Where Saints Row Went Wrong | Extra Punctuation 

You complain about the lack of English gangster voice i have to complain about the lack of Hispanic gangster voice since 3

What they should have done for a sequel: Time Travel. It was in the ending of SR4 if you got 100%, and can you imagine a sandbox game where you can swap between the old west, modern day, the future, maybe even the medieval periods all at the touch of a button? The potential was amazing (even if it'd require multiple versions of the same city) for taking it truly to the next level. Instead we got.. this..

They could have stepped up the story by going after the gods. That's more over the top than aliens.

In sr3, i made my boss sterling archer. The burt reynolds bit was amazballs.

Evil Dead was a great movie series

True. They could have also borrowed from the isekai tropes in anime and other stories and had them get flung into a sword and sorcery dimension devoid of all their original wealth and influence. The boss powerbombing an ogre from the top of a fortified tower onto an enemy wizard would also be an escalation.

And imagine the villains! We could have had a team up of Hitler, Gengis Khan and Rasputin.

It could've been a cool adventure through time. they could even do a whole SR2 part where you have to make sure not to meet your younger self, all tounge in cheek. maybe even referencing that the default boss had an entire different look from 3 and 4.( as well as a redo of the "shaundi meets stoner shaundi-joke" from 4).

>a naked guy dildoing his way through the crusades >Evil Dead was a great movie series Imagine your [naked] character in a cutscene going "THIS...is my BOOMSTIIIIICK!" with a giant purple dildo.

Reminds me of fallout 4, no matter how you roleplay you're aways a loving father and husband

Yeah. Saints Row 2 and onwards were really good with carefully writing to make sure any possible character would slot into the story, but the reboot just abandoned that ethos entirely.

okay you're right, but I just want to add that its not uncommon for older people go to back to uni to study a new field, LOTS of people actually do that. for example, I studied film and media with a 45 year old who was sick of psychology and wanted to move onto something different.

@@kabobawsome Even the zombie voice in SR3 somehow worked, but most of the custom characters in the reboot just look wrong. Having such a young supporting cast and having them as your roommates really limits things.

@@82Catfish Okay.

Dude have you played 2 recently like Carlo's death is hilarious because the game thinks it did anything to make me care about Carlos like oh my god here is the entire character of Carlos hi I'm the guy who couldn't scream I'm going to die more likely if I was wearing a red hat instead of a purple one I have no other distinguishable personality trait except I'm young. Saints row 2 is has very poorly written story if we can't work don't end it is one note in fact I'm going to list all those notes please Johnny Gat badass, Shaendi stoner girl guy Dean Vogel ass hole businessman the general Haitian stereotype pappi Sanji l sidekick of stereotype Marlo the scary big guy the Ronin leader compensating arrogant son the Ronin leaders dad disappointed father the Ronin bald guy is just a ninja. Yah no everything you've said is completely wrong and filled by nostalgia. Saints row 2 isn't a bad game but it is not the perfect game people treat it as

Saints Row 2 also didn't sugarcoat that the Boss was a bloody psychopath - heck, there's only one character he never really yelled at or treated badly in any way and that was Carlos. The other Saints had to earn that affection. This was a guy who had no problem locking somebody in a trunk to get crushed by their unsuspecting lover or burying somebody alive. 3 played with the idea of the Boss and their crew having grown soft, which was kinda interesting - but then 4 kinda lost the plot for me by making the Boss and the Saints bona fida heroes. While Yahtzee praises the serial escalation, It was always a drawback for me personally because it kinda took the series away from what I enjoyed about it in the first place. 3 at least still had you do gang shit, even morally questionable stuff, but 4 just threw that all out for space VR hijinks - it also managed to make some of its own mechanics obsolete. For example, why steal and upgrade a car if you can just jump or fly anywhere?

Although Carlos wasn't a character I particularly liked his death was incredibly handled, you could see the boss trying to find someway to help him before realising its too late, and just to save him anymore pain, its a perfectly nightmarish and horrific scene. And this is why I despise the beginning of saints row 4, the boss is put into their worst nightmare and its a silly world without violence rather than one of the most traumatising character deaths I have seen in fiction.

One correction: You killed Carlos? We trick YOU into killing your girlfriend.

@@kendaar9002 ding ding! Yeah maybe Carlos wasn't a super deep character but I don't need a fucking bottomless ocean of characterisation or get to know everything about a character to make me care. Carlos saved you from prison, had a brother in the Saints and really wanted to be part of it always ready. With that I saw the type of man Carlos was and that was enough. And his death is brutal, the way it was handled brutal that it forces you to care. Seeing my boss take out one of his own lieutenants? That shit hit hard.

My Boss was a default hot chick in black clothes. Quite unique and original.

My boss from 3 ended up looking like fit Steven Segal before I realized.

My boss was a dreaded redhead, drunk on vodka all the time and mobbed around with his shotgun always stopping to beat up pimps . Who has the better pimp hand now, buddy!

My Boss was an asshole Latina who occasionally ran around as a nudist because she was THAT damn proud of her tattoos. She also had an interesting story arc as she lost her accent by the forth game.

Mine was an overweigh British bloke in a nice suit

I can totally identify as the first type. Coincidentally I discovered the Yakuza series a few months ago and got completely hooked to the series. Also completely struck as to why Japanese studios still seem to do it right while Western studios all fall in line of the same bland (bugged/broken) game design and writing. I was actually amazed how intense the story of Yakuza 0 was and at the same time gave me so much crazy side activities to explore. It actually felt like I was playing something that simply doesn't seem to exist in modern gaming anymore.

2nd type all the way

I got in the SR3, the charm of that game got me, and I also liked tig ol' bitties, and the jiggle physics. But the larger point is right -- we two groups banded together and hate the Reboot. Volition decided to be cross with both of us to seek out another group, so we cast them away.

100% second type for me, bf is the first type and thinks I'm weird. Probably helps I'm not nostalgic for SR2 at all (not to say you SR2 guys are wrong, but nostalgia's the only conceivable way I'd personally like it more) since I didn't pick up the series until my mid-twenties. SR3 specifically is peak for me. 2 has a blend of serious mainquest and whacky sidequests, but it's like steak and potatoes. It's very much 2 things. 3 is like a hearty beef stew with potato chunks in it, where the whacky and the serious achieve something approaching homogeneity. Perfect balance of trainwreck whacky fun time that pushes the boundary on plausibility to the very limit, *just* shy of becoming a full-on sci-fi/fantasy game. Sure, there's some advanced technology (the hoverbikes and stuff) but it isn't ubiquitous or commonplace within the world of the game - it's... "futuristic but not sci-fi", I guess (obviously this is still technically sci-fi, and this is a total cop-out) . 4 and Gat Outta Hell go off the deep end entirely. 4's *really fun*, the superpowers and stuff are great gameplay additions, but it's 'all whacky all the time there are no brakes on this train to crazy town lol XD so random". I unashamedly admit I do absolutely love that, it just... lost something for me. It lost its potatoes and deepfried the steak.

Am I the only SR fan who actually likes the reboot? Probably. I'm in group 2, and that might be why I like it more than others. Hear me out. I've never given 1 and 2 a real go because 1 was never on PC and 2 was a broken port. Perhaps why I like SRR so much is because of that. I had never really played a silly yet 'realistic' SR game. This is the closest I had. But yeah, I'm not going to call Reboot Row good or anything. I just said I liked it, but I won't defend the bad parts of it.

and also have a good antagonist to face off against

@@sarafontanini7051 The antagonist would have been "Everyone who doesn't believe them" and that would probably have been all the countries of the world. Yeah it's a step back from "Spaaaaace" but they could have also gone with time travel antics and having the player do missions that the player would then need to stop later on because they made such a huge mess. Having the player be the protagonist and the antagonist would be a masterstroke.

I like the failing aspect, but since historic characters like Jane Austin, Aleister Crowley, and Santa has all be established, why not have the Saints traveling through time to recruit legends and epic heroes to help them save the Earth. Or maybe even Zinyak would recruit his own team of super evils throughout history? Having Hitler getting smack in the face with an red white and blue pixelated 'penetrators' by a major Saint character would make for great marketing materials.

@@rurimuni2937 Having a time travelling player be their own antagonist is a genius idea, but probably _incredibly_ hard to design, especially in a large open-world game. I know some smaller indie games have played around with similar concepts, and I hope one day somebody makes it work on a large scale. I can think of many ways it could go wrong and no ways it could go right, but fortunately I'm not a game designer 😕

@@KillahMate When they posted for writers for this game I did put in an application, with this outline for what would be cool. Sadly, I've only a few very niche smut novels under my belt and that isn't good enough.

Rather optimistic of you to assume there will BE another Saints Row game after this...

@@KeithCopeland67 At this point we need someone to try to bring True Crime back or something.

@@SlickSkuddy Sleeping Dogs!! :D

@@KeithCopeland67 And here I was hoping for a Red Faction sequel after this disaster.

@@KeithCopeland67 Never underestimate funding that comes from thin air. Every time you think it's a failure, someone pulls money from their ass and it becomes a trilogy.

2's pretty good even though you need to install a mod to actually get it to run right on PC since the port literally has Turbo Mode locked to ON and that mod is the only way to really fix it...plus it's just a good mod in general that doesn't pull a Bethesda mod and wildly change the game. 3 is honestly one of the last gasps of ye olden days when cheat codes were something you unlocked instead of something you bought, since the late-game upgrades can make you pretty much immortal and have infinite ammo with no reloading, but that's tied together with a relatively-serious plot about the identity of the Saints as a whole. Plus zombies, for some reason.

@@dosbilliam it was 2008, when zombies ruled the pop culture zeitgeist. Not having them would get you laughed out of the building

@@dosbilliam They fixed that. IdolNinja helped Volition patch the game.

@@ZiddersRooFurry Huh. Haven't played it in 7 years, apparently, so didn't hear that. Sorry to hear about IdolNinja, though. :'(

If you like 4 don't forget to play 3 !

They had it right there. It was even teased in the credits of SR 4. Also, imagine if that game ended with you fighting God because he wants to scrub the Saints timeline, since it's so borked. An ending would be you losing, but then the new kids take up the mantle because "there will always be Saints." It would've kept the energy high since we would want to know if they ever get back to the 'weird' timeline, if it's an inevitability that s**t happens.

I'm so glad you mentioned this. Time travelling saints would have been awesome!

Yeah, the possibilities are endless. Arguing that there was no place for the Saints Row series to go is just lack of imagination.

@@noxteryn agreed. The fourth game ended with the boss becoming the dictator of a freakin galactic empire after all.

@@noxteryn This is the thing I can never agree with on Yahtzee. There is so many games in the space genre for a reason... It's infinite, which means you always have options to create tension and stakes. Ultimate crime syndicate of Earth? Meh ok. Ultimate crime syndicate of the galactic trade network? Oh my!

Why stop there? Saints in medieval times. Saints in 1920s America. Saints in imperial Japan. While it would essentially just be a wacky slideshow of settings, that doesnt have to be a bad thing.

@@AnonJuggerbot "While it would essentially just be a wacky slideshow of settings, that doesnt have to be a bad thing." They've been doing this with Assasins Creed for a while and people still buy them.

Time Travel? That would have been genus. Volition should have hired you.

Either that or push the Saints Row in Space concept much harder and have the Boss conquer alien worlds and build an intergalactic empire.

Goddammit Volition! You had one fucking job!! ONE! JUST ONE JOB!!!

I mean traveling the nine realms is basically the same thing as going to different planets. In the Marvel Universe it arguably IS the same thing, even. So from a non-linear, non-subjective point of view, God of Four actually did go to space. Technically. Sort of. With wormholes instead of spaceships.

@@ThePCguy17 More of a dimensional thing I think, but point well made. Still, it was able to go different instead of bigger because the game changed location. Speaking of, I think Chains of Olympus might be low key the most important game of the franchise. If it wasn't for Kratos, everyone would be dead. If Atlas holds up the whole world instead of the part Greece is on, there would BE no location for Kratos to wash up on post III.

Modern Sony hates Japan so that would never happen.

Leave change' out of this, it's not her fault she didn't want the bandits to have immortality lol

"Japanese mythology" "on the moon fighting rabits".... was .... was that a dragonball reference??

Well what obstacle cant be solved when you can out time travel your enemies? This super bad guy whose going to end the world? Go back in time five seconds before he pops up and shoot him in the head.

Technically agents of mayhem was that. It was explicitly an alternate timeline of the Saints universe.

Didn’t the alien destroy Earth and the result is the simulation that he puts you through? So it would be in space sort of

was just thinking this. But that would mean the developers would have to have been imaginative... and the game would have probably cost more to develop ....and why would parasitic publishers want to do that?

Could have taken a rival factions/gangs on a new planet apprach. Plenty of room for wacky cultural misunderstandings and serious moments of dealing with being the last of humanity.

Alternately, time and space travel, which was setup at the end of IV. The Saints Rule Everywhere!

Agreed, Saints Row 4 was primarily a Matrix parody with us exploring a virtual reality human city with superpowers. They definitely could have escalated the next game even further by making it a Star Wars parody set in a proper alien city and having the Boss end the story as the Emperor of Space.

... that and time travel?

Didn't they kind of already do that with Gat Out of Hell?

Which is odd because Niko, as cool as he is, does suffer from Ludonarrative Dissonance, like how in the story he goes on about wanting to start a new life and avoid all the violence, blood, and death from the wars he was part of and yet they put him in a GTA game, the kind of game where you can run over civilians and commit mass shootings, and none of it has an effect on Niko in the story. If anything, a character like Claude Speed from GTA 3 is more suited to the kind of catharsis that GTA games tend to go for.

@@TheCyclicGamer Yup i agree, but i still think Niko is one of my personal favorites.

@@AshleySOAD Same, he's a good character who is very quotable, it's just that he's the odd one of the bunch. Like every other GTA protagonist, with maybe exception to Franklin and Michael from GTA 5, all want to become crime bosses/lords in one way or another, while Niko just wants to live a normal life. The chaos of GTA's gameplay suits them, it doesn't really suit Niko though.

@@TheCyclicGamer I guess it could work in him struggling to move on and that he wants to protect those around him, and depending on your choice revenge could consume and hurt those around him. But yeah, he's probably the most """jarring""" compared to the others in the series.

In terms of Rockstar protaganists, I don't know if Niko going around killing people is more or less jarring than the incorruptible Cole Phelps carjacking someone's convertible because it's faster than Rusty's Nash, then immediately mounting the sidewalk to get to a non-urgent appointment very slightly faster.

is she even visible under all the scars by elden ring?

@@Aota1740 I can't tell, on account of the controller still stuck in my screen.

@@SirSaladhead this is basically why i've never played any of those games

@@Aota1740 It's more about patience than anything. Dark Souls is like a puzzle game. If you know where the enemies are and how they behave, you can bust through basically anything. ESPECIALLY for Dark Souls 1. That game has so many hidden paths and alternative solutions that it's kinda insane. Elden Ring had the worst design in that aspect, as things are just sorta scattered around instead of deliberately placed. It's one of the reasons I personally don't like Elden Ring much. It loses all of its replay value once the first NG is over because it's so broad that getting to where you want to be (for whatever reason) or beating the game again while still collecting things takes ages. In addition to this, while Dark Souls and Bloodborne have this air of desperation where you have to use things you find and your wits to your advantage, Elden Ring has so many things that essentially let you get through any challenge by standing there AFK or hitting a single button that there's no challenge at all if you don't hold back on the enemies. So every run where there's even the slightest amount of challenge feels like a challenge run in the Soulsbornes, like Level 1 naked runs or something. Something you have to do deliberately to make the game more difficult.

@@terratrox7180 i suck at video games in general which is why i like fromsoft games so much. they feel like no matter what, as long as you find the right method, you can reliably overcome any of the games' obstacles, unlike a lot of other rpgs / shooters / beat-em-ups etc. where it feels like you're stuck relying on your own skill or dexterity or just luck (which is also why the waterfowl dance ruined what would've been my favourite boss fight of the series). I like how noah caldwell-gervais put it - "in Dark Souls your hard work pays off; that's part of the fantasy"

Also the motivation for the protagonist. In saints row 1 he join the gang to push gang warfare out of his neighborhood. In SR2022 they start the gang to pay their student debts, but then to pay their gang members they rob a train, completely undercutting the necessity of starting the gang in the first place.

Yeah, not to mention that in the first game, you're not even the boss of the Saints, Julius is! You're just someone who rises up through the ranks. It's not until the 2nd game that you actually become the boss, but even then you do it by rebuilding the gang from the ground up. Playing the series from the very start really was like a rags to riches story.

@@BadgerOff32 More of a rags to "Holy fuck what is this now?" story. As you face off against a galactic overlord. Then the spinoff is literally about going to hell and kicking Satan's ass.

@@BadgerOff32 Actually why isn't Julius in this game ? He created 3rd streets Saints. If it's suppose to be origin story it would only make sens for him to be there.

@@BadgerOff32 true in the first game you only take over lead at the very end with explosive results. It is the second game you start from nothing as the leader and build up your gang. In both of these games you have a struggle, low points, drama, and heck even subtly. You grew up in a rough world and you become the bad element to try and get rid of the bad element. That even speaks to the futility of gangs in general all while having some damn fun. To me SR2022 feels like a cheap mini-golf course if that makes sense.

Was it good?

@@Hysteria98 It was like Saints Row 4, with 90% of the great cast removed, 50% of the map and side missions cut and the story reduced to 4-5 major cutscenes total. So no, not really. It felt more like a standalone DLC. Fun to see some of the diseased Saints Row characters like Dane Vogel and the DeWynter sisters playing major roles, though.

@@Hysteria98 Yes, it was. It introduced a new core mechanic (flying by flapping your angel-wings) and expanded upon it. The story was somewhat basic, but it did feature a really cool musical number, which you can look up on RU-vid. It wasn't a masterpiece, but it was definitely worthy of being part of the Saints Row series. Much better than the reboot, that's for sure.

@@Hysteria98 it was a 20 bucks standalone dlc. so yeah a bit more of 4 if you wanted it, but nothing more.

I was wondering why he didn't mention that. Regardless of what you think about it, you have to admit that conquering Hell as a follow-up to conquering space was a pretty clever form of escalation. Certainly more so than the idea of conquering time, which is actually a de-escalation if you ask me.

If AOM were treated as canon, SR '22 wouldn't exist.

'All you have to do is be good and everything else will work itself out.' Well said. I often think about how every nonsense idea could be gold if it's executed right, and every golden opportunity can be squandered. Will BioShock make a good TV show? Depends on whether they make a good TV show.

I assume its going to suck hard. Not only cause the track record is bad, but also if its actually alright itll be a pleasant surprise

We already have a mass affect 4, it was terrible

Your mistake here is assuming it was gonna be bad. When your expectations should always be apathetic.

I know lots of people shit all over Mass Effect 3’s ending, but the first time I went through the ending I felt incredibly melancholy. Because this was the end of MY Shepard. I had made her all the way back in ME1, watched her grow with my choices. That’s what can make character customisation so good. You get more invested in your character.

would've been a fun payoff on the time travel tease at the end of 4. Same characters. Just multiple cities across multiple times

A saints row dead or alive volleyballs for instance

Good point. In other words: the "Rick and Morty"-route of infinite universes.

time makes fools of us all

The problem… it costs money to make a proper GTA clone. Look all the other games that wanted to be similar to Rockstar flagship game: the last one was Cyberpunk2077 by the way.

The other problem: we don't want saints row to be gta, we want saints row to be saints row.

Missing out on Adventure is Nigh, lots of 3 Minute Reviews on indie games you probably don't know about, good design essays via Anatomy and fun essays about cool gaming moments via Quest Log. We think you'd find a lot to like.

Does it NEED continuing? All stories need to come to an end sometime, as sad as it is.

@@Mernom I think problem comes with lack of alternative. What other game has similar blend of open world craziness? Just Cause is close to it but they cant figure out how to progress from islands to liberate, towards planets to liberate and it would end there as well. People want more but they want games that can only be made once and only for so long if continued.

@@Mernom it doesn't NEED to continue by any means. I was just wondering if there was a good way to continue the series

Top a vanishing car? You do know Bond went into space right? Moonraker is a thing that exists.

@@FranciscoAreasGuimaraes The issue from what I can tell is not the back to basics idea, it's that it's also uninspired and poorly done. Even when stepping down in terms of narrative scope you still have to provide new and interesting ideas. In fact, by making the scope smaller, when done well a game can provide previously unthinkable levels of creativity, freedom, and player expression because it doesn't have to account for variables on a galactic scale. I kind of disagree that "always escalating" doesn't mean a series can't step down in scope between installments, it's just a question about having a good enough idea and direction that warrants it.

I think those who preferred 2 are going to still feel the same way; a bland, bad reboot doesn't just clear the slate of complaints that existed for previous games.