saints row forever

i cannot believe they would rip away one of the actually more developed characters in saints row 3 for fucking wardens.

the city is more generic with fewer land marks and no real distinction between areas

the writing is a distinctly different, and in my opinion worse tone

everything with how they handled johnny gat

everything with how they handled shandi

lack of things SR2 had. no day’night cycle, less customization options, no changing npcs between city areas, no changing npc reactions

supposed primary antagonist dies so quickly and suddenly it’s confusing what even happened

significantly less content than SR2, less side missions, less main story missions

general weird and lifeless feeling to the game, as opposed to SR2 which had a lot of life in little ways, like your hideout becoming more remodeled and fancy as the game went on

"saint row nice"

saints row 4 johnny on the other hand… everything that made him visually stand out for me is gone. his tattoos, earrings, his funny haircut, even the small details like his tooth gap. everything that made him so charming to me is thrown out of the window. he’s now the size of the god of war protagonist (he’s even bigger in aom?) which just reminds me of a video i recently watched on male characters being just as sexualised as female characters by being Huge Tough Muscle Men in which the conclusion is that no they’re not they’re just big and on steroids to make the male straight gamer feel powerful. and that’s exactly what the fuck is going on for me with johnny. they took out all the emotion. all the pain he dealt with. all the fucked up shit he went through. it’s just not manly enough apparently. he shows no emotion at all over the course of the fourth game. there’s no emotional response to being reunited with the boss, there’s nothing to indicate that the whole zin simulation scarred him in any way “its over and done now boss im ready for the future”, he doesn’t even care that the earth is blown up. they turned him into Huge Guy McMuscle who is void of any emotion and the game gives him this weird legendary status in its own universe which - if you go back to the first two games - isnt justified at all? in sr1 he gets shot in the knee, in sr2 he does some badass shit but only because the love of his life got brutally murdered in front of him, and in sr3 he dies???