[Mafia III: 2025 replay]

 

It’s been 9 years. 

Felt like a bad itch I just needed to scratch more than anything. I won’t be revisiting this again.


All the bugs since launch are not only still intact, but have seemingly gotten worse over time. 

The final product was always fundamentally broken, and I realize now I should’ve been more harsh when it came out. It was just bug after bug after bug this time around. To think I still waited 6 years for this miserable pile of shit.


 

Most, if not all of III’s issues are gameplay related, but the more I take in any fragment of the narrative, the more I realize how roughly they dropped the ball on what the story was meant to deliver.
 

I remember pre-launch actually being fascinated with the idea that the protagonist would have an “everlasting trial” on his head while you’re in the middle of taking down a mafia family.

Mafia III’s story was told and partially framed as a present day (2016) televised mob documentary. ‘Retelling’ a hybrid of both fictitious and drastic real world events (JFK death/Civil Rights Movement) within their own reality of 1968 Louisiana. 

Ultimately, this meant... well, this and that.

You spend a lot of time on this repetitive warpath. Something that comes up in the game a dozen times is the ability to spare or kill informants, and it plays absolutely no consequence to the main character other than sparing an informant gives you more money on rackets. The in-game cash is so arbitrary for something so empty that you might as well never give a shit about it at all. The main guy surely doesn’t.

This is one of those campaigns where even if you lean favorably towards it, it objectively doesn’t seem like it gets better overtime. And I mean this in the perspective of Lincoln vs Marcano. 

Maguire’s tidbits on Lincoln Clay seemed at the very least sophisticated in 2016, but you go back and it’s rather too primitive and play-safe on the fate of Lincoln Clay.

There’s only a few instances where you feel the doc segments truly break the mold and suggest something more feasible to the imagination. It’s one thing if a story like this does in fact not have a canon ending, but you also have to really sell your narrative as you go along if you truly want something like that to work. 
 

 

The best take away, and really an underrated aspect of the game’s acting would be Father James during the 2016 segments. That’s ballsy to say, considering he’s not a favorable character to most players.

I think if you’re judging James solely on the whole Lincoln Clay epic then yes, you will look at him poorly. What he says about war, anger, hatred; He just says a lot of things grounded in reality for someone to have lived that era. This game dumps like a hundred audible N-words into your eardrums, and James’ words almost 50 years after the main story’s events were the one thing to uplift that negativity in some fashion. The badass stunts Lincoln pulls are mainly for show and action story sake.

 

Some things about Mafia III’s commentary do stand out currently. The side quest to kill the KKK. Fast forward to now, games are getting shelved because developers and companies now skip around to appease racists.  

And it’s not like Mafia III was squeaky clean itself. Mafia III was written by a white man - - a white man’s vision. Some percentage of whites hated that black people “stole their franchise” and some percentage of whites were a bit too jolly about their history lesson. It’s kind of like the rough outcome of Hollywood’s various Harriet Tubman/slave films where the black audience itself isn’t particularly considered.

Mafia III presents an active ‘68 slave trade during that klan chapter. You free trafficking victim npcs as an additional sidebar. THAT was what I found more tasteless than anything else, shit like that you can’t just minimize as a fucking game objective to be forgotten about. Maybe I’ve become more prudish over the years, but when you do shit like that, you are more or less trivializing civil rights. You’re telling an “interactive” story but these were people’s lives, and they suffered.

You won’t, or shouldn’t hear any complaint about battling the klan because that’s a sustainable form of artistic and creative protest. In turn, there are also some things you just shouldn’t make popcorn fodder out of, and maybe read a book instead.

I also get mixed signals when they make it a point that the lead kills half the Haitians in less than an hour of playing the story. Vice City got backlash for less when it came to that. But communities stay divided like that, so it wasn’t so uncommon or out of the norm.

 

The return of Vito Scaletta, as well as giving Vito the city feels like the one redeemable gameplay feature long term.

I think about what feels most rewarding during the main course of Mafia III, and it’d be seeing Vito’s guys always roll in with those nice teal rides on properties you claimed to them.

When you give Vito each and every racket, and you just hear him become the most cheerful and positive associate over time. Even being a gentleman in rare occurrences when he’s thinking about how much it’ll piss off the other lieutenants that he’s getting the territory over them.

 

Lincoln Clay is given three lieutenants to help dismantle the Marcano Crime Family in New Bordeaux. Vito, Burke & Cassandra.

It’s weird because the launch trailer and marketing made it a selling point that you’d want to treat all lieutenants equally when the game itself doesn’t reflect that at all.

One tiff I have is that it’s rather contradictory for a game to battle racism, but also give you an “ally” who’s only ever racially degrading and calls the protagonist slurs while doing business. That’s Irish gang leader, Thomas Burke in a nutshell. 

It’s not that Burke can’t be an entertaining asshole when it counts. It’s the principle that this black character going on a revenge mission against a venomous white syndicate maybe shouldn’t have somebody on his payroll calling him the same shit.

They establish with Burke’s terminal cancer that he dies regardless of what you do, but you still have to question Lincoln’s self-respect if he chooses to keep Burke around.

The beginning of the game actually has a short doc segment for Thomas’ daughter Nicki, much older than her ‘68 counterpart. It was really her first introduction and she detests him well after death, blaming him for her brother’s killing. That scene alone makes you feel less bad about Burke being gone, and she’s really not wrong either.



Cassandra’s just horrible rep because her whole shtick is that she’s treacherous and untrustworthy. Her second-in-command Emanuel was a smuggler who fled Haiti, lost his wife... lost everything. You figure all that out in two shitty little side-jobs, but Emanuel is given more humanity and depth than the one from his gang who actually holds the spotlight. It’s discouraging. He evens strikes a relatable chord with Lincoln but the game tells you that it’s not important.


 

Back to Vito.

Something they promised of course was to deliver on the outcome of Mafia II’s cliffhanger.

And yeah, Joe Barbaro appears at the end of Mafia III as the long haul.

It’s conflicting because it’s purposely resolved anti-climatically, but you do a handful of quests dedicated to “closure on Joe” and it’s the same exhausted gameplay. Joe Barbaro as a character deserved hell of a lot more than awful stealth tactics on a bunch of nobody npcs. Even when the whole outcome of the side mission was Vito being fed false info.

They could’ve at least played more into it being a blatant fib on Vito. The 6th or 7th guy Vito sends you to kill says word-for-word “I should’ve never gotten roped into Leo Galante’s shit.” That would’ve been more fun to play into, giving Lincoln himself a reason to doubt the situation.

The mobsters for the Vito/Joe missions were all supposed to be from Chicago Outfit... but they all have the same native southern accents as everyone else in the game. It’s so uninspired.


When you give Vito everything in the city (and I did for this), Lincoln says to the exact effect that he needs Scaletta’s help smoothing things with the Commission back north in Empire Bay. This was foreshadowing the final mission where Lincoln meets Leo Galante and Joe Barbaro. Lincoln only knows Joe from Vito’s word, and not by appearance, so it’s something only the player can take in.

The scene with Leo & Joe in of itself goads you into the outcome of Lincoln leaving the city to Vito.

Lincoln Clay had successfully taken down the Marcano family as revenge, but he’s a lost soul by this point. He has a city at his fingertips, and the oldest figure of the more organized side of the mafia is discussing business partnership... but it’s not something in Lincoln’s actual repertoire. Lincoln only discovers this just in that moment after everyone’s dead.

It should’ve been obvious considering Lincoln never actually owned one fragment of the city. He gave the districts to contractors. He was a fresh Vietnam vet already fucked up enough from that war, who got tangled up in revenge and would cling toward many in the story because he felt no sense of belonging beneath it all.

Lincoln asks Galante what if he leaves it all behind because that’s really all he can do. That’s all his heart could be set on if he even has to ask. 

It works for Vito either way in that scenario. If Lincoln stays and he rules the city together with Vito, they have to give 20% of their proceeds to the Commission and that opens Scaletta up to getting back in with Galante.

Vito rules, Leo has no choice but to work with directly, and that brings Joe to Vito. That makes the past 15 years of the duo aging like shit suddenly worth it.



It’s so disappointing that Vito and really just the lieutenant-ownership system in general can be a sheer afterthought. Not one cutscene was Sal Marcano pissed that Vito Scaletta specifically took over downtown or the French Ward or whatever. They spent hours building up why Lincoln has to team up with those lieutenants and they only had the budget to abruptly address it in small wrap-up endings.

The irony isn’t lost that Lincoln would essentially be giving the keys directly back to a thriving Italian mafia, and Maguire doesn’t even scold Lincoln for that at all. “Las Vegas of The South” is all they can say on that. They just fold their arms and say Vito’s doing a fantastic job running everything which hey, can’t complain.

[Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories - 20th Anniversary]

 

I’ve been playing through the story again every day since the night of the actual anniversary, and for some reason this is the most fun with LCS I’ve had it feels like.

I’ve had the original PSP copy as well as the PlayStation 2 port for years. I’m obviously playing the port since it handles better, but to think this was the first big GTA game you could have handheld on the go. We’ve gotten so spoiled with technology since.



When I talked about Vice City Stories last year I kinda went off about how VCS underwhelmed with the plot.

This one and The Lost And Damned are the GTA campaigns that people don’t talk about as favorably. And for valid points.


I’m guess I’m more accepting of what this is while also acknowledging the flaws.

They did a good job not only making a version of III that plays better (GTA III with San Andreas engine) but giving you a prequel to III that decently maps things out and adding previous context from the last of the trilogy.

It doesn’t have all the features of San Andreas and quite frankly never needed to. Just an okay segway into the near end of the 3D era when GTA IV was the one to make a Liberty City the likes of which outclassed this.


With the protagonists of the Stories titles, Toni Cipriani gets more gripe than Vic Vance for being a yes-man with a gun.

I think what they get wrong with Toni was that Cipriani was a mere parody character in III, played by the late Michael Madsen. When you have a character who was a deliberate lampoon from the start, you’re just not going to make a believable badass protagonist out of that with any merit.

But I go back and I see that LCS itself doesn’t even treat Toni that seriously. LCS was really going with the flow of the shock humor from GTA San Andreas, and this rendition of Toni somehow blended into that well after having the infinitely more popular Carl Johnson.


When they made Vic they just retconned a minor dead guy into something very different personality wise. 

With Stories, the sidekick characters are more developed than the protagonists, and it’s a no brainer that Salvatore Leone would be the highlight of this.

It’s great too because Frank Vincent had then started appearing in Sopranos. You also can’t thank Vincent enough for jumping directly into LCS after III & San Andreas. Michael Madsen in contrast did not come back to voice Toni.
 

They show how Luigi’s Sex Club 7 came to be. The Leone club had previously been Sindacco owned with a completely different name. I think the change of that building over the course of the plot would lend itself later to how you’d build your empire in Vice City Stories. The change of assets was actually pretty cool for this.

Despite LCS not having the same gang warfare layout as San Andreas, it still continues on that idea of territory ownership with the Leones even if you can’t personally control it.

Toni tells Sal that they’re losing Hepburn Heights to Diablos and... no shit. That’s what happens in GTA III. You can’t rule *everything* like CJ did as III’s events are the plot armor, but GTA III started with establishing Leones still had a good advantage in Liberty City.


The LC gangs also look sooooo much cooler than they did before. The Triads in III wore their fish factory gear and talked in the Mickey Rooney voices while the Triads here are more relative to San Andreas. The Yardies also look the most badass, even sporting K-Jah directly!

Never too fond of who replaced Kyle MacLachlan for Donald Love but eh, can’t win ‘em all.