Best part of GTA V for me was the social satire and Trevor being a total sociopath. The story isn’t anything special, the final mission hits the wrong story beats (it should have ended with the big shootout of government bureaucracy pileup), and the gameplay has some design mistakes (like business income being completely useless, and money in general being a non-issue after the first big heist). It had bugs that prevented story progress without workarounds that were never fixed. It got a lot of praise at the time for having crazy draw distances in an open world game while working on an XBox 360. That’s no longer a big deal.

I don’t think it deserved all the five-star reviews it got back then.

Conversely, if the social satire is on point and the character building is solid, then I’ll be happy.