Highlights
- The Grand Theft Auto series has a generally comical and light-hearted tone, but some games, like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, delve into darker and heavier material, adding depth to the story.
- Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Grand Theft Auto 3 explored more serious themes, resembling shows like Game of Thrones , with betrayals, intrigue, and a feeling of unease.
- Grand Theft Auto 4 and its DLC, The Lost and Damned , delved into the darkest moments of the franchise, exploring intense crimes like murder and human trafficking, and telling tragic stories of betrayal and the downfall of a motorcycle gang.
The Grand Theft Auto series is filled with crime, betrayal, and murder, and yet a lot of the games are surprisingly light-hearted throughout. The general tone of the Grand Theft Auto franchise has almost always been quite comical and fun, blending the crime worlds of more serious gangster-based properties with stylish characters and slick worlds.
The action-comedy style of the games is filled with a tongue-in-cheek style and with some hilarious characters that are admirable and have helped the Grand Theft Auto games become some of the biggest and most infamous video games in history. Despite this, some GTA games feature a darker tone that lasts throughout.
5 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is generally considered one of the best games in history, having completely changed the game for the franchise when it was originally released. However, despite still having a tongue-in-cheek style throughout much of the game’s runtime, San Andreas has some surprisingly heavy material that appears and takes center stage at times in a way that future GTA entries could learn from.
Examples of this include the beginning, since CJ originally returns home because of his mother’s death, and how much of the plot in the game and what was happening around San Andreas was built on real ideas of what was happening around areas like Los Angeles at that time, including the 1992 riots, the huge drug problems in the area throughout the 90s and the street wars between various gangs as well. All of this made for an incredible story in the game, but shocked some players who knew a lot about the region at that time.
4 Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories
Liberty City Stories was the first entry in the GTA franchise made for a handheld console, the primary version being released on the PSP while a port for the PS2 was also made. A prequel to GTA 3, Liberty City Stories followed Tony Cipriani as he rose through the ranks of the Leone Crime Family. This shady entry in the franchise was filled with betrayals and proper mob-related crime.
While all GTA entries deal with crime, the general feeling of unease that all the characters are experiencing as hits are put out on many different people makes Liberty City Stories resemble something more like Game of Thrones than the more comically-focused entries that came later in the series. While there is plenty of intrigue and the story is fascinating, Liberty City was the kind of setting for a quieter, more danger-filled entry to test the waters on a much more serious GTA game for the future.
3 Grand Theft Auto 3
The original story set in Liberty City, Grand Theft Auto 3 was the real beginning of the GTA franchise as it is known today because it was the first 3D game where players could explore at their own pace in an open world. The protagonist, despite being a silent one, went through a lot of despair throughout the game, beginning with his girlfriend Catalina betraying him and leaving him for dead in the opening minutes.
Despite Grand Theft Auto 3shaking up the franchise and becoming the first truly legendary game in the series, it was a dark one with a lot of intrigue and scheming going on in the background. Starting gang wars and spreading the drug trade across Liberty City showed that the GTA franchise wasn’t yet at the point it had reached by the fifth entry when much of the criminal side of the franchise was toned down so that the parodying of life and the rich could be pushed further to the forefront. Nevertheless, GTA 3 was a phenomenal game that remains a great one to revisit today.
2 Grand Theft Auto 4
Grand Theft Auto 4 was also set in Liberty City, a location that seemed to be much more conducive to serious, dark-natured games than San Andreas. The fourth entry followed Niko Bellic, who is one of the darkest Grand Theft Auto characters in the history of the franchise. His dark past, having taken part in Eastern-European wars which involved him murdering innocent civilians, arrives in Liberty City and begins working as a criminal immediately.
Throughout the game, some of the most serious crimes such as brutal murder and human trafficking are explored, making Grand Theft Auto 4 the darkest mainline entry by a long way as even other games in the franchise didn’t dare to touch upon such subjects. Niko spends a great deal of the game working for local drug warlords, allowing them to continue and expand their operations which were designed to spread only pain and suffering, leaving a much more bitter taste in the mouths of many players as they engaged in the brutal activities than most of the other franchise entries.
1 Grand Theft Auto 4: The Lost And Damned
However, perhaps the darkest moments in the whole Grand Theft Auto franchise came in a DLC for Grand Theft Auto 4. The Lost and Damned focused on Johnny Klebitz and the Lost MC, a motorcycle gang that Johnny is desperate to keep going over events that run concurrently with GTA 4’s main story. The tragic story sees old friends betraying each other constantly, as the gang chapter falls apart.
The Lost and Damned has been called by many fans one of the best DLCs in existence in any game, and a huge part of what made it successful was the dark way it was handled, making for a much more mature story than gamers expected, perhaps even inspiring later Rockstar Games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 with the way the club fell apart to in-fighting and eventually the last members burned down their clubhouse and walked away, leaving nothing in a dramatic final mission.