TheGTA 6trailer has dropped, and despite my recent wishes for the game to have been set in a time period a little removed from the modern day, I’m not going to sit here trying to suppress my hype sensors with bitterness over what could have been. The teaser was fantastic, deftly juxtaposing the drama of the two core characters with the absolute madness of the Floridian world around them.
There are alligators, there are old men in thongs sprinkling their lawns, there are parties and people twerking on top of cars, and there are livestream overlays and ‘Follow’ buttons capturing the sheer chaos of Vice City, reflecting the modern-world obsession to convert the eccentricities of the world into those sweet, sweet, Likes, Follows, and Clicks.
Honestly, it’s everything I despair about in the western society condensed into 90 seconds, but it’s also irresistible in its presentation and with Tom Petty singing ‘Love Is A Long Road’ over it.
At the core of everything, however, is a dual-protagonist pairing (that many of us have been expecting). What was a little less expected is that, in the sparing moments we see and hear them, they evoked more empathy and interest in me than any of GTA V’s three caricature anti-heroes. They’re depicted as a couple of intimate, serious, and badass people trying to find their way in a mad, mad world.
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We only get a few sightings of Lucia and her hitherto unnamed lover/partner-in-crime. First, it’s when Lucia is in prison, then we see them fleeing a crime scene while blaring cop cars speed the other way. After that is the real zinger; laid over with the couple carrying out robberies and wheeling off in a car, we get a voiceover of an exchange between Lucia and her partner as she straddles him on the bed in a motel room:
“The only way we’re gonna get through this is by sticking together, being a team. Trust?”
—Lucia and her partner, GTA 6
It’s super-sparing dialogue used to great effect, differentiating the characters from the world around them and actually making them relatable; it’s these two against the world. It’s a massive contrast to Michael’s vapid mid-life crisis monologue over the GTA V teaser, and actually takes me all the way back to the GTA IV teaser, which like this is just a couple of lines of dialogue late in the trailer that encapsulate the character of Niko, and key theme of the game, brilliantly:
“I’ve killed people, smuggled people, sold people. Perhaps here, things will be different.”
—Niko Bellic
And we all know how that turned out…
Niko Bellic was the last (and arguably only) serious GTA lead, whereas GTA V’s ‘unlikely trio’ tri-tagonists were largely played for laughs, forcing the characters into reductive roles that made them too much like the eccentric one-dimensional NPCs you meet throughout the world, rather than believable characters existing on its peripheries.
The GTA 6 trailer sets the leading couple apart from that. Those few words and shots tell us that for all the craziness of the world around them, there’s intimacy here, trust, maybe evenloveamidst all the criminal carnage, and that gives me a lot of hope that we’ll get a couple of anti-heroes worth caring about.
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