This is one of the rare times where I kept with a game hoping for it to get better. I had issues with the first game, but I liked the concept, I liked the art direction - surely a sequel on a stronger console could refine the experience into something good or great. But my god, Gravity Rush 2 is so much worse! Gravity Rush 2 is so much more expensive looking I didn’t notice right away, but the physics are more borked than they were in the previous game. Each of the player character’s actions needed more time in development to be fun or useful. Instead, that needed money went into polishing a terrible, incomprehensible story, and all the cheap filler with which a Video Game Product gets stuffed to fill out menus and marketing materials.
I’m not cracking open a bottle of haterade for this game. I want to like it so bad. There is so much of this game that is done so well, (like the engrossing score and the ambient atmosphere of its elaborate floating cities), that I completely understand how one could love Gravity Rush 2 and not notice most of the complaints I have about its technical elements. The game’s world is rich for people who like to mill about in hub areas or take in-game selfies, and the game’s campaign is easy enough most people won’t notice a jank interaction or two. But any time the game required precise movements or otherwise challenged player ability, more flaws came to my attention. And for a game that bills itself on its brand of movement, movement being a weak link compounded my frustrations the more I played.
Fundamentally, this series only has vague game concepts with a “gravity” theme instead of a cohesive gameplay loop. It has transversal mechanics like a flight simulator, but combat like an action platformer, with a camera that properly serves neither. I forgave this disjointed feeling a bit in the first game since it was a new IP. Instead of forging a firm gameplay identity, Gravity Rush 2 doubles down on introducing separate abilities with negative synergy, and inadvertently breaks some of the elements that worked better in the first game.
Gravity Rush 2 has serious frame-pacing issues that frequently result in dropped inputs. This is rarely a problem when the game’s focus is the leisurely novelty of flight, but becomes more pronounced with combat. The game’s targeting system for combat, specifically for Kat’s flying gravity kicks, is terrible. By using the right stick and gyro controls, the player must manually move a reticle until the auto-targeting system picks a target. There is no way to make the camera track a target, or lock on to a single target among many - made more frustrating by the inconsistency with which the targeting reticle will oscillate between targets. Sometimes the target will change mid-attack to an unseeable object on the other side of a building, throwing off the player character’s flight trajectory and sending them hurtling into space. More than once when this happened, the camera glitched and was left behind, my missed target jeering in the center of my screen while Kat became a speck in the distance. And unfortunately, gravity kicks were not the only mechanic that caused this to happen.
The series’ substitute for a run, where Kat slides along any surface as if falling down an incline, is incredibly jittery in this game. Due to the sequel’s increased budget and stronger hardware, the more meticulously modeled environments contain more polygons upon which the game may calculate Kat’s sliding trajectory. As a result, small eaves and window insets can be enough to throw Kat off a building at a completely unforeseen angle - a scenario made more likely by the camera constantly bouncing as it tries to find the ever-shifting “ground”. There are so many answers to the problems that arise from this mechanic I don’t know how the game shipped as is;
- make the hitboxes uniform on buildings and other textures with multiple small jagged edges
- stop Kat from flying off into one direction if the vector makes too sharp an angle from the vector of her previous heading from the last .4 seconds
- stabilize the camera to not auto-adjust to her gravity angle while sliding
- have the option for gravity shifting to follow a building or object’s geometry Mario Galaxy-style so the player character can circumnavigate objects instead of always falling if they get too close to an edge
The lack of control was so bad I had an easier time navigating through some levels specifically asking me to use this power by… walking. I’m not a game developer, so I know something is wrong when I start brainstorming fixes for a basic movement mechanic.
For all of the flaws in the first Gravity Rush, it was firmly a game about movement. Reckless, crashy, simple movement, intermixed with unwieldy combat, but the focus was on moving through that game world in a unique, flight-adjacent way. It had some video-game-y elements I thought it was stronger without, only feeling natural once Kat’s skill trees were maxed out. Gravity Rush 2 seemed to half-agree with me, as Kat’s fall speed, stamina gauge, and attack strength were all made constants. But yet, Gravity Rush 2 also has different, more expensive looking, more useless skill trees, which is the least egregious symptom of its Video Game Product bloat.
This bloat is everywhere. In addition to the ignorable skill tree abilities, there are also farmable, craftable talismans with equally ignorable abilities. These talismans originate in a randomized dungeon with some sort of superfluous asynchronous online multiplayer element that has already gone offline. But the husk of that online service is everywhere, with the first option of the pause menu being a now useless “Announcements” tab instead of the map, skill tree, or task list. The pointlessness of it all would be inoffensive and annoying on its own, but unfortunately, this bloat seeps into the gameplay in the worst ways.
Because the number of unique levels in Gravity Rush 2 is still geared towards a shorter experience. Three large cities, five mining sites, and a few campaign mission exclusive levels. Plenty of variety for rivaling the content of the first game. However, completing everything Gravity Rush 2 has to offer takes twice as long as the first game. How is this accomplished, you might ask? With some of the most tedious Video Game Side Quest Bullshit I have ever experienced.
Video Game Side Quest Bullshit is easy to smell. Does the game normally let me do something cool, then ask me to stop doing that cool thing for “variety”? Does the genre of gameplay change to something completely unrelated to the core gameplay loop? Is that new gameplay genre, “walking up to NPCs and pressing a ‘talk’ button”? Does the NPC have a lore-building name like Rich Woman? Does she exist solely so you can take out her trash? Is your reward - nothing? A checkbox being checked? Even describing this phenomenon makes my eyes glaze over and drift away from the page.
Gravity Rush 2, by time spent, is as much a flight simulator / 3D action platformer hybrid as it is an eye-spy puzzle, a fetch-quest walking simulator, and/or stealth game. Gravity Rush the first had 20 challenge missions of various obstacle course races and combat trials. Gravity Rush 2 also has 20 challenge missions, but also has 49 side missions that often completely ignore or actively prohibit Kat’s gravity shifting powers - the whole point of the game. Worst of all, these gravity-power-less missions are intermingled in the main campaign’s missions! You never know before you start a mission whether you’ll be fighting an army, taking a selfie, or walking someone’s dog.
Oh my god the dog side mission. That might be the worst. An escort dog mission. Absolutely no use of gravity powers. Just. walking around a park, looking for a dog toy. With a dog who randomly wanders away and can’t hear you calling her to come back. and has a little animation that takes like ten seconds every time she wants to examine something. which is most likely a waste of time. and you can see it's a waste of time. it's not her toy. it’s a duck. but you still have to wait for her to sniff the duck, and for Kat to wonder if he found something, and then you can get the text box that it was just a duck. And because that text box is up, you can’t press the “call” button to stop the dog from going to investigate some other waste of time. This mission lasts over ten god damn minutes even if you already know where to go because you must watch the dog putz about the park X number of times before she’ll sniff the first NPC who will actually advance the quest. This sucks.
And that’s just the first part of the mission! Then you have to play fetch with the dog, and she has a happiness meter that goes down if you don’t throw the frisbee exactly where she wants it. Which highlights how much the “picking up objects with your local gravity field” still does not work as a gameplay concept, because objects you pick up will randomly orbit Kat in unpredictable ways. So when you press the “throw” button, you cannot predict where or when the object will leave its orbit, or what vector the game will choose for transitioning from your orbit towards your target. So sometimes you’ll have the frisbee throwing reticle perfectly lined up, and pressing the “throw” button will have it whiff right on the ground. Or you’ll over-correct and now it’ll bounce off a tree that was off-screen but still within Kat’s orbit radius. And each time a little girl will tell you you’re making the dog sad, and now you have to throw the frisbee even more to escape this dog park purgatory.
And oh no, that’s not even the only dog mission! There’s another where you have to walk behind a dog as it randomly sniffs garbage and other dogs until it leads you to a random part of the city, where you can then start the next part of the side mission’s fetch-quest chain. And there’s another mission where you have to catch a dog, but keeps getting away because it pees on the player character, who drops it so you have to chase it around three separate parks.
Those examples were side missions, completely optional, but are not that different from story missions where you are tasked with finding a specific NPC with minimal guidance and no waypoint markers. Gravity Rush has a chaotic camera system, as the player is constantly changing their perspective on what is “up” and “down”, which reorients automatically every time gravity powers are activated or disengaged, or any time Kat lands on a surface or careens off an enemy. The world design takes place in floating cities, so there is often no universal “ground” or “sky” distinction. As a result, waypoint markers are a necessity for navigating this 3D space. But this game is not immune to the experience I have where, after waypoint markers are introduced, my sense of curiosity and exploration for a game space is significantly reduced, and never rebounds when the markers are turned off. All that remains is lingering annoyance at their absence.
So when multiple missions in this game, both mandatory and otherwise, task me to look for NPCs so that NPC can give me a waypoint towards finding another NPC in a process that can go as many as five NPCs deep, my frustration boils. I know the game knows where the NPC is hiding, because waypoints are the default in this game. So turning off the waypoint can only be artificially wasting my time. Because you can’t use your gravity powers and look for NPCs at the same time - you are either flying too far away from them to make out details, or get too close and they’ll cower in fear of being flung into space. Looking for NPCs sucks in any and every game! And it super sucks in this one! And you have to do it so much! The function of these quests in other games is to teach the player level geography, if they serve a purpose at all. But in this game you can fly above and ignore urban planning and are blindly falling towards waypoints 80% of the time anyway, which makes these NPC tracking tasks always feel pointless!
Maybe if the story was worth a grain of salt, all this dialog and NPC hunting wouldn’t grate against my soul as much. I had high hopes for the start of this game, as the editing and pacing of the story segments had improved in communicating what the player character needed to do and why. But friend, let me tell you - for a brief time in 2019, I understood the plot and knew all the lore of both the Kingdom Hearts franchise and Death Stranding at the same time. So believe me when I say the story of this game makes no goddamn sense. The kindest thing I can say about Gravity Rush’s writing, as a series, is that at least it is bad in uniquely incomprehensible ways instead of being bad in anime ways.
Gravity Rush will not stop introducing new magical elements. I routinely felt like I was missing three chapter’s worth of context when characters would reveal new cutscene-only abilities, or reveal they had secret connections to ambiguous god characters, or reveal they had / did not have memories of another life that were displaced across time. I even watched a terrible anime special that was “supposed to bridge the gap between the two games,” and it only introduced MORE new characters and magical nonsense that never even appeared in the games.
To give an example, within the span of like three chapters, the game introduces a kabal of evil government officials who plan to kill the poors, a class war happens between the working class and the military, and a magical portal opens in the sky and a smoke monster eats the kabal of evil men. Then Kat gets thrown through another magical portal back to her original hometown, where she is also evicted by the police and learns an entire quarter of the city is filled with the discarded and subjugated homeless. But instead of joining up for another revolution of reformation, she immediately joins up with the police! After she just saw a military force try to kill her friends like two days ago! It was clear to me then the writing had zero idea what it was doing or what it was going for, and continued to confuse and offend me right up until the end.
Which, without spoilers, was one of the most soul-draining gauntlet of bosses I have ever fought that also felt incredibly easy. I died like 20 times because the camera was not designed to handle the quick movements of what the game was expecting of me, and I laughed out loud when I still died even after the game gave me its equivalent of the Golden Tanooki Leaf. It perfectly encapsulated every design, narrative, and mechanical flaw of the game in one all-encompassing experience, which in a way I guess is everything you could hope from a game’s finale. It only missed out on making me ask some NPCs for directions first.
In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. Gravity Rush 2 gets a C-, and at least one of its 1.5 stars is due to that sweet saxophone that plays where the rich assholes live.
I’m not cracking open a bottle of haterade for this game. I want to like it so bad. There is so much of this game that is done so well, (like the engrossing score and the ambient atmosphere of its elaborate floating cities), that I completely understand how one could love Gravity Rush 2 and not notice most of the complaints I have about its technical elements. The game’s world is rich for people who like to mill about in hub areas or take in-game selfies, and the game’s campaign is easy enough most people won’t notice a jank interaction or two. But any time the game required precise movements or otherwise challenged player ability, more flaws came to my attention. And for a game that bills itself on its brand of movement, movement being a weak link compounded my frustrations the more I played.
Fundamentally, this series only has vague game concepts with a “gravity” theme instead of a cohesive gameplay loop. It has transversal mechanics like a flight simulator, but combat like an action platformer, with a camera that properly serves neither. I forgave this disjointed feeling a bit in the first game since it was a new IP. Instead of forging a firm gameplay identity, Gravity Rush 2 doubles down on introducing separate abilities with negative synergy, and inadvertently breaks some of the elements that worked better in the first game.
Gravity Rush 2 has serious frame-pacing issues that frequently result in dropped inputs. This is rarely a problem when the game’s focus is the leisurely novelty of flight, but becomes more pronounced with combat. The game’s targeting system for combat, specifically for Kat’s flying gravity kicks, is terrible. By using the right stick and gyro controls, the player must manually move a reticle until the auto-targeting system picks a target. There is no way to make the camera track a target, or lock on to a single target among many - made more frustrating by the inconsistency with which the targeting reticle will oscillate between targets. Sometimes the target will change mid-attack to an unseeable object on the other side of a building, throwing off the player character’s flight trajectory and sending them hurtling into space. More than once when this happened, the camera glitched and was left behind, my missed target jeering in the center of my screen while Kat became a speck in the distance. And unfortunately, gravity kicks were not the only mechanic that caused this to happen.
The series’ substitute for a run, where Kat slides along any surface as if falling down an incline, is incredibly jittery in this game. Due to the sequel’s increased budget and stronger hardware, the more meticulously modeled environments contain more polygons upon which the game may calculate Kat’s sliding trajectory. As a result, small eaves and window insets can be enough to throw Kat off a building at a completely unforeseen angle - a scenario made more likely by the camera constantly bouncing as it tries to find the ever-shifting “ground”. There are so many answers to the problems that arise from this mechanic I don’t know how the game shipped as is;
- make the hitboxes uniform on buildings and other textures with multiple small jagged edges
- stop Kat from flying off into one direction if the vector makes too sharp an angle from the vector of her previous heading from the last .4 seconds
- stabilize the camera to not auto-adjust to her gravity angle while sliding
- have the option for gravity shifting to follow a building or object’s geometry Mario Galaxy-style so the player character can circumnavigate objects instead of always falling if they get too close to an edge
The lack of control was so bad I had an easier time navigating through some levels specifically asking me to use this power by… walking. I’m not a game developer, so I know something is wrong when I start brainstorming fixes for a basic movement mechanic.
For all of the flaws in the first Gravity Rush, it was firmly a game about movement. Reckless, crashy, simple movement, intermixed with unwieldy combat, but the focus was on moving through that game world in a unique, flight-adjacent way. It had some video-game-y elements I thought it was stronger without, only feeling natural once Kat’s skill trees were maxed out. Gravity Rush 2 seemed to half-agree with me, as Kat’s fall speed, stamina gauge, and attack strength were all made constants. But yet, Gravity Rush 2 also has different, more expensive looking, more useless skill trees, which is the least egregious symptom of its Video Game Product bloat.
This bloat is everywhere. In addition to the ignorable skill tree abilities, there are also farmable, craftable talismans with equally ignorable abilities. These talismans originate in a randomized dungeon with some sort of superfluous asynchronous online multiplayer element that has already gone offline. But the husk of that online service is everywhere, with the first option of the pause menu being a now useless “Announcements” tab instead of the map, skill tree, or task list. The pointlessness of it all would be inoffensive and annoying on its own, but unfortunately, this bloat seeps into the gameplay in the worst ways.
Because the number of unique levels in Gravity Rush 2 is still geared towards a shorter experience. Three large cities, five mining sites, and a few campaign mission exclusive levels. Plenty of variety for rivaling the content of the first game. However, completing everything Gravity Rush 2 has to offer takes twice as long as the first game. How is this accomplished, you might ask? With some of the most tedious Video Game Side Quest Bullshit I have ever experienced.
Video Game Side Quest Bullshit is easy to smell. Does the game normally let me do something cool, then ask me to stop doing that cool thing for “variety”? Does the genre of gameplay change to something completely unrelated to the core gameplay loop? Is that new gameplay genre, “walking up to NPCs and pressing a ‘talk’ button”? Does the NPC have a lore-building name like Rich Woman? Does she exist solely so you can take out her trash? Is your reward - nothing? A checkbox being checked? Even describing this phenomenon makes my eyes glaze over and drift away from the page.
Gravity Rush 2, by time spent, is as much a flight simulator / 3D action platformer hybrid as it is an eye-spy puzzle, a fetch-quest walking simulator, and/or stealth game. Gravity Rush the first had 20 challenge missions of various obstacle course races and combat trials. Gravity Rush 2 also has 20 challenge missions, but also has 49 side missions that often completely ignore or actively prohibit Kat’s gravity shifting powers - the whole point of the game. Worst of all, these gravity-power-less missions are intermingled in the main campaign’s missions! You never know before you start a mission whether you’ll be fighting an army, taking a selfie, or walking someone’s dog.
Oh my god the dog side mission. That might be the worst. An escort dog mission. Absolutely no use of gravity powers. Just. walking around a park, looking for a dog toy. With a dog who randomly wanders away and can’t hear you calling her to come back. and has a little animation that takes like ten seconds every time she wants to examine something. which is most likely a waste of time. and you can see it's a waste of time. it's not her toy. it’s a duck. but you still have to wait for her to sniff the duck, and for Kat to wonder if he found something, and then you can get the text box that it was just a duck. And because that text box is up, you can’t press the “call” button to stop the dog from going to investigate some other waste of time. This mission lasts over ten god damn minutes even if you already know where to go because you must watch the dog putz about the park X number of times before she’ll sniff the first NPC who will actually advance the quest. This sucks.
And that’s just the first part of the mission! Then you have to play fetch with the dog, and she has a happiness meter that goes down if you don’t throw the frisbee exactly where she wants it. Which highlights how much the “picking up objects with your local gravity field” still does not work as a gameplay concept, because objects you pick up will randomly orbit Kat in unpredictable ways. So when you press the “throw” button, you cannot predict where or when the object will leave its orbit, or what vector the game will choose for transitioning from your orbit towards your target. So sometimes you’ll have the frisbee throwing reticle perfectly lined up, and pressing the “throw” button will have it whiff right on the ground. Or you’ll over-correct and now it’ll bounce off a tree that was off-screen but still within Kat’s orbit radius. And each time a little girl will tell you you’re making the dog sad, and now you have to throw the frisbee even more to escape this dog park purgatory.
And oh no, that’s not even the only dog mission! There’s another where you have to walk behind a dog as it randomly sniffs garbage and other dogs until it leads you to a random part of the city, where you can then start the next part of the side mission’s fetch-quest chain. And there’s another mission where you have to catch a dog, but keeps getting away because it pees on the player character, who drops it so you have to chase it around three separate parks.
Those examples were side missions, completely optional, but are not that different from story missions where you are tasked with finding a specific NPC with minimal guidance and no waypoint markers. Gravity Rush has a chaotic camera system, as the player is constantly changing their perspective on what is “up” and “down”, which reorients automatically every time gravity powers are activated or disengaged, or any time Kat lands on a surface or careens off an enemy. The world design takes place in floating cities, so there is often no universal “ground” or “sky” distinction. As a result, waypoint markers are a necessity for navigating this 3D space. But this game is not immune to the experience I have where, after waypoint markers are introduced, my sense of curiosity and exploration for a game space is significantly reduced, and never rebounds when the markers are turned off. All that remains is lingering annoyance at their absence.
So when multiple missions in this game, both mandatory and otherwise, task me to look for NPCs so that NPC can give me a waypoint towards finding another NPC in a process that can go as many as five NPCs deep, my frustration boils. I know the game knows where the NPC is hiding, because waypoints are the default in this game. So turning off the waypoint can only be artificially wasting my time. Because you can’t use your gravity powers and look for NPCs at the same time - you are either flying too far away from them to make out details, or get too close and they’ll cower in fear of being flung into space. Looking for NPCs sucks in any and every game! And it super sucks in this one! And you have to do it so much! The function of these quests in other games is to teach the player level geography, if they serve a purpose at all. But in this game you can fly above and ignore urban planning and are blindly falling towards waypoints 80% of the time anyway, which makes these NPC tracking tasks always feel pointless!
Maybe if the story was worth a grain of salt, all this dialog and NPC hunting wouldn’t grate against my soul as much. I had high hopes for the start of this game, as the editing and pacing of the story segments had improved in communicating what the player character needed to do and why. But friend, let me tell you - for a brief time in 2019, I understood the plot and knew all the lore of both the Kingdom Hearts franchise and Death Stranding at the same time. So believe me when I say the story of this game makes no goddamn sense. The kindest thing I can say about Gravity Rush’s writing, as a series, is that at least it is bad in uniquely incomprehensible ways instead of being bad in anime ways.
Gravity Rush will not stop introducing new magical elements. I routinely felt like I was missing three chapter’s worth of context when characters would reveal new cutscene-only abilities, or reveal they had secret connections to ambiguous god characters, or reveal they had / did not have memories of another life that were displaced across time. I even watched a terrible anime special that was “supposed to bridge the gap between the two games,” and it only introduced MORE new characters and magical nonsense that never even appeared in the games.
To give an example, within the span of like three chapters, the game introduces a kabal of evil government officials who plan to kill the poors, a class war happens between the working class and the military, and a magical portal opens in the sky and a smoke monster eats the kabal of evil men. Then Kat gets thrown through another magical portal back to her original hometown, where she is also evicted by the police and learns an entire quarter of the city is filled with the discarded and subjugated homeless. But instead of joining up for another revolution of reformation, she immediately joins up with the police! After she just saw a military force try to kill her friends like two days ago! It was clear to me then the writing had zero idea what it was doing or what it was going for, and continued to confuse and offend me right up until the end.
Which, without spoilers, was one of the most soul-draining gauntlet of bosses I have ever fought that also felt incredibly easy. I died like 20 times because the camera was not designed to handle the quick movements of what the game was expecting of me, and I laughed out loud when I still died even after the game gave me its equivalent of the Golden Tanooki Leaf. It perfectly encapsulated every design, narrative, and mechanical flaw of the game in one all-encompassing experience, which in a way I guess is everything you could hope from a game’s finale. It only missed out on making me ask some NPCs for directions first.
In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game. Gravity Rush 2 gets a C-, and at least one of its 1.5 stars is due to that sweet saxophone that plays where the rich assholes live.
thephilosopher
10 months ago