Kaser Focus: Go marching in

If you don’t know this about me, I’m a huge fan of Saints Row. For a series that started out as a blatant Grand Theft Auto ripoff, it somehow grew beyond that (probably because, unlike GTA, the writers of Saints Row have watched things that aren’t Heat, The Godfather, and The Wire). Satire is a difficult literary convention at the best of times, especially in games, and Saints Row comes the closest to it out of any game series I’ve ever played.

When I heard they were rebooting the series, I was excited. And then the first trailer dropped, and it was… not great. It’s not that the trailer was bad, but it didn’t have the series trademark wit and silliness. It tried — sweet Christmas, it tried. But nothing about the weedy hipsters in the trailer recalled the Saints’ rascally energy. I did the only thing a fan could do: I wrote an essay about it, then withdrew into my burrow to hibernate.