Playing Saints Row: Decanonized

Comments · 2.2K

• TE

  @Tehsnakerer · 3 years ago · pinned

  Can you find the 5 Mr. Brazils?

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• BO

  @bobaloo20 · 8 months ago

  What's interesting to me is recent postmortems (especially the one from mrsaintsgodzilla21) show that all the horrible elements of the game you've highlighted was a true group effort from Volition. Whether it was their corporate overlords rejecting their more sensible pitches, the desperate rehire of old writers and refusing to let them work with the current writers, the current writers obsession with being relatable via 'student loans' and 'love of LARPing' (apparently the original concept was the boss would participate but with real weapons and massacre everyone, but the writers decided that they would make it an opportunity to spread the 'joy of LARPing'...), their best features being stripped down or removed completely because they overestimated the RAM situation on the current Xboxes, and even the Love Shack ending was abhorred by almost everyone at Volition but a producer insisted on the ending regardless, Saint's Row reboot was truly a sum of everyone's worst ideas.

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• PL

  @planescaped · 3 years ago (edited)

  &quot;It feels like gang war for kids&quot;<br><br>You know, that really does accurately sum up the tone and feel of Saints Row the new one. It really does feel like a brutal and violent gang war game made for tweens and children. Which is why it&apos;s such a tonal fucking mess. Like an R rated kids movie.

  982

• SU

  @supereldinho · 1 year ago

  That scene of the Saints hanging around in their apartment whilst casually talking about murdering people for money is quite literally the most jarring case of tonal whiplash I&apos;ve ever seen. Like, the characters are supposed to be down-on-their-luck college students and the whole thing is played off as some Big Bang Theory sketch, yet instead the characters come off as complete psychopaths with how detached they are from reality. <br>Like, previous SR games also had moments like these, such as those lovely sing-along sessions during car rides, but at least those were up-front about the fact the Saints were, you know, murderous criminals. <br>Characters don&apos;t need to be likeable for a plot to work, but you can&apos;t ask people to like said characters by just pretending they are.

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• MI

  @mike42192 · 3 years ago

  A kind of petty thing I noticed, in the beginning when the Boss works for Marshall, and it shows his locker with pictures of Eli, Kev, and Neenah. Why are they individual headshots of the three of them, and not like, one group photo of them? The kind of picture that real friends take, and frame. Instead the individual headshots of them makes it look like they are assassination targets.

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• V6

  @v6SK-IC5 · 1 year ago

  I feel like everyone overlooks how great of a guy Johnny is. Being involved in the gang life you’re around a lot of women. Johnny could have easily been a heartless bastard but right from the start his undying love for Ayesha is made clear; Helping her fake her death, blowing up the evil record label HQ, saving her sister. Even in the second game he goes to great lengths to respect the house they have together, he considers her feelings and isn’t too proud to clean when he makes a mess. Easily the best character in the entire franchise

  53

• QT

  @qty1315 · 3 years ago

  This game feels so condescending. It feels like a fifty-year-old guy lecturing the young people about how they&apos;ll love his new rock n roll album because he knows what the kids want, and his kids are telling him not to release the songs because they&apos;re embarrassing, and the kid who actually likes rock music is telling him to make the songs more like the classic rock bands like Led Zeppelin instead of Imagine Dragons.<br><br>Then, the dad releases his songs about fidget spinners to the world and he gets mocked for them.

  403

• SN

  @snowblind9551 · 3 years ago

  &quot;It&apos;s like a coffee shop AU for an IP that doesn&apos;t exist&quot; That&apos;s such a one-of-a-kind insult.

  604

• SK

  @skeletonwizard708 · 3 years ago (edited)

  There&apos;s a touch of comedy writing advice that isn&apos;t universal, but is a good fall back. The Leslie Neilson rule:<br><br>It&apos;s okay for the world, setting, and story to be a joke. But the sillier your world, the more seriously your characters need to take it. Comedy comes from contrast.

  1.3K

• O-

  @O-pinyin · 3 years ago

  &quot;There are vampires that can handle stakes better than this game, since they at least have the heart to go through with it.&quot; <br>Holy shit, you&apos;re a poet.

  1.3K

• AR

  @artificialcalories7019 · 3 years ago

  The Idols being seemingly written out of the story is one of the funniest things that came from this game. As if someone at Volition realized they had accidentally made an interesting commentary about the hypocrisy of upper class anarchists, and desperately tried to erase any mention of them from the rest of the plot in the middle of the game. It astounds me how this game, written to be squeaky-clean and politically correct, does something unintentionally based, catches itself too late into development, and just writes out one of the TWO rival gangs in the game to fix the problem.

  1.1K

• NE

  @nerdyvids1 · 3 years ago

  The &quot;Marshall now owns the Saints&quot; &nbsp;plot point is baffling to me from the outside. They&apos;re a criminal organization, not a tech startup that can get screwed over by paperwork. Like, if a group of people respond to the cops saying &quot;that&apos;s illegal you&apos;re coming with us&quot; by opening fire, how the fuck are legal threats supposed to have any kind of sway over them? I imagine the game has some explanation (maybe the &quot;gang&quot; is technically an LLC or a mercenary concern?), but the whole concept seems nonsensical.

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