It's a great franchise and it's over-rated :P The GTA's back in the PS2 days all deserved their high score's as all of them were fantastic, especially San Andreas. GTA4 was absolute shit and deserves a metascore in the 70's while GTA5 is a fantastic game but still over-rated, meta should be around 90, not 97.

Except GTA IV all GTA games are great.

Great.

This is like asking, "Is everything that is popular overrated.? Seriously

You have my attention.

Great and overrated. The best games in the series, 4 and 5 are great but still overrated. GTA3, Vice City, and San Andreas are meh to okay and overrated. The only good 2D GTA imo is Chinatown Wars, the original ones get too repetitive too quickly.

A lot of journalists and people throw praise specifically at the gameplay, which while GTA4 and GTA5 have good gameplay for a GTA game, a better shooting system, better missions, etc, if you compare them to other competent third person shooters, they're really not that great. If you want to play with manual aiming, it's not smooth at all, the only thing that's really good is the auto aim. What about the open world. That's good, right? I honestly don't find the open world to be very good in GTA. Great, there's a helicopter, you can fly around and do nothing in the air. Great, you can parachute, wow, so fun. The only thing good to mess around with the open world is to just blow stuff up and do the side stuff.

There are other open world games that have better gameplay and missions specifically. Storyline might not be as good as GTA4, GTA5, and Chinatown Wars, but the gameplay is a whole hell of a lot better.

The Saboteur had an extremely fluid third person shooting system, great snap to cover system. Lots of missions throughout the game that can be completed with run and gun or stealth. Decent story.  Large amount of side content after you finish the game.

Scarface the World is Yours uses the same auto aim mechanic that GTA4 does, except the game came out before GTA4 did. It also features a very fluid manual shooting mechanic and a meter that fills up the better you play allowing you to go into a rage mode for a short amount of time, infinite ammo, infinite health, and restores health each enemy you kill during that mode. Decent story, telling what happens if Tony was to survive the shootout, lose his fortune, then come back to get revenge.  Large amount of side content after finishing the game plus endless amount of random missions kind of like the turf wars on Episodes From Liberty City, plus the drug running.

Just Cause 2. The storyline on this game is pretty terrible, driving in vehicles is available, but the physics are bad. The missions are decent. While I wouldn't rate this as good as GTA4 and 5 when it comes to actually playing through the single player, that's it. When it comes to screwing around with in the game world, the reason given when GTA fans tell you that's why they purchase each and every game, Just Cause 2 is better in that aspect. Just cause has better shooting, a world that's several times larger and better crafted than all GTA titles combined, many different types of vehicles from cars, jets, boats, airplanes, helicopters, etc, a parachute, a grappling hook gun to use the parachute to travel around, or latch any two items in the game together, or pull yourself up to anywhere in the game, grenades, remote mines, rocket launcher, an upgrade shop, fast travel to anywhere on the massive map, etc. If you want to blow stuff up, the amount of non storyline content scattered throughout the game is massive. Here's a montage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsXmLGlxcfM  Also, if you have a PC, you can play in the Just Cause 2 world with friends through a mod.

Also, money is actually worth getting in the games listed above, as well as many other games.  Most GTA games, you pretty much forget about the money as it's almost worthless.  I think GTA5, Vice City Stories, and Chinatown Wars are the only games where having lots of money is good, because you can upgrade weapons, purchase homes or businesses, upgrade the businesses, etc. 

Great. Best video game series ever. I wouldn't be a gamer if it wasn't for GTA.

GTA III and IV were overrated for me, while GTA SA, Vice city, and V were great. Overall, GTA is a great series.

I'm sure its great on its own rights, i just don't find the world appealing to play in.

Best story and characters.

Nico was the only protagonist in the entire series you could really feel sympathy for, the rest are just assholes (especially Trevor, Franklin, and Michael from V). 

I love story and character driven games, so I loved GTA IV. GTA V and San Andreas may have been better gameplay wise, but the characters were unlikable and the story meh. The dark tone of IV was amazing.

Also, I hating having to sit through two characters yelling the n-word at each other 15 times per sentence trying to emulate ghetto hoods or something.

I thought GTA IV was terrible. Drive here, shoot that, drive all the way back. Get an call for a mission on the other side of town just before you reach mission you were driving too. More shooting with auto aim. I did have a lot of fun with it, but it's a waste to me to have a huge open world with such a linear story, and the side missions range from nothing special, to tedious. Every mission seems to play out the same, can't say much for story.

Hope they added a bit of gameplay variety, and innovation in GTA V, because I expected a lot from IV, seeing as it's an industry leading franchise. That was the first GTA I played, because before that I was Nintendo only, so can't comment on the others.

I don't want to complain as their was a lot of content, and detail, but at least now it has some competition with Watch Dogs, and Saint's Row.