Saints Row : A Retrospective
Mike Watson died last year. It’s OK if you didn’t hear — he wasn’t well-known. But he is the man who almost single-handedly saved the Saints Row series. I replayed the series as a sort of tribute to him, and since the reboot is about to come out, this seems like a good time to see exactly what these games are all about.
Saints Row
Back before the term “first person shooter” was coined, that genre was just called “Doom clones”. Similarly, games like Saints Row used to be called “Grand Theft Auto clones”. I don’t think the term has ever been more appropriate — the Saints Row games as a whole hew VERY closely to the GTA formula, and while they have since deviated from it, that all came well after the original Saints Row.
I never actually played Saints Row 1. It was an XBox exclusive, and I haven’t owned a console since the first Playstation (that’s not an elitism thing, it’s purely a money issue). I was only aware of Saints Row for two reasons — a Youtube video showing some pretty terrible bugs in the game, and this Penny Arcade strip :
To my surprise, I recently learned that Saints Row actually got pretty decent reviews. I suppose that makes sense — if it had been a failure, we never would have got the masterpiece that is..
Saints Row 2
I don’t like to gush, but Saints Row 2 is one of the finest video games ever made. It uses the GTA formula, but at every opportunity it goes further and does more.
Just as an example, take character customization. Many games, across several genres, let you create your own character. Saints Row 2 goes a little farther in terms of body types, but it absolutely blows every other game out of the water when you look at clothing options. A game like Grand Theft Auto might give you 20 odd different shirts to choose from (more in GTA 5, of course, but Saints Row 2 came out in 2008). SR2, by comparison, offers several dozen shirts…each with multiple customization options. Choose the color and pattern you want on the shirt, choose whether you want it tucked in, whether you want the sleeves rolled up, whether you want the color popped…and then choose an undershirt and a jacket, all of which offer similar options. SR2 is also surprisingly inclusive — male characters can wear female clothing, and vice versa. The combinations are virtually limitless.
Does that seem like a small thing? Maybe, but if you’re going to play a game for more than 20 hours, having a character who looks exactly like you want them to really helps keep you interested. Moreover, that same philosophy is applied to every aspect of the game. The Grand Theft Auto series featured “emergent gameplay” — things that were never intended by the developers, but which the players discovered anyway. The key example is car surfing — jump on a car, shoot your gun, and the car will take off at high speed while you try to stay on. Never more than a momentary diversion in GTA, Saints Row 2 took that idea and turned it into a whole polished mechanic. Saints Row 2 offered an almost mindboggling amount of stuff to do, and it was all well-realized.
In this genre, what matters most is gameplay. The writing, while important, is secondary. And that’s why it’s so surprising that Saints Row 2 had such incredible writing. The supporting characters were vibrant, unique, and engaging, while the main character (known only as “Playa” or “Boss”) was a one-of-a-kind triumph. They’re enough of an immoral lunatic to take on any task, no matter how outrageous, over the top, or outright suicidal, and just capable enough to succeed. This also neatly solves the ludonarrative dissonance problem — a number of GTA games star characters who would never drive at high speed through a crowd or massacre a hundred cops with a rocket launcher, even though those are key points of the game play. In Saints Row 2, on the other hand, it’s impossible to imagine the Playa leaving a crowd alone if they have the option to drive over everyone.
But Saints Row 2 had a serious problem. It worked just fine on the XBox and Playstation, but the PC version suffered from critical bugs that could render the game unplayable. That’s where Mike Watson, better known as IdolNinja, came in. A fan of the games, he not only released a patch that fixed the PC port, he also added a whole lot of new content to an already massive game. Without Watson, Saints Row would have almost certainly fizzled and died on the PC platform. It didn’t. In fact, the next game in the series was more polished and fancier than ever before.
Saints Row The Third
Just watch this trailer and try telling me that it isn’t one of the finest short films ever made. You can’t.
Could any game live up to this kind of hype? Probably not. Did Saints Row The Third come close? Not exactly.
Saints Row 3, sadly, was a wildly uneven game. What it did well, it did VERY well. The rest it of it was just disappointing.
So what did SR3 do well? The gameplay was a lot more polished and specific than SR2, and so was the aesthetic. In both cases, SR3 worked hard to develop its own identity, rather than the generic qualities of SR2. Some of the new characters, like Kinzie, were also wonderful additions to the series.
Where did it go wrong? The writing. While Kinzie was great, and Pierce remained pretty cool, Shaundi, one of the supporting characters from Saints Row 2, went from being a relatively unique laid-back stoner to a generic angry girl — even her original voice actor, the great Eliza Dushku, was replaced.
That’s a small complaint, but it’s emblematic of the half-assed, watered-down writing in SR3. Instead of playing as a psychopath fighting a group of slightly worse psychopaths, Saints Row 3 positions you as more of a cheeky anti-hero fighting hardened villains.
One of the most serious flaws happens very early. Johnny Gat, a character who has been established throughout the series as a virtually-immortal avatar of death and who has been shown at the beginning of SR3 as wanting to shake up the status quo, is killed off-screen. This meant to be the emotional engine of the entire game, but it seems really obvious that Johnny either survived or outright faked his death. You spend most of the game expecting him to show up again, which robs the story of its weight, and lets you down when it eventually becomes clear he’s actually dead.
What about the actual gameplay? You know, the stuff that separates a game from a movie? Well, like I said, it’s more polished and individual than SR2…what there is of it, anyway. There’s less to do in Saints Row 3, and a lot of the side missions are just rehashes of stuff that happens in the main story. You can even do some of the side missions before they’re introduced in the story, which gets pretty confusing. Hell, even the character customization options are a lot scantier than they used to be.
Don’t get me wrong — Saints Row The Third is fun, unique, and well-made. It’s also short and generally poorly-written. It still sold pretty well, which got us :
Saints Row 4
You know how I said SR2 was “one of the finest games ever made”? Saints Row 4 is damn near perfect. It’s the Sistine Chapel of gaming. The game starts off with the Playa as President of the United States, but that’s just the start — aliens invade in the introduction, and put most of humanity into a virtual reality simulation. As humanity’s last hope, it’s your duty to fight off the alien invaders using your patented ability to cause chaos…plus a bunch of Matrix-y super powers.
OK, about two thirds of the game uses the same map as Saints Row 3, which may seem cheap, but it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds. See, Saints Row 4 gives you a whole new relationship to the map — instead of walking, running, and mostly driving like you did in SR3, SR4 has you running at a hundred miles an hour up the sides of buildings, leaping thousands of feet at a time, and gliding halfway across the map. They basically just stole the movement system from Prototype (2009), which is fine, because Prototype had the best movement system ever created by man or god.
The story is insane, the gameplay is perfection, so how’s the writing? Well, it’s both insane and perfect. There’s a whole section where Vice President Keith David fights Roddy Piper. There’s a series of missions where you travel to the virtual North Pole to save Santa Claus.
Saints Row 4 is the closest I’ve ever been to seeing the face of God. Which is ironically appropriate, given where the next game takes us.
Gat Out Of Hell
Alright, technically Gat Out Of Hell is more of an expansion pack than a full game, but it comes fairly close. It’s about a third the length of a real Saints Row game, and that’s a generous measurement because the side missions are less varied than usual. There’s less to do, there are fewer characters, and the city is smaller…but the game is still a true delight.
The story is about what you’ve come to expect by now — Satan kidnaps the Playa to force them to marry his daughter, so Johnny Gat and Kinzie go to hell in order to mount a rescue. In order to do so, they gain angelic powers (basically the same kind of super powers as SR4, plus flying) and have to recruit some of history’s greatest monsters. Much of the story is told as a musical. One of the weapons is a magic toilet.
Gat Out Of Hell is probably for Saints Row enthusiasts only, unless you really love wing-flapping simulators, but it’s a real treat for fans of the series.
Whither Saints Row?
Saints Row 4 ended with the Earth destroyed. Gat Out Of Hell had multiple endings, one of which led into the semi-spinoff Agents of Mayhem (about which the less said the better), while others saw humanity settled on a new planet. No matter what you picked, there was very little room left for the series to move forward.
That’s why they’re rebooting the series. The new Saints Row comes out next month. I know very little about it. Apparently they’re toning down the absurdity and bringing it back to Saints Row 2 levels. That’s probably for the best — as great as the insanity was, I don’t know how much more they could have done with it, and a somewhat more grounded approach could give the plot more gravity. The only other thing I know is that they’ve gotten rid of the iconic 3 foot long purple dildo weapon, which is almost an unforgivable sin.
Will the new Saints Row be any good? C’mon, what do you take me for? I’m no psychic. There’s only one way to find out. But I’m going to wait for a sale. See, the critically acclaimed Spider-Man game is coming out on PC at the same time, and it looks like it’s going to be a great addition to the Prototype and Saints Row 3/4 genre of running up buildings.
(PS — I understand a limited number of dildo-bats were actually manufactured as promotional items for Saints Row 3. While some apparently went missing, I know a few must still be out there, and I’d love to get my hands on one.)
