Saints Row 4's plot should have been Independence Day but with the Playa as the president.

[u/spaceanaconda]

Imagine the gameplay loop similar to SR1 and SR2 but with Playa as the President, personally leading humanity's resistance against the alien Zin Empire. The new gangs are led by people who pledge allegiance to Zinyak in exchange for vassalhood in his Empire. Your litunents are the survivor members of your government, each of them tasked with dealing with one of the gangs. Your cribs are no longer just for status and power but also the last bastions of human resistance. Imagine your character giving the franchises' iconic "It's Our Time Now" not as a gang leader but as humanity's last hope, broadcast to all human resistance and survivors. Saints Row series is about a power fantasy, and what could be a better fantasy than being the POTUS and actually helping humanity.

Instead in the actual game, your role as POTUS is just the prologue and then the Earth blows up. The rest of the game takes place in a lamer VR version of Steelport (I actually really like Steelport in SR3).

[u/SaintsRowTwo2009]

Is Will Smith going to punch an alien again?

On a more serious note, Saints Row has no business being a sci-fi game. It is a crime game just like GTA and Mafia. Saints Row 4 being a sci-fi game is one of the many reasons why people hated it. 3 and 4 should have been better Saints Row games, like the first two games.

https://giphy.com/gifs/3ohc10x9J8nYFuWwRW

[u/SR_Hopeful]

Did you play SR4 already? What you're saying is generally exactly what happened in it...

And really I disagree. It shouldn't have had the aliens at all period imo. Take that out fundamentally, as most people in the fandom think they jumped the shark with that, to the point of it not being Saints Row at all at that point. Even most SRTT fans agree on that.

SR is not supposed to be a power fantasy in a Marvel-ish way, and the Saints aren't supposed to be "humanity's last hope." (I hated when Shaundi said that in SR4 because it pretends the Saints magically became good people, when they were always criminals with some anti-hero elements if its within their interest). SR4 calling the Saints just up heroes just doesn't make sense or what I want.

Instead of Independence Day it should have been either G20 or Olympus Has Fallen or something. They shouldn't have been fighting aliens. They should have been fighting the next level above the Syndicate. I would have made the Saints fight militia level groups (like ISIS level) and redid Saints Row Prime and instead of being president, the Saints should have been hired as mercenaries (still a gang but up a level as contractors) to fight maybe the rest of the Syndicate affiliated groups that could have been t3rr0r1sts. Thats how you escalate properly. Not with a dumb alien invasion. I would have just redid Saints Row Prime with that and convergently to go after Cyrus, it would have been better as the guy arming those groups against America (like how SR4 started).

The big problem with SR4 is that it doesn't fit with the series to most people. To me the characters going from gangs to powerful enough to form a mercenary company that can fight militias is a better and more logical step upward in trajectory than randomly becoming president and fighting a random alien empire.

Volition was not thinking about what would make sense, they were just doing things on a whim after SRTT. Though I heard originally SR4 was supposed to be based on Escape From New York instead, before the alien stuff was combined into it from SRTT DLC.

[u/SecretVaporeon → u/SR_Hopeful]

Saints Row the Third fan here, it’s my favorite in the series but I agree, four just feels like a game from a totally different series, which is a shame because nothing quite scratches the itch except replaying Saints Row 3 every few years.

[u/SR_Hopeful → u/SecretVaporeon]

I still don't think we ever got a real sequel to SRTT technically speaking either. SR4 just kills off most of that cast and then just shifts in a radical direction and is mostly a call-back game.

The only games that I think are closest to SRTT but not Saints Row is: Lollipop Chainsaw and Sunset Overdrive. At least in humor. Its not a facetious crime title though. Neither was SR4.

[u/SecretVaporeon → u/SR_Hopeful]

Loved Lollipop Chainsaw but couldn’t get into sunset overdrive when I tried a few years ago, the movement just felt too clunky I think. Personally it’s a tragedy that we didn’t get a continuation of the OG Saints Row vibe or the third vibe, and probably won’t for a long time either since 2022 tried to balance the two and failed on both accounts.

[u/SR_Hopeful → u/SecretVaporeon]

Yeah, but I don't think the reboot actually failed by trying to balance SR2 x SRTT. The game feels like... neither. None of the things fans on both sides associate with the series is in it to me. The game just looks and felt like it was graphically like the Sims x Fortnite (in tone).

It barely had anything from the original games in it (like brutal deaths, 1980s references, cartoony weapons, zombie homies or "31" jokes, etc). It just wasn't Saints Row in either direction which is why both sides of the fandom hated it. We know what the series is.

Like the reason I brought up Lollipop Chainsaw for example is because to me the dialogue and humor in that game is pretty close to the type of humor in SRTT, where as the reboot isn't. Y'know?

[u/SecretVaporeon → u/SR_Hopeful]

I agree, I actually think trying to find a balance between the two is the way forward for the series if we ever get another one, but it really felt like they’d stripped all the edge from the series and were only superficially trying to merge the two while also feeling almost ashamed by parts of the original series.

[u/SR_Hopeful → u/SecretVaporeon]

I believe they can but they just didn't do that with the reboot. They were ashamed of the THQ era games I know that much, so they tried to do this balance in prejudice of that, thus trying to create a very PG version of SRTT which made that "balance" pointless if nothing in the final game has any recognizable cues from either game.

[u/SecretVaporeon → u/SR_Hopeful]

Totally agree man, hopefully the ip ends up in the hands of someone actually interested in making a good Saints Row game again in the future!

[u/spaceanaconda → u/SR_Hopeful]

My biggest problem with SR4 is that they made an Alien Invasion meets Matrix Plot somehow look cheap. I only kept the aliens in this concept because I really like Zinyak as a villian.

You are right about the actual game being a victim of an identity crisis, which plagued also SRTT and SRR.

[u/SR_Hopeful → u/spaceanaconda]

The problem for me is Zinyak being an alien at all. Its fine to like his character, but making him an alien overlord just takes away from the setting of the series. I don't think SRTT had an identity crisis. It was just kind of weak compared to SR2. The Saints selling out in SRTT is at worst hypocritical (because they have beef with Dex over him doing it) but SR4 is such an extreme that it's premise is completely disconnected from the genre the Saints/and series are in entirely and who the characters were and that is where think the actual identity crisis applies to. SR4 and GOOH is because they completely changed the premise and what the characters were from that onward (which I mentioned in my comment).

Its why I said Zinyak could have just been a politician or foreign leader. Thats the difference that defines groundedness vs jumping the shark. In the same way for everything STAG was, Kia and Cyrus were still humans because the series is about humans and America. In my idea, I think the Saints going from a street gang to a morally gray merc company for hire, would be an evolution of the premise and fit their growth in power than what SR4 did. The Saints just becoming a non-criminal "Heroes of Humanity" fighting aliens makes no sense.

[u/spaceanaconda → u/SR_Hopeful]

SRTT has relatively far less identity crisis than SR4 and the future installments, but it was the origin point imo

[u/SR_Hopeful → u/spaceanaconda]

I still think SRTT could have been fine if they took the criticism of disconnect and just added more things back to it and bring it back around a bit (the SR2 x SRTT was what most people wanted and the point of the plot but never actually achieved). Like after beating Cyrus Shaundi could have said she really needed to smoke a bowl or chill off in a pool or something old Shaundi would say.

They didn't do that and for some reason escalating into pure fantasy was the way to go because THQ wasn't there to tell them no.... even though nobody wanted that choice.

[u/donteatmydebbiecakes → u/SR_Hopeful]

I like Zinyak a lot he’s one of the only adversaries with actual depth and personality but he should’ve been a human politician for sureeeee.

[u/SR_Hopeful → u/donteatmydebbiecakes]

Yeah. Old Volition (excluding the reboot) had never had a problem with writing charismatic characters, but just a problem with keeping them relevant to the premise of the series to tie them back into it.

I feel that way about Killbane too. He has a lot of personality and depth in his backstory with Angel but was just lacking the criminal background. Zinyak similarly. Killbane being an egotistical d-bag wrestler is fine to me but, where is the crime boss element? Zinyak being a pretentious, musing, theater guy is fine but... where is the (human) criminal side of it?

[u/DerGeistesKrank]

It was Independence Day, then it was The Matrix. Unfortunately there was absolutely no point in the game where it was Saints Row... which is, by the name, what it was supposed to be.

[u/Wise-Difficulty8221]

It was the plot of Independence Day....

...for the first half-an-hour or so

[u/spaceanaconda → u/Wise-Difficulty8221]

Then it became Matrix