Call me crazy but at least for my money it is. I understand most people prefer GTA V for obvious reasons, being the most recent one and therefore the most advanced of all, and beside it they often place San Andreas, which is quite often hailed as the GOAT by most fans. But at least for me, GTA V is kinda tainted by strange memories, and SA, though it gave me my share of fun, never quite did it for me. Maybe it has the most content, the bigger map, it has way more missions and has much more variety within them, and so on, maybe it even has the most complex story and characters, but for some reason, it just don't do it for me. And having said all that, as the title of this article implies, I find Liberty City Stories to be the true Rockstar ace. Now it could be that, as with most games and so on, nostalgia is playing a factor here, I won't deny that possibility. I still remember getting LCS sometime in september 2006, just at the end of summer, and then playing it all throughout my seventh grade. Good times... Nowadays, when I play it again, I find myself having proustian moments at every other turn. But regardless of my self-professed bias, there are still a couple of three things I wanted to talk about when it comes to the game, so I figured, hey, why not, you capiche?
After some unfortunate loading screen time, you start playing and, just before getting into the characters themselves, you'll find yourself on a tiny island called Portland, a very industrial place where it rains all the time, and when it doesn't rain, it's always cold and cloudy. Let me tell ya, if you prefer sunny Vice City you won't feel at home here, but if you do like the rain, as I do, then you'll greatly enjoy your stay. And those rare times when the sun does shine over Liberty City will be much more beautiful for precisely that reason. And I should still mention how the game itself is rather visually appealing, both the graphics of the overworld themselves as well as the vibrant and appealing colors embedded within the actual gameplay features. The whole thing is just pretty to look at. In a word, I would say I found my whole experience of LCS, perhaps because it was initially experienced within the tiny universe of a PSP, to be quite cozy.
This is why Staunton Island is my happy place
Then as you explore the city and perform a couple of missions you will be gradually introduced to Toni Cipriani, your hero... The trait I find most interesting about him is that, unlike other GTA protagonists like CJ or Franklin, who have this recurring theme of wanting to quit the life of crime but being slowly pushed towards it by the bad influences around them, Toni actually seems to relish in the crime, he's actually very willing to commit all sorts of atrocities, and he doesn't even attempt any excuses for his morals, or lack thereof, which actually makes it more fun, as well as somehow coherent, when you're causing chaos all over town. Indeed, Toni is a complete madman, the only man he truly respects is Salvatore Leone, the head of the family, a slightly paranoid and unintentionally hilarious mobster voiced by the late great Frank Vincent, not to mention how his character model was slightly shaped after a Don Corleone. On that note, if Sal is Don Corleone, then Toni is his Luca Brasi. And so throughout the game, you will have to guide Toni through his life of crime, always readily doing Sal's bidding in hopes of establishing him as the de facto mastermind behind all of Liberty City.
Throughout your journey you will meet a great cast of hilarious and insane characters. Vincenzo Cilli is the first one, a fellow mobster loyal to the family, a capo who shows Toni the ropes just after he returns to Liberty City. Vincenzo appears to be a man relishing in his life of crime as well, bossing his soldiers around from the comfort of his office down by the docks, indulging in drugs and multitasking sexual activities, indeed, he seems to appreciate the life of crime over anything else, seeing it in quite the typical sociopathic way of it being just business, except perhaps when it comes to his intense dislike for Toni. Then you meet JD O'Toole, a man who runs a brothel for the Sindacco crime family but who now hopes to change teams, feeding Toni useful information in between nervous and incoherent ramblings about all his anxieties and perversions. Eventually, Toni gets a call from his mother, always referred to as Ma, who keeps baiting her son from her balcony, since we actually never get to see the demented old bat, to commit all sorts of crimes, expertly manipulating her own son, and in fact being perhaps the only person who can stir in him any feelings besides anger. I almost wanna say her character is an overblown caricature of Livia Soprano, and if so, then it's very effective... Up next in Portland is Maria Latore. She's what you'd call Salvatore's girlfriend although they have a very complex and dysfunctional relationship. She's often partying, dating other guys, scoring drugs and constantly flirting with Toni, whom she at times incoherently claims to be in a relationship with, and other times just bosses him around as a lowly grunt.
After running errands for all of these people, Toni returns to Salvatore who is now being chased all around town and so he has to escape to Staunton Island. The second island of the game is thus unlocked, and you now get to meet a whole new cast of characters. But before that, you might wanna have a little look around... The first thing you might notice is that Staunton is quite different than Portland. First of all, if Portland's main business comes from the docks and the industry, Staunton's business is commerce, it's the tertiary sector all the way. Instead of highways, docks, factories, trucks, vans and so on, you now have retail store after store, all very high-end stuff, and the cars you find along the street are now much prettier and faster, which is great fun for the player. I think the three islands in this game reveal a distinct progression of class which I will briefly return to when I talk about the third and final island.
A black Cheetah and a yellow Banshee... Accept no substitutes
Anyway, eventually the electoral race is over and, sadly for Salvatore, Donald loses. That means O'Donovan, the new mayor, decides to put the screws to crime in Liberty City, and Salvatore is thus promptly arrested. So now Toni has to travel to Shoreside Vale, the third and last island on the map, and with it the social disparity becomes really apparent. Because while in Portland all we find are tiny, cramped apartments, apart from Sal's mansion, in Shoreside Vale we find the truly rich part of the city, full of large estates with swimming pools surrounded by fancy hedges, built so far away from the underworld that is the blue-collar industry of Portland. In fact, aside from the landscape itself, as well as the cars people drive, we notice that the pedestrians actually change into richer, well-dressed people, instead of the working class in Portland, of which Toni and the gang are sort of a part of, but they rise above it through violence and corruption.
In this last stretch of the game, Toni has to take out Sal's opponents in order to secure his release from prison. Part of it involves reuniting with a disgraced Donald who is hoping to make his explosive comeback. The player does just that, eliminating rival crime families, and then, after all that violence, the very last mission of the game begins in Salvatore's mansion in Portland. So after all those travels, it would seem the player has to go back to the humble beginnings of Portland so as to take over the entire city in a mission eloquently titled The Sicilian Gambit...
Apart from the story, the whole game is quite fun. I just feel right at home playing it, sort of in a nice, cozy way, and doing one hundred percent runs of the game during rainy, winter days is a pretty neat thing to do, perhaps better than in SA which, in my view, feels bloated. As a kid I painstakingly played the entirety of the story missions, naively failing most of them and getting quite frustrated, especially with Love on the Rocks, the mission that unlocks Shoreside Vale, to the point of having to wander around aimlessly, just collecting hidden packages, doing random side missions, and so on. I think I got up to seventy something percent, which I guess was pretty good considering how up until that point I mostly played GTA games by driving around aimlessly and doing random stuff. And of course, when you're driving around, there's always the radio to keep you company, which is fun in all games, but LCS takes the cake for me. Maybe Vice City or Vice City Stories have the best music overall, being set in the eighties and all, but the songs in LCS are great too, especially the smooth pop of Lips 106 and Flashback FM, especially with Reni's crazy ramblings, and I'd add that doing stunt jumps can be quite awesome with the opera of Double Clef FM blasting in your ears, and that doing boring taxi or trash dash missions is greatly enhanced by listening to the raving madness of LCFR, which is a great example of the humor in the game because in truth, it makes fun of pretty much everyone. The satire is sharp and over-the-top but we've been there before. In GTA games, it just has to be that way, no jokes can be left unsaid. The world is meant to be real in so many ways, and crazy in many others.
And while we're on the subject of random stuff, I suppose LCS doesn't allow swimming, doesn't allow flying, except with glitches I suppose, there's no respect system, no fast food restaurants, no endless clothing options, and the map is actually a little bit tiny. At least when I was a kid that's what my friends would bash about the game. But I dunno, I guess I enjoy the simplicity and I find that a lot of GTA games, by adding a ton of new features, don't necessarily make the game any more fun, just more diverse. And don't get me wrong, there's still a bunch of content here, especially considering it's a handheld game, but the features that it lacks are ones I personally don't really miss. And then with the sociopathy of Toni Cipriani, the whole cast of insane and funny characters, especially in the company of Frank Vincent's voice, is enough to make this my all time favorite GTA game, as well as my favorite PSP game of all time. And having now done two complete runs of it I figured I might as well write something about it.
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