SF was a great surprise, I wasn't expecting much from that city, but I have now great memories from it. Unfortunatelly I didn't ride the cable car :/ But I spent almost a day at pier 39 and it was amazing! For sure I will retun someday.
The places I liked the most were Las Vegas and the Nevada desert <3 I wanna return there as soon as possible to visit the Grand Canyon and Valley of Fire.
I'd rank like this:
1. Vegas
2. SF
3. Los Angeles
Damn, shame you missed the cable car! I'm not surprised by your ranking because Vegas has a reputation for being crazy and fun, plus you probably really feel like you know it because the big things there are the casinos in the game. I haven't been to either the Grand Canyon or the Valley of Fire, but they're on my list, too. If you want some more California weirdness outside the cities, Yosemite is cool. Tahoe is also gorgeous and right on the edge the Great Basin; you can ski into spring usually and the mountain biking is good in the summer.
My rant on SF vs. LA:
SF is older than LA and it had a much more crazy history -- case in point, the financial district is on landfill made out of old sailing ships because it didn't have enough land to expand. It's also been a cultural center through its existence, from the gold rush to the beatniks, the hippies and counterculture, the LGBT pride movement, through to the birth of the transistor and the current tech boom. It doesn't hurt that it's also pretty there. It punches above its weight, and as a smaller city it's much easier to see the cool things.
LA only really became a thing in the '30s. It's where all that stuff goes to get watered down and commercialized, then sprawled out over a wasteland of traffic and tract homes with a blanket of smog on top. Its major industry is the production of facades -- from movies to the absurdity of having a "green city" of four million people in a desert. They do make good music and the food is great, though. I'm heavily biased as a NorCal resident, but I've never liked being down there for long and the people often feel fake. GTA V heavily accentuates those characteristics.
