“Because the vanilla game is solved,” says Marco, a 22-year-old modder from Brazil who goes by the handle GroveSaiyan . “We have played the original story for 18 years. We know where the Ballas spawn. We know the date of the heist. The only way to feel that ‘new game’ rush again is to fly around the map at 500mph firing energy beams at police helicopters.”

Is it worth the 45-minute installation process? For the moment you fly over the desert in a yellow aura while Rock the Dragon plays from your phone speaker, watching a police car explode into a ball of green light? Absolutely.

It is a scene that exists somewhere in the fever dream of every early 2000s kid: CJ, the gangster from Grove Street, standing on top of Mount Chiliad. He isn’t holding a 9mm. Instead, his hair is spiky, gold, and defying gravity. Across from him, Big Smoke has inexplicably transformed into Perfect Cell.

“Most of the links are scams,” admits TechDroider , a YouTuber with 500k views on his DBZ mod tutorial. “They’ll make you download three survey apps before giving you a texture pack that just turns CJ’s shirt orange and calls it ‘Goku.’ The real mods are on Brazilian or Russian forums, behind captchas.” Let’s be honest about the experience. Running a high-poly Super Saiyan 4 model through the 2004-era renderware engine on a smartphone is a recipe for chaos.

It sounds like a joke. It plays like a glitch. And yet, it is one of the most technically impressive—and legally nebulous—experiments in mobile gaming today. Why would anyone want to turn Rockstar’s magnum opus of gangland Americana into a Shonen Jump battleground?

On a flagship phone (Say, a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2), the game runs at a locked 60 FPS. The auras look fluid. You can fly (via a jetpack model replaced with a Nimbus cloud) without crashing.

But installing these mods is not for the faint of heart.