GTA V – From Liberty City To Los Santos

Ah, Liberty City; a place where liberty really exists in its true dark meaning; chaotic, expressive, shameless, mesmerizing, and so much more. It’s not for no reason that GTA IV was widely regarded as one the greatest GTA games to date.

If anything could speak for its own brilliance, it was, well, everything! Liberty City really did speak for itself, seeming ordinary at first, but showing glimpses of darkness and uncontrolled liberation in every other corner.

You could be crossing a normal American-looking road, seeing other normal Americans behave in normal fashion; but they’d always be a hint of eeriness, a hint of a twist in the normality of what was in front of the eyes.

That is what Liberty City was; a self-expressing, un-controlled city of both madness and harmony. In simple terms, Liberty City was alive. It was so alive, that even till now it manages to  surprise with something previously unseen for those who dwell in it aimlessly as the much-loved Niko Bellic.

The fictional metropolis was the ideal correspondent to New York City, with the added enhancement of negativity heavily injected in the very fabrics of its existence. But that was all more than three years ago, and after a considerable silence, when our fore-minds forgot the bewitching aspects of Liberty City, leaving them to ponder in the back of our brains, GTA V precipitated, bringing all the content from the back-storage to the front, re-invigorating the nostalgia for experiencing something like Liberty City.

Little did I know that just over a minute’s video trailer would change the way people saw gaming, until GTA V’s Los Santos came in view. The trailer itself had the personality of Liberty City, subtly yet cleverly hinting the ways of life in what would otherwise seem like ordinary captures of various parts of an urban region.

One can only imagine if it’s the brilliant narration, the fantastic graphics, or the mesmerizing life-style, or the combination of these, that makes Los Santos seem at least as great as Liberty City in a minuscule trailer of less than two minutes. Perhaps Rockstar managed to evolve their brilliance further, gaining help from their own earlier ingenious designs.

This certainly adds one plausible possibility: Los Santos may not just be as great as Liberty City, it may go quite a few steps further, and hence quite appropriately be one of the all-time greatest game-worlds ever created.