let me tell you about the first experience I ever had with saints row

I didn’t have my feet in the ground with where they should be when it came to the media choices of something like Grand Theft Auto. The boat had missed me by a country mile that started with a post on a game criticism forum talking shit about the open world way those games functions. Grant Theft Auto I had in experience taken from someone elses life, were games where defaulting to the story, for the most part you did an exercise of the same shit over and over again. Different vehicles, guns, but the ways of interacting with the world could all be done from the moment you launched into it. It was up to the player to build their own relationship with San Andreas or Vice City, a relationship textured by radio channels and minigames as much as it was the things Tommy Vercetti actually got up to.

My first experience with Saints Row came through the third game on Playstation. One of those summers at twenty that gets spent with a few weeks between jobs that are going to pay you just enough to make it from one rent payment to the next. Nothing to do, no food in the fridge, the last couple of dollars go to a case of beer: fuck, I didn’t even know MF DOOM was a thing at the time. One beer left, and bad financial investments from roommates meant a PS3 sat on the carpet floor in the living room.

Saints Row 3 is a game about Loud People. When you live with Loud People, it can’t help but endear part of itself to your memory. I think of others I knew online at the time, commenting that the second they climbed in the car with Pierce and the exposition of character relationships gets revealed, of all things, to a session of car karaoke to Sublimes What I Got. The Saints, for the last time in the franchise, still centered in the world of crime drama, were at their peak. There might not be a Final Fantasy XV without Saints Row 3 for all the time you spend driving around in one car with friends.

Let me be real and unequivocally state: Saints Row III is a game where you can do everything in the game in the first ten minutes, and it rollercoasters you from one place to the next with a soundtrack for people that fondly remember highschool but have no wish to go back, an aspiration of really fucking around with your friends if you had the money and bullets necessary to take what’s yours. A fantasy that lives in the head of a person writing rap in their liner notes on a school desk, and letting those words about the money they don’t yet have come out in front of a microphone. It’s all of the things it was in the tabloids: dildo bats, dubstep guns, licensed soundtracks.

Hours vanished on that floor, then that couch that we found at a nearby mission. We got a fucking couch: it was the single piece of furniture we owned in the apartment that wasn’t a mattress on the floor. I would no longer come home to my roommate square legged on the kitchen countertop blasting emo and staring at a half empty-bottle of Jack Daniels their fingers curled around. We didn’t talk much about the world outside of the apartment, we went to shows and struggled to keep our rent paid on salaries that had smarter people than us selling drugs on the side. We were legit; violence was something that we did when we were kids. Paying the bills and keeping out of trouble were the main points of community: any behavior from people who had our back was excuseable as long as something called drama stayed out of our lives.

That couch, the lamp afterwards, a giant pitch black tapestry of Ozzy Osbourne’s head hung right above the doorway. Every house got pieced together the same, starting from a blank slate with no money in our bank accounts. Sometimes we sold videogames, or our hard-earned musical equipment we’d have to get back from pawn shops later. A roommate would disappear for a month off to california, and end up back on the doorstep with enough money to pitch in for rent a month after that. Maybe, the createst crime you can invent at that kind of time is thinking the world owes you more. Fifteen dollar shows, fistfights with show security. A little too angry for the city to take us seriously, a little too poor for the small town to not see us as the losers we were.

Saints Row, released by Volition Studios, now closed by Embracer Group a multi-billion dollar shareholder that speculated that games will always offer a return, and faced their losses by cutting the employment of thousands of people year after year, proudly opens with a credit before you even see the former companies name that it’s Brought To You By Embracer Group: the first sneer of a half finished game with a desolate open world that wants to tell a different story than the one written. Irregularly review-bombed by conservative gamers on Metracritic who insist it went Woke because a black character wears a bowtie, or someone has an undercut, or a woman doesn’t have makeup on, or: actually, the real reason: everyone looks like a Fortnite skin of a raver, and we all know Fortnite isn’t a real game. There’s not even a way to gay or straight hook-up with your roommates, for a game that indulges in camp in so many ways.

Saints Row isn’t very good: i’ll save the time of explaining why here by commenting that it’s a game out of lock-step with itself at every turn. It is hilariously decadent in the way of gun-feeling and pistol emotions. There is only one way to satisfyingly snap to the head of the closest cop, gang member, civilian or multi-national mercenary corporations and make their head explode in a cone shaped shower of something textured somewhat like a ketchup fountain and hollywood blood. Every time you do this it feels great: there are at least five different voice actors for your Boss (what saints row calls the player character((though, not as smart as the first game referring to you by dialogue as “playa” constantly))) who all have individual lines about how good it feels to murder someone. At various points in the game, she will refer to herself as a “walking murder party”. She’s the loudest, and by any account, most fun person of the central cast to be around and you get to be her for the whole game.

Set in a city-icon that’s somewhat Phoenix, Arizona, somewhat Bisbee, Arizona and Tucson, Arizona, and mostly all of Las Vegas, Nevada, it’s an open world game with resplendent badlands, lowrise neighborhoods of southwestern style buildings covered in fading and sun-bleached graffiti. At times, the best of them at night, it’s like there was a city here at one point. A real breathing place: a place the story starts with the player character getting fired in. The first place Saints Row steps out of pace with the game it most wants to have a relationship with: Saints Row is in the very opening mission.

Let me tell you something about every city that will make a conservative person or a Concerned Liberal Type, who doesn’t mind young people but wishes they didn’t have as many face tattoos as they do or wear their pants so low, absolutely shit themselves. There’s no more unsafe cities to tourists and instagrammers, every city putting so much money into chambers of commerce that highlight brick-laden arts districts, and put so much pressure on the poor people that DO want to rob you that they’ll be so cop murdered for acting out of suspicion or desperation that in most cases they cross the street to avoid you on your vacation with your lovely wife and two kids that open carry in public.

For the working poor who live on the street (and even the most unhoused, unemployed person should still be considered working: working to fucking stay alive, working to not be murdered) cities still stay dangerous. Rife with people ready to exploit them, beat them, or rife with opportunities to get out through what the papers call “gang violence” but still spare a teardrop emoji and a new york times op ed if you’re white to call it “organized crime” and long for better days. Saints Row, the original, the OG, opens with no bullets fired by the player. A multi sided scuffle turns into knives, and then it turns into drugs. The Playa, walking down the streets, is organized collateral. An anonymous face, in a bad situation. Poor in a conflict where they don’t have a preference for any side. Then, there come The Third Street Saints. An organized collective seeking to end the constant turf wars plaguing the city, by taking over from the bottom up. Michael Clarke Duncan and Keith David play opposite each other with our Playa caught in an escalating gang war. Saints Row indulges in slapstick side-missions but keeps its tone consistent throughought. A soundtrack of underground and encompassing New York hip hop and more stretching back to the 80’s, cut with churning emo guitar rock and screamed out alternative. Music for the broke, angry, has a gun or wants one and wants to know who has their back.

it’s Saints Row (2022) though, and we’re a walking murder party. An empty city rife with activities that mostly get in the way, trapped in a plot where the other gangs are bumped off early to make room for the real badguys. The vicious Paramilitary Corporation that is doing something like “killing gang members” but gestured towards “securing the southwestern border for American Conservatives” complete with an all white cowboy theme, our game opens with two failed missions where our Boss is a little too good at what they do and upset the natural, corporate balance. Brought to you by the Embracer Group.

The last joke about being broke capital B in this world is about how much a waffle maker works, and using our last waffle on it a handful of cutscenes in. There’s no greater overarching goal anchoring us to the world: broke, with 32,000 dollars in our bank account from the activities we’ve been dicking around doing. Huddled around an empty dark apartment, the central cast finally goes “Why the hell don’t we do this for ourselves?” but we’re not out to make a criminal empire: we’re out to shut down the players former employers soon enough, sieging corporate RN&D offices and cubicles, gunning down the employees who aren’t smart enough to point guns at our faces like the ones in body armor. The soundtrack reels into hype, kicking off bars of suspiciously similar songs that earlier games in the series could afford to license.

Like being insulted with a promise that couldn’t be met: Saint’s Row. There might never be another series like it, and it’s funny to end the game with gunning down first the CEO of the company that employs the player, and then the person who sells you out only because they want what you’ve had.

It’s not there though, and the music that spurs on this revolution wouldn’t be familiar to anyone who so much as uses Spotify let alone Bandcamp today: a curiously small collection of the cheapest licensed music that can be found, with only one Eric B and Rakim song for the oldheads in the audience. Anonymous synth buttrock, the broken heart strings and guitar strings of traditional mariachi music nonwithstanding. What’s the use of wanting to take on the world if you can’t even sing along to it? What’s the use of a car exploding if it doesn’t have a good goddamned song playing over it?

At some point the game kicked me out of a mission onto a rooftop. Overlooking sprawling canyons and hearing echoes of cop sirens and seeing only vague gestures towards there ever being life here. I check my inventory and it’s been emptied out. No guns, no ammo. The party is over.