As I wrote about in my review, Saints Row locks a lot of progress behind completing Venture Quests, which are like side quests except they cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to unlock. Some of these are Saints Row classics, like Insurance Fraud and Mayhem, while others are new activities that never quite recapture the old magic. One of these is a LARP quest, which also ties into the main story in an incredibly weird and rather pointless way. I think I've seen this film before, and I didn't like the ending.
Video games have leaned on LARPing for a long time. They are kindred spirits, after all. RPGs have long been one of gaming's most popular genres, and LARPing just takes the power fantasy from RPG games and makes you dress in silly clothes and act them out in real life. Video games and LARPing are tantamount to the same thing, save a few details, and yet video games seem obsessed with making LARPing a big punchline. Saints Row is the latest, and perhaps least funny, to try its hand.
For the record, I have never LARPed and likely never will. I think it’s a bit too nerdy even for my taste, and I have no desire to go to bat for it. Dressing up in cardboard and tinfoil and calling yourself Ye Olde Knight of Fezzlethwick is objectively a funny thing to do. But in the world of video games, laughing at LARPing feels a little pot-kettle when you're running around as Commander Blastobutt. Saints Row's LARP quest takes a tremendously long time and has no real jokes beyond 'isn't it funny that we're LARPing? Oh, we are such silly sausages, we are!'.
Borderlands leaned into LARPing, but despite sharing a similar sense of humour to Saints Row, played it off with much more authenticity. Its LARPing DLC (technically liveable tabletop, but same difference) was affectionate and seemed very in on the joke. It was so popular and well constructed that it even spawned its own spin-off in Tiny Tina's Wonderlands. Saints Row feels like it's telling a joke Borderlands has written, and is fumbling over the delivery. One joke - that invisibility potion is represented by folding your arms - shows the quest to be more of a homage than a parody, but the rest of it feels like the whole joke is on LARPing, and it's lazy.
Borderlands doesn't have the patent on LARP/tabletop quests, of course. Life is Strange: True Colors' best section is a LARP adventure, but it's completely different to what Borderlands did, and built around the narrative and joy in LARPery, not the combat inherent with fantasy roleplay. There's no narrative here, aside from right at the end when the Boss says they feel a sense of respect for the hardline cop who runs the Marshalls, which underlines how little Saints Row thinks about anything.
Saints Row, as is typical across the rest of the game, has tried nothing new. It has come for the king, and it has missed. The LARP mission only serves to remind me of other games that have done the same thing but better, and it's a strange choice as the centrepoint of the Venture Quest storyline which is all about building a business empire. It's slow, sloppy, and it makes no sense. Big ol' Saints No from me.