I'm going to try not to repeat myself for each entry:
GTA3 - Best aspect: the structure and game design of GTA3 is genius. Just the very idea of going to a place, getting an objective, doing it and progressing through a story where you unlock more parts of the map, more weapons, more vehicles. It's an amazing formula. The worst aspects: the car physics and the aiming, shooting in all other of the games is hitscan but GTA3 i remember if your hand isnt facing the person when you fire you shoot off into the distance. Very annoying system
Vice City - best aspect: the amount of side missions, i love how much optional story there is in this game. entire subplots like love fist and big mitch, the cubans vs. the haitains, the phone calls, avery carrington and even some of the assets and i think colonel cortez's last mission (tho i could be wrong) are all optional. it makes the world feel more alive and like youre not merely here to accomplish a set of tasks. the worst aspect: this is a tough one but im going to say the second island. i love the map design but someone pointed out to me that the first island seems to be the better designed area of the two whereas the mainland has a rushed feeling in its texture quality and geometry especially when you compare it to how VCS updated the locations with more neon. the map as a whole is great but i think that the second island couldve been more polished
San Andreas - best aspect: character customization is a big one and is almost a pillar of how san andreas works, even if you never customize CJ he will gradually change as you play. i think there's still an amazing amount of flexibility in how you personalize him and for me the fun of replaying an open world is getting a look i can not only call my own but can also distinguish from my prior playthroughs. i think San Andreas is unfortunately still yet to be beat except for Saints Row 2 and RDR2 which get close, from hair to fat to clothes you can give CJ a different look not only every playthrough but in every city of every playthrough. the worst aspect: the gang warfare grind, i dont understand it at all, the game is already 100 missions long i dont see why they felt the need to lock the finale behind taking over an abritrary amount of territories plus it's way less convenient to do this post-Riot starting so you essentially have to start the grind as soon as you get it back but some missions like the one where you have to do four gang wars in a row take away territories you may have taken over so you can earn them back. if they really wanted to pad out game time they shouldve made all the side missions mandatory because the wang cars asset was clearly meant to be done before EotL according to dialogue
Liberty City Stories - best aspect: one of my lesser GTAs but I love a lot of the missions in this game but especially the ones where you participate in events that have major ramifications in 3, like blowing up Fort Staunton or getting involved with the big brother Kasen's wife. the worst aspect: i think the reason it's one of my lesser GTAs is it's kind of boring as a plot, GTAV has a bad plot but amazing dialogue and characters to balance it out. this plot isnt bad but there's not a great villain to latch onto, just a lot of really good side characters that i also liked in GTA3. it has that problem of being a bit wanky with the prequel shit that it forgets to have any new characters that are actually interesting, and the ones that are interesting die or leave the plot
Vice City Stories - best aspect: love this game, but to highlight something i think it did best of all i would argue that vehicle variety was VCS' strongest aspect. it combined one of the best settings with all the stuff i loved about san andreas, so boats, bikes, jetskis, swimming, planes, helis, bikes, hovercraft, bicycles and sports cars are all in the game and it makes vice city a joy to navigate in a way it wasnt in 86 but it's also a smaller, more vibrant map than san andreas and in that way it feels more fun to use these tools in this map than it did in san andreas. the worst aspect: that's a tough one but i'd say the technicals especially the framerate, i think either version isnt really a technical powerhouse and my preferred version is the PS2 which really chugs on the second island. PSP is mostly stable but then with that youre getting a kinda worse looking game with worse controls and it still has those weird audio issues the cutscenes of these PSP era GTAs have
GTA4 - best aspect: honestly this is going to be faint praise because i really dont see what anyone else sees in GTA4 but i'd say the best aspect is probably the drive-by shooting and the variety of the mission order. i think it feels better to engage in car combat in this game than in V, one of the few aspects i feel that game did poorly, because there's a certain amount of flow and power in your aiming. the car controls work quite well for this, where youre bobbing and weaving and shredding people down. it's cool. and while unfortunately gta has very few side missions (in fact all gtas post-vice city seem to ditch side missions in favor of random events and strangers which arent as good), what i do love about gta4 is how open the structure is. for example im doing a playthrough where ive encountered ULP and Francis midway through the game, and by the time i get to Packie i'll probably be two thirds in. last time i was doing work for Ray and Packie seemingly early into act two and even though it's the same missions the story gets a different feel when youre going from government stooge to criminal double agent versus the opposite. the worst aspect: i'd say mission structure is gta4's failing, this game is fond of doing a lot of really tedious tailing missions and i cant stand the missions where you need to schedule an appointment, where it'd be easier to just do what the older games did and have you arrange the appointment, go to it and then finish the mission. the irony is easy missions like Final Interview and Out of the Closet have these pseudo-checkpoints but practically no other missions do and thatd be welcome on something like Puerto Rican Connection which I wish they brought back Trip Skip for
TLAD - best aspect: i'd say difficulty curve is the best aspect of TLAD, i was originally going to put it as "worst" because it's hard but then i realized im not a bitch and i looked at it from the angle of this being DLC for GTA4 and it's actually neat how they upped the challenge from GTA4 while having more variety in the missions and having your objectives be more interesting. i also like them elaborating culturally on alderney which always felt like a third island of liberty in IV rather than a seperate state. the worst aspect: the whole biker thing just comes off a bit pointless, you dont need to spend the whole game on bikes, the levelling up system isnt really all that useful and you torch the place by the end so you dont really benefit from any of it. it's a bit like if in VCS all your businesses burn down because "that's what canonically happens after VCS". i wouldve liked it if we kept the hideout but the final cutscene of them torching is a secret 100 percent reward you can CHOOSE to do. it's also a bit silly to have a yellow tint on everything,
TBOGT - the best aspect i think is the entire presentation. the radio, the art direction, the voice acting and storyline are all in many ways superficial but they take the core GTA4 experience and twist it in ways that makes it enjoyable to me who doesnt really rate GTA4 highly in the series. like for example i dont like GTA4's handling, i dont dislike it either i think the discourse has become too polarized between "realistic = good" and "difficult = bad", my problem was that you spend a lot of the game in really shitty cars but when youre in a good car it's pretty fun and that's what gta is good at doing: having you steal fast cars. you can still have a gritty story with fast cars, because the protagonist is still gritty. with TBOGT all they did was tweak the spawn rates and suddenly the game plays 50 times better, that's what i mean by presentation making the game's core better because those spawn rates were meant to make the game more glamorous but have a knock-on on making for better gameplay. the worst aspect: this is a really minor nitpick but i dont like that the game's settings are integrated with IV and TLAD, i wish i could change on a per-game basis but if i were to maybe make a couple more nitpicks to add into a bigger criticism because i really do love the game i would add that there's some weird character models that seem low budget like Joni's and i think Luis' mother is a massive bitch
chinatown wars - best aspect: the drug wars, love dealing me some drugs. it's like a better version of V's stock market. worst aspect: huang is a lame protag and i think a lot of the gimmicky touch screen missions were super frustrating like that dragon one. the thing is im sure theyre easy on PSP when i get round to playing that version but the problem is just that it's wasting a mission slot on something that isnt fundamentally GTA
V - wont relate online because i havent played it since ps3 days but best aspect of SP: the special abilities. i love the way GTAV's shooting and driving feels in general (tho i agree they went too far into arcadey whereas i think games like San Andreas and even Saints Row 2 have better guns and driving to me, because they balance weight and fun rather than just going for so fun it's easy) but i think the way i can use the abilities strategically makes me feel super badass. even in these scripted segments i feel some level of agency when i turn on mike's slow motion to hit five headshots in a row or kamikaze myself as trevor or weave through traffic in the big score as franklin. the worst aspect of sp: the customization, i think this game has the worst customization of the series. games like LCS, VCS and VC have less options but I think trying to do anything with V feels so unintuitive. michael and trevor have very few hairstyles, are actually missing some they should have from prologue (michael's cut, trevor's stache WITHOUT stubble), you cant buy some clothes as some characters but can with others, sometimes you can change a shirt and jacket separately sometimes you cant, etc. I get that they didnt want to make models for something thatd seem out of character for the others to wear but I dont really care. Franklin's three piece suits all suck, I just want to give him an all black tieless suit like Michael and Trevor have. What's weird is they have a perfect way of doing all this, because they implemented my ideal system with the TATTOOS. where you can just layer on as many tattoos as you want and theyll overlap in ridiculous ways. if they just let us layer on clothes, like putting on a red shirt from binco then a suit jacket and then a chain, it'd be a great system, online mightve done that already by now but ive forgotten
