The first Gravity Rush is a modest, basic little game carried entirely by two things: the strength of its player character, and the strength of its moveset.
To touch upon the latter first, Gravity Shifting is deceptively one of the most fun abilities a video game has ever offered a player. It doesn't seem like it at first, because it feels quite awkward. Jump into the air and hit the button to go Zero Gravity. Rotate your camera - either with the buttons or the Vita's build-in gyroscope - and hit the button again to shift gravity. You will now fall in the wrong direction. You may readjust if you'd like, but after a certain amount of time, you will start falling in the right direction.
It's weird and clumsy and will absolutely result in Kat zooming in weird directions or falling flat on her face. But eventually you realize, "Oh, wait! This is flight! It's purely physics-based flight!" And then you start to experiment with things like momentum and chaining Gravity Slides into Shifts, and you really start to see Hekseville as the playground it was designed to be. It helps also how forgiving the game is with missed targets and depleted meters, since it's usually pretty easy to loop back around and that meter recharges super quickly (in mid-air!), especially once you have a couple upgrades under your belt. Even if you happen to fall out of bounds, it's no big deal - Dusty will swoop in to bring Kat back into the game, no worse for wear.
I will say, Gravity Shifting definitely felt like it was missing something in this game. It gets a lot of mileage out of Shifting, Sliding, Kicking, and the Stasis Field, but there's a certain je ne sais quoi absent. This would be addressed in Gravity Rush 2, but here Kat's moveset is "only" great. Still one of those games where the mere act of moving around the world as the main character feels right.
Speaking of the main character, holy moly is Kat great. She's such an unabashedly wholesome and sweet (if a little self-centered) protagonist, something you don't expect on first blush with her character design. Her defining moment for me has always been "Home Sweet Home", an early mission where the amnesiac Kat decides her first order of business upon arriving in an unfamiliar city is to find a place to live. She ends up finding a disused sewage run-off pipe and is delighted, then flies around town finding garbage to decorate it. One montage later, the kid's actually set up a pretty sweet pad for herself, and you'll see her relaxing there every time you save or boot the game up.
Every story this game tells is filtered through the lens of this character, who doesn't seem to realize the gravity (heh) of most of the situations she ends up in. So while the plot goes in a lot of directions that, frankly, I can't keep up with, it's always told through the very grounded, simple-minded perspective of its main character. Helps make the whole thing more fun.
Like... she successfully convinces hardened gang members to stop being gang members by asking nicely. What more do you want from your lead?
I had the good fortune to play this game during the year I had free access to PlayStation Plus, and this ended up being one of my runaway favorites from that year. You're generally better off playing the PS4 port these days, but don't overlook this release, either.
To touch upon the latter first, Gravity Shifting is deceptively one of the most fun abilities a video game has ever offered a player. It doesn't seem like it at first, because it feels quite awkward. Jump into the air and hit the button to go Zero Gravity. Rotate your camera - either with the buttons or the Vita's build-in gyroscope - and hit the button again to shift gravity. You will now fall in the wrong direction. You may readjust if you'd like, but after a certain amount of time, you will start falling in the right direction.
It's weird and clumsy and will absolutely result in Kat zooming in weird directions or falling flat on her face. But eventually you realize, "Oh, wait! This is flight! It's purely physics-based flight!" And then you start to experiment with things like momentum and chaining Gravity Slides into Shifts, and you really start to see Hekseville as the playground it was designed to be. It helps also how forgiving the game is with missed targets and depleted meters, since it's usually pretty easy to loop back around and that meter recharges super quickly (in mid-air!), especially once you have a couple upgrades under your belt. Even if you happen to fall out of bounds, it's no big deal - Dusty will swoop in to bring Kat back into the game, no worse for wear.
I will say, Gravity Shifting definitely felt like it was missing something in this game. It gets a lot of mileage out of Shifting, Sliding, Kicking, and the Stasis Field, but there's a certain je ne sais quoi absent. This would be addressed in Gravity Rush 2, but here Kat's moveset is "only" great. Still one of those games where the mere act of moving around the world as the main character feels right.
Speaking of the main character, holy moly is Kat great. She's such an unabashedly wholesome and sweet (if a little self-centered) protagonist, something you don't expect on first blush with her character design. Her defining moment for me has always been "Home Sweet Home", an early mission where the amnesiac Kat decides her first order of business upon arriving in an unfamiliar city is to find a place to live. She ends up finding a disused sewage run-off pipe and is delighted, then flies around town finding garbage to decorate it. One montage later, the kid's actually set up a pretty sweet pad for herself, and you'll see her relaxing there every time you save or boot the game up.
Every story this game tells is filtered through the lens of this character, who doesn't seem to realize the gravity (heh) of most of the situations she ends up in. So while the plot goes in a lot of directions that, frankly, I can't keep up with, it's always told through the very grounded, simple-minded perspective of its main character. Helps make the whole thing more fun.
Like... she successfully convinces hardened gang members to stop being gang members by asking nicely. What more do you want from your lead?
I had the good fortune to play this game during the year I had free access to PlayStation Plus, and this ended up being one of my runaway favorites from that year. You're generally better off playing the PS4 port these days, but don't overlook this release, either.