It is even more powerful than the Desert Eagle.
• Heroic Comedic Sociopath: Luis.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Tony and Luis. Only one side of the partnership is hetero, but it's strictly platonic.
• High-Altitude Interrogation: One mission requires the player has to intimidate a Shallow Parody of Perez Hilton into not blogging anything negative about Tony, anymore. Part of this involves throwing him out of a helicopter and catching him before he hits the ground, effectively making him crap his pants in terror.
• Hollywood Skydiving: Averted for the most part. San Andreas's parachuting mechanic makes its long-awaited return, and thanks to the new physics engine, behaves much more dynamically, requiring a greater sense of timing and direction when deploying the chute. They haven't averted Soft Water, allowing you to just freefall into the sea without deploying, though this is carried over from the main game.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Luis also serves as this to Gay Tony.
• Hypocritical Humor: Yusuf complaining that his friends are tacky.
• Informed Ability: Gay Tony proudly introduces Luis as his "business partner" so much, even Luis himself has bought into it. However, the extent of Luis' supposed business acumen is limited to making decisions anyone who isn't as melodramatic, gullible, or high as Tony would. On regular days, he's either a glorified hitman when attending to clients, or a glorified Bouncer when managing Maisonette 9.
• Internal Homage: The '80s Pop station (one of its songs is Hall & Oates' "Maneater", which is also featured in one of the cutscenes) is called Vice City FM, complete with the font on the game's instruction manual being used on the station's nameplate.
• Jerkass: Mori Kibbutz. How to best describe his Jerkassery? Let's just say that he's largely the reason Brucie acts the way he does in the main game, and even if you thought Brucie was obnoxious, the things you see Mori do to his brother will make you feel sorry for him.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Luis and his friends, Armando and Henrique.
• Karma Houdini: Rocco gets away scot-free at the end, despite being a racist jerk throughout the game. And there are no more expansion packs to find out if he gets his comeuppance.
  • Averted in GTA V when he shows up again and you finally get the chance to kill him
• Large Ham: Gay Tony is such a huge drama queen.
• Laughably Evil: Ray Bulgarin is a horrible human being to be sure, but at the same time that doesn't stop him from being enjoyable.
• Lighter and Softer: While The Ballad of Gay Tony retains the darker edge of GTA IV, the story is generally lighter in tone while returning to some of the wacky fun from San Andreas. Golf cart chases, dancing, and parachutes are back, baby! Not to mention the fairly happy ending.
  • The game also has a noticeably more colorful appearance than GTA IV or (especially) the grimy The Lost and Damned. Whereas in those two games Liberty City looks rather unpleasant at times, it comes close to almost looking downright beautiful in Ballad of Gay Tony.
  • Even the map/menu screen has a lighter feel to it, featuring almost trance-like background music as opposed to the heavier-edged music heard playing in the other games.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Buzzard is a stealth-attack helicopter loaded with rocket pods that never run out of ammo. If there were any doubt to its ability, in the mission it's introduced, you use it to sink a yacht. The boat needs about a couple of dozen shots to go down in a blaze of Impressive Pyrotechnics, but that won't take you too long.
• Mob Debt: The main driver of the game's story. Gay Tony owes a massive debt to the Ancelotti crime family, and later gets into deep debt with the Russian mob to the point where the price they want is his head.
• More Dakka: You can get an automatic shotgun with explosive shells (great for taking down choppers) and a high-powered machine gun.

• Network Decay: In-Universe, the Vladivostok FM radio station from Grand Theft Auto IV returns, but has been purchased by a new DJ and no longer plays Russian/Eastern European pop music, instead playing European EDM.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Seeing as how it's set in the world of Liberty City's nightlife, this is bound to show up.
  • Gay Tony, between his looks and his voice, bears more than a passing resemblance to Robert Downey Jr..
  • The Celebinator is essentially a skinny Irish Perez Hilton, completely with the Photoshopped tabloid photos and sleazy rumors that demean reputations.
  • Poppy Mitchell, a perky TV and rom-com actress (described as "America's favorite daughter") whose personal life is a mess of partying, liquor, and sex, is a pretty clear parody of Miley Cyrus and Lindsay Lohan. By the fifth game, she's also had at least two sex tapes come out, one of which the player participates in filming, and she gets into a high-speed chase with the cops.
  • Kerry McIntosh, the bulimic, drug-addicted supermodel, is a parody of Kate Moss right down to her initials.
  • Cloe Parker and Jill Von Crastenburg pretty much are Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. Cloe Parker's name is even a Shout-Out to the protagonist of The Truth About Diamonds, Richie's semi-autobiographical novel.
  • The Blue Brothers are a parody of The Jonas Brothers, being a pop group consisting of brothers with a squeaky-clean Christian public image (though in private, they're don't even try keeping their virginity pledges) and hordes of squeeing fans who literally chase the car they're in.
• Non-Action Guy: Gay Tony. However, some of the missions over the course of the game see him competently back Luis up with a firearm, turning their dynamic into something of an Action Duo.
• N-Word Privileges: Yusuf Amir constantly attempts to invoke these, completely ignoring any attempts by Luis to point out that, as an Arab, he doesn't have them. Turns out Tony doesn't seem to like Yusuf's attempts at this trope either.
  Yusuf (to Luis and Tony): What's up, my niggas!
  Tony (to Luis): Did he just say that?
  • Yusuf doesn't understand the concept of N-Word Privileges—as far as he knows, nigga's just something cool people like rappers call each other. Basically, he's Pretty Fly for an Arabic Guy. Ironically, this is somewhat Truth in Television; while its use is still very subjective, various Ambiguously Brown hip-hop figures like DJ Khaled and Pitbull have said "nigga" on record for years. The outrage really only kicks off if the offending party is white.
  • Gay Tony frequently says "fag".
• One-Hour Work Week: Luis has a job, but doesn't attend work that much as he gets sent on errands by his boss. Still doesn't prevent Tony and Dessie from calling and asking why the player isn't helping out at work.
• Only Sane Man: Luis is the next in a long line of GTA protagonists with this trait, after having the trait be somewhat subdued in Johnny and Niko (mostly due to the relative darkness and seriousness of their stories, while Ballad is a lot more humorous).
• Optional Sexual Encounter: You can have sex with female patrons in Maisonette 9 if you ace a dancing minigame, as well as unlocking them for booty calls.
  • Underlining the "optional" part, there seems to be no game-advancing purpose to engaging in this. You don't even win a trophy (in the PS3 version) if you previously made it to third base with one of Niko's girlfriends in GTA IV.
• Parental Substitute: Tony is sort of a father figure to Luis, whose own father ran out on his family, even though Luis is the more rational of the two. In one of the later missions Tony tells Luis that he loves him like a son. He's on who knows how many drugs, but it's still very sweet.
• Percussive Prevention: Tony has to plant a series of bombs around the city as yet another favor to Rocco but is clearly too irrational and under the influence of drugs to pull it off. Luis has to punch his lights out to prevent him from leaving.
• Plunder: The whole point of the Drug Wars minigame. Luis helps Armando and Henrique acquire capital for their drug-dealing operation by raiding drug stashes, deals, and transports belonging to other gangs.
• Power Trio: Luis is the superego, Armando is the id, and Henrique is the ego.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: Niko Bellic and Johnny Klebitz make cameo appearances in the opening cutscene and some of the missions.
• Prison Rape: Luis is an ex-con and his friends tease him about it mercilessly, especially since he now works for Gay Tony.
• Psycho Ex-Girlfriend: One string of random encounters has Luis meeting up with Margot, one of his past flings, who had become obsessed with him. When Luis rejects her two more times, she attempts to kill herself. The first instance ends with a potentially fatal dose of sleeping pills being pumped out of her stomach. The second instance involves jumping off a pier. She gets it right this time.
• Refuge in Audacity: Very much in the vein of the older games rather than Niko and Johnny's more gritty missions.
• Replay Mode: The first entry to the series to introduce a mission replay option. It comes in handy if you want to complete any of the optional mission objectives you missed the first time around.
• Right Through His Pants: Any time Luis has a sexual encounter onscreen, he is fully clothed.
• Ripped from the Headlines:
  • Big Bad Ray Bulgarin develops a sudden, intense need to own the Liberty City Rampage ice hockey team, requiring Luis to make them An Offer You Can't Refuse. This appears to be an amalgam of two major stories (though with murder added; it is GTA): mysterious Russian billionaires purchasing the New Jersey Nets basketball team and Chelsea soccer team.
  • Arguably the entire plot, which revolves around a man who lived beyond his means and is now deep in debt and about to lose everything. Ladies and gentlemen, Rockstar presents the first video game about the recession.
• Satchel Charge: The Sticky Bomb given to Luis is pretty much a purpose-built satchel charge that can be remote-detonated and planted onto any surface.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Most of the billionaire construction magnate Yusuf Amir's missions involve elaborate and spectacular thefts of items, such as a military helicopter, a NOOSE APC or a Liberty City subway car. Luis repeatedly points out how much easier it would be to just buy these things using his deep pockets, to no avail (later on, one of Yusuf's associates mentions that, despite his wealth, Yusuf is obsessed with what he can't buy). However, this does come in handy during the final mission, where Amir shows up in his golden attack helicopter to destroy the cars full of Russians standing between you and the airport.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Subverted. Rockstar, apparently having learned nothing from the Hot Coffee scandal (or possibly just thumbing their nose at everyone who made it into a scandal) actually shows Luis railing a random club girl and then getting a blowjob from another, on-screen, during the same mission.
  • However, during the optional nightclub encounters and booty calls, the action still takes place off-camera.
• Shout-Out: All on this page.
• Show Within a Show: As with the other GTA IV-era games, a number of TV programs can be viewed in-game, including the anime spoof Princess Robot Bubblegum and Republican Space Rangers. And the radio stations featured in the other games are available once again, some of which contain complete episodes of programs like the Howard Stern-spoofing Martin Serious Show.
• Sky Heist: One of the missions for Yusuf Amir involves stealing a subway train car with help of a transport helicopter.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Mori.
  • Rocco also applies within The Mafia's sphere of influence. He talks a big game and threatens Luis and Tony a lot, but when Luis finally responds with force, he ends up skipping town and no Mafiosi are to be found imposing his will. Seems he wasn't as high up the chain of command as he would have them believe.
• Smart People Play Chess: Mori Kibbutz plays and easily wins a chess game against his brother while doing a boxing workout, then he boasts about his academic achievements.
• Speak of the Devil: In the intro, Niko and the other McReary bank robbers stop in front of Luis right when Luis phones Tony to inform him of the McReary-perpetrated robbery at the Bank of Liberty.
• The Stoic: Luis. He just doesn't laugh, or even truly smile for that matter. The only bit of emotion that can be discerned from his face is barely noticeable pity for Brucie, which also reappears when he's about to (not) shoot Tony. And that angry grimace after you lose a mission? It's pretty much standard to the IV protagonists.
  • Luis' ex-girlfriend Margot calls him out on that, accusing him of becoming nothing but a shell of a person. Luis seems unfazed.
  • Although earlier on whenever a loan shark threatens his mother, he is actually struggling to stay The Stoic and not try to beat the crap out of the dude.
• Straight Gay: Gay Tony. Yes, really. Aside from the name and a couple of odd quirks and rants, of course.
• Supporting Protagonist: If you think Gay Tony is the protagonist because his name is in the title, think again.
• Throwing the Fight: Luis is told to take one to get his mother out of a debt to a local thug. A debt she only owes because she refuses Luis' money. In a fight, you only enter for her sake. If you take the dive, she calls you up to call you a loser afterward. Gee thanks, Mom.
• Universal Driver's License: Mocked. If you fly poorly in one mission with Tony in the passenger seat, he will complain about it. Your character will respond that this is what you get when your boss only shells out for the two-week pilot course.
  • In a hilarious easter egg, you can find the piloting certificate on Luis's apartment wall.
• Villains Out Shopping: In the main Grand Theft Auto IV, Ray Bulgarin is a mysterious Russian mobster from Niko's past who deals in at least human trafficking and causes lots of trouble from behind the scenes. In this game, Bulgarin is an asshole who collects rock and roll memorabilia, is berated by his sister, and really wants to own a hockey team.
• Weight Woe: Kerry McIntosh is a supermodel. When she has Luis obtain one of her rare food orders, Iron Belly Deli made sure that it was smooth enough to vomit.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Most of Yusuf Amir's missions are elaborate (and spectacular) schemes to gain the approval of his father, Abdul, never realizing that his extravagance only disappoints his conservative dad.
• Where Everybody Knows Your Flame: Hercules, Gay Tony's gay-only club.
  • Coolest Club Ever: Maisonette 9, Gay Tony's other club, which you manage. Also, you get to enter Bahama Mamas, Tony's biggest competition on the nightclub scene for one mission only wherein you have to kill its owner.

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