Grand Theft Auto has been a series I've loved it since a cousin of mine let me play the very first one on his Playstation. That's right, the very first Playstation! I was so young and naive to what exactly was going on. I just moved my little blip of a character and ran from cops and just killed people without reason. It was fun I must admit. This was the first game that I had gotten my hands on that was completely open world and those games are just absolute chaos. Next time you get a chance, go ahead and find a proper open world game and give it to a child and you see what happens (Minecraft should be screaming at you). I've practically grown up with the series, playing each game that has came out, but there was something that rang to me in the latest game Grand Theft Auto V.
Grand Theft Auto V is not even close to being the fifth installment of the GTA franchise, nor does it even follow familiar characters that have been all around the other games. What it does do is allude to different actions and characters that happened in the previous game and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which is always argued to be one of the best installments in the franchise at all. GTA: San Andreas also takes place in the same city of GTA V, Los Santos, or in other words, LA. You play as three characters throughout the story which all three have fallen under a financial "crises" in which they need money in a relatively quick amount of time. Each character having a unique and interesting point of view in life in general and how to do things makes character development and allowing for the player to connect to at least one of the main characters very easily. Heist after crime after heist after assination after heist the player is left with a game-changing choice that you can not go back from (if you weren't to load a previous save of course).
The ending goes a little something like this... Absolutely nothing gets better. They had gotten to the point where money wasn't a general need yet greed had consumed them and they often got wound up in more trouble trying to pursue that grand ol' cheddar rather than anything constructive at all in the first place. Our main character Michael still has a terrible family and a cheating wife, Trevor is still trailer park trash and doesn't change from his old ways of drugs and kicking biker gang ass; however, our final main character, Franklin, has the most dramatic change. He's moved out along the way through the story from the ghetto to the Hills. He's made a lot of big choices, but still end up with his usual bored self. Isolated now more than ever. The lesson here is that money isn't everything. No matter how much money you obtain, legally or illegally, you can't just use that brick of cash like it was an eraser. Your happiness with large amounts of money quickly fades and you're soon left exactly how you started. Broke. Maybe your wallet is large, but everything around you is worth so much more.
