{"id":57247,"date":"2022-08-26T17:11:48","date_gmt":"2022-08-26T17:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/the-saints-row-reboot-is-a-preposterously-silly-empowerment-fantasy\/"},"modified":"2022-08-26T17:11:48","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T17:11:48","slug":"the-saints-row-reboot-is-a-preposterously-silly-empowerment-fantasy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/the-saints-row-reboot-is-a-preposterously-silly-empowerment-fantasy\/","title":{"rendered":"The ‘Saints Row’ Reboot Is a Preposterously Silly Empowerment Fantasy"},"content":{"rendered":"
Typically I’d spend as little time as possible fussing with the character creator in a modern role-playing game. I played Cyberpunk 2077 <\/em>for more than 100 hours and can’t even remember how I styled V apart from selecting her gender. but historically Saints Row<\/em> swears by the comic relief in its customization, and I wanted to create a character who can hang. <\/p>\n the first few menus let you select from eight voice actors for your character; I went with Erica Lindbeck, who also plays the spunky sidekick Jessie Rasberry in Final Fantasy VII Remake<\/em>. This isn’t the most sophisticated character creator I’ve encountered in recent years, but it was good enough to let me design a protagonist with a decent resemblance to Amy Schumer. I gave her Ray-Bans at the start, and once I’d done enough gigs and looted the corpses of enough gangbangers to bankroll a shopping spree at the Buckaroo Leggin’s clothing store, I outfitted her with a tan leather duster, denim shorts, roper boots, a cowboy hat with floral embroidery, and a tacky turquoise bangle. Now dressed to kill, I’d stand outside a hostile establishment\u2014a gym run by a local gang, for instance\u2014and I’d whip out my smartphone and leave a two-star review of the place, thus immediately provoking a massive shootout with the staff and clientele in the parking lot. Los Panteros now live in fear of Amy Schumer.<\/p>\n this is Saints Row<\/em>a reboot of the open-world, third-person shooter series developed by the studio Volition since 2006. It’s long been positioned as the scrappy runner-up to Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto<\/em>a franchise that’s produced the second-best-selling video game of all time with its latest entry, Grand Theft Auto V<\/em>. Compared to the inner-city melodrama of Grand Theft Auto<\/em>, Saints Row<\/em> is a much sillier series, a parody of a parody of urban American culture. For example, 2013’s Saints Row IV<\/em> sees the player-character elected US president, with his fellow 3rd Street Saints gang members filling out the Cabinet, before fighting off an alien invasion from inside a computer simulation. With the reboot, Volition pledged to bring the series back down to Earth. The company also controversially teased a softer sense of humor; the first two games’ fast-food chain Freckle Bitch’s, with its half-naked mascot and naughty slogan (\u201cYou can’t beat our meat!\u201d), goes by FB’s in the new Saints Row<\/em>. No more pool noodle dildos! Still, Volition assured players that the essence of the originals would still remain. \u201cWe are not backing down on this,\u201d the company tweeted<\/a> in response to one fan in distress upon watching the announcement trailer.<\/p>\n Volition isn’t alone in its struggles to reconcile the competing sensibilities within its fan base. Rockstar, with its shock jock style in Grand Theft Auto<\/em> and its beleaguered workforce in the developer’s Manhattan headquarters, recently pledged to become a \u201ckinder, gentler\u201d company, as Bloomberg<\/em> described it, with less \u201cpunch[ing] down\u201d in the writing for the forthcoming Grand Theft Auto VI<\/em>. With its lower profile and earlier release date, Saints Row<\/em> is a canary in the culture war. <\/p>\n Amy’s no keyboard warrior, though she is the sort of 20-something caricature only a millennial or zoomer could love. She’s already called \u201cthe Boss\u201d in the character creator, but it’s a bit weird to call her \u201cthe Boss\u201d before she has indeed become the boss. So for now, we’ll keep calling her Amy. She lives in the dusty southwestern metropolis of Santo Ileso, with three roommates in a crummy walk-up. They’re each luckless young adults with massive student loan debt and conflicting allegiances to rival organizations. There’s the aforementioned Los Panteros, a street gang of beefy gearheads aligned with Amy’s roommate, Neenah; the Idols, a cult of anti-capitalist EDM weirdos, including Amy’s roommate, Kevin; and Amy’s own employer, Marshall Defense Industries, the high-tech megacorp that patrols the city with armored trucks and laser weapons. (The fourth roommate, Eli, is unaligned.) <\/p>\n Amy begins Saints Row<\/em> working for Marshall as a lowly recruit, raiding a local saloon to apprehend a mysterious, old-school gunslinger known as the Nahualli. the allegiances that pay the rent and utilities in this modest household quickly prove unsustainable; Amy, Neenah, and Kevin fall out with Marshall, Los Panteros, and the Idols, respectively. Disillusioned with the treacherous factions of Santo Ileso, Amy and her roommates resolve to launch a criminal empire of their own. They set up headquarters in a condemned church at the Old Town Shoreline. The Saints\u2014and the Boss\u2014are born.<\/p>\n Now you’re in business: recruiting goons, stockpiling weapons, stealing vehicles, and turning the church into party central. The map divides Santo Ileso into 15 districts, each contested by the major gangs. You give the Saints a foothold in Santo Ileso by seizing vacant lots, launching shady businesses\u2014a laundromat, an urgent care center, a food truck dispatch\u2014and fending off rival factions that could potentially cut into your profits. These criminal fronts are a tedious business. Each location saddles you with a checklist of several similar errands\u2014the laundromat requires you to sneak vehicles around police checkpoints and dispose of them in a variety of ways, for instance\u2014and even the checklists themselves, from business to business, feel a bit too similar. It’s work, all right. And you’re required to complete the objectives for at least a couple of businesses, since the expansion into new territory is pivotal to the Saints becoming the talk of the town and the subject of various retaliations in the main story. <\/p>\n