So for my 1000th review, I chose what I consider to be the most important brazilian game of all time. The mere existence of Unsighted is a miracle in itself, being made by 2 latinas trans women with a short budget is nothing short of impressive, considering it’s quality not only in the gameplay but also in the sprite artwork, music, and so on. How did possibly the greatest achievement in brazilian game developing history become so unknown nationally? To properly answer this question, we first have to analyze the gaming scene in Brazil.

Despite being the 3rd largest country in number of active "gamers", Brazil has a surprisingly small game development scene due to a lot of harsh factors. Hardware and Software prices tend to be too high, the government gives very little incentive in developing technological careers, and both of these have only gotten worse in the last few years by the dystopian combination that is Bolsonaro, crypto bros and Covid-19 working together. Also worth mentioning, is that a lot of programmers and artists who are into game design, straight up just leave the country whenever possible, seeking better life conditions.

Currently the most noticeable games in the minds of the average brazilian gamer, are not the likes of Dandara, Chroma Squad, Momodora or Sludge Life, who even if they don’t make your cup of tea, had a lot of effort and love put into it. The most usual names you’ll hear are the cheap ones that were made to be bad, hoping that you either play them or buy them for your friends as a joke. Kandidatos, Ultra Miner Adventures, Zueirama, and the ever infamous Bad Rats, are probably the ones that get the most recognition.

The ironic praise and fetishization of trashy national media has always existed throughout the entire world, however, I think that the extent in which it happens in Brazil is absurd, especially considering it started off as a counter movement in direct response to the enforced nationalism by government endorsed media during the dictatorship years and the “Brazil: Love it or Leave it” mentality. For decades, our most watched movie genre were softcore porn movies called “pornochanchadas”, that benefited the state by suppressing other types of movies that didn't support the regime, in perhaps the weirdest panis et circenses case I can think of.

The good neighbor policy, enforced by the american government at the time, only directly affected Rio and São Paulo as they were portrayed as the definitive tropical paradise for other first world nations to exploit. Culturally wise, the majority of the country was abandoned, which meant that the imposed nationalism had to come from within every single state, creating a sense of animosity from others, as they were perceived more as enemies than neighbors. Xenophobia became ingrained in our culture, which meant that the idea of being born in a specific state became more important than being born in Brazil itself. Mocking the idea of being brazilian while hyper valorizing your own cities had unfortunate lasting effects even after the dictatorship was dissolved.

Although the respect for other states has gotten better in the last 10 years, the disdain for the government has only ever increased as we’re facing our worst political decade yet, ranging from multiple extensive corruption scandals to a forced government takeover publicized as a democratic impeachment. However, what I think is the series of events that perfectly encapsulates our political scene, happened when our current president, Jair Bolsonaro, denied covid for 2 months after it was declared a worldwide pandemic, only to accept it’s mere existence months later by contracting it himself, only to deny it again weeks later as he was cured, claiming that his “past as an athlete wouldn’t let him die by a simple fever”.

More than 600.000 lives were lost due to covid, a number elevated by Bolsonaro’s actions and denialism. 3 ministers of health were fired during the height of the pandemic, because any measurement that went against his agenda that Covid was nothing special, resulted in them being dismissed. While most nations were trying to buy and distribute vaccines, he denied 11 deals until april 2021, with common names such as Pfizer, Covax, and even the vaccine being developed in the national territory by the Butantan institute, deemed as untrustworthy. He tried to push a chloroquine agenda, claiming it to be the true cure to covid, which to no one's surprise proved to be ineffective even before he made his announcements. Couple of months and many deaths later, Bolsonaro would end up, surprisingly, accepting a vaccine deal, which turned out later that he only actually accepted as there was embezzlement involved.

Amongst our presidential wrongdoings, the indie gaming scene flourished around the world, and although it didn’t thrive as much in Brazil, it had an impact nonetheless. Developing codes, creating digital art, publicizing media, have only gotten easier as time goes on, despite creating the unfortunate consequence that it’s more scattered around the net as ever, making so that the mere chance of a spotlight is to be considered a miracle for the average indie dev. In the last 2 years, the gaming scene was severely hit by Covid-19, however, that didn’t affect small studios a lot, especially when the amount of people working on them is as small as 2 in Unsighted’s case.

Still here after the overly simplified history lesson? Good, let’s actually talk about the game now.

The easy way to explain Unsighted to someone is that it’s a mix of Hyper Light Drifter fast paced combat alongside the limitations of a punishing stamina bar, with a metroid map progression. I’m NOT calling this game a metroidvania because it has nothing to do with the usual 2D combat, however if you think metroidvanias are more of a “feel” with progression based items with pseudo open world games, I won’t stop you. The constant back and forth of experimenting with your new upgrades is one of gaming’s greatest sensations when done right, now imagine doing that in a punishing time limit. Sounds stressful when you can’t progress in your own way? Good, that’s the main idea behind Unsighted.

After finishing the tutorial, you’ll notice that everytime you go to a new room, a small text appears in the middle of the screen telling you how much time you have left until you become an unsighted yourself, a walking android with no thought beyond primal instincts hard coded in their metallic soul. The game tries to calm you down by explaining that you can give yourself and your friends more time, with an item called Meteor Dust, which you can find by exploring, however you’ll quickly realize that giving 1 day’s worth of time is not very impactful when a day ingame happens in less than 40 minutes. You may also share them to increase your “friendship meter” to get unique rewards, which is the opposite of what anyone would do in that situation: Embracing a decaying materialism in a world that needs only solidarity.

By accepting the loot social aspect more than the emotional one, you can in theory, save more people than before, since you’ll be increasing your combat capabilities which results in you resolving the game’s conflict faster, which means you’ll be bringing salvation to even more individuals. This could also be my half assed coping mechanism that I ended up developing after letting 2 characters that were really special to the main character die, both meeting their fate because although I tried really, I ended up failing, but chose to move once again. As we all have to do sometimes.

Gear Village is one of the most comfortable hubs I have seen in gaming, facing fierce competition against Majula from Dark Souls 2 and Rosalina’s ship from Mario Galaxy. Not only it has a plethora of charming characters wandering around, but also it looks like a place I could live in, if I travel enough to the south. The androids are all visually distinct and offer different essential functions from one another, like upgrading your items, selling useful stuff, or giving you hints on where to go next.

Exploration is not obtuse in the slightest, since there’s a clear indicator in what you can and can’t do, and early on you don’t even have to get key items in a set order, so it becomes a question in how you want to approach the game. The best weapon, until the very last dungeon, and some gadgets that allow you to completely bypass some puzzles to get powerful items early on, can be obtained after the very 1st dungeon if you’ve been exploring. It’s only after a long while, that you’ll have to progress in the way the game wants you to, which is honestly pretty well executed, because it ends up coinciding, for the average player at least, to a certain “event” in the cathedral which I’ll explain later.

Fighting also feels amazing, mobility is key in this game and it feels wonderful running around. By allowing the players to never take damage by missing platforming sections, even if you have to “respawn” again, it encourages a riskier and more fun approach to both combat and puzzles. Parrying is both smooth and responsive, and also if you land it gracefully with precise timing, it restores your stamina bar fully, making it so that if you take the effort to master it, you’ll be rewarded by never having to back down from a fight. There’s also a colossal weapon arsenal to choose from, including swords, pistols, axes, shotguns, dual wielding weapons, flamethrowers, and even grappling hooks.

Well, I’m gonna get into spoilers now, so if that’s what you wanted to see from this review, have a good one, and make sure to give this game a shot, it’s worth it.

Eventually, while exploring, you’ll receive some notifications about some npc’s who have less than 24 hours remaining. The feeble, the fragile and the old ones fall victim first, however soon you’ll start to notice that the character that teaches you how to parry better and is known as the village’s chief, is also one of the first ones. And that’s when it clicked with me, that this curse comes for everyone, independent of who you are, what you’ve done, and even if you have a “past as an athlete”. While not directly being a covid metaphor, the way Unsighted handles the story, themes, and the mechanics around time being a currency, are inherently something that could only happen in our current political and social scene.

One important thing I purposefully didn’t mention until now, is that during the entire game you’ll be accompanied by a small pixie called Iris, who doesn’t exactly have much time in her hands. She greatly helps you, not only navigate and solve puzzles, but also by being your only source of actually “leveling up”. In this game, the only progression you’ll get, besides equipping discardable gears with single uses and buying expensive items to improve your healing at the cost of time, is increasing your chip slots, which might give you more health, defense, damage, stamina, etc. The fact that the only fixed progression you’ll get is tied to a npc low in time is astonishing, because it forces you to sacrifice precious time with her. Due to the nature of video games we usually don’t end up thinking much about our sidekicks, but Unsighted makes sure you know how much she’s sacrificing for you and asks you to at least keep it mutual. If you intentionally or not, let her go unsighted, your journey is not only going to be a lot lonelier, but also immensely harder, because you took her feelings, dreams, and maybe even existence, for granted.

A certain event happens when your character has less than 100 hours: she is contacted by an entity in the cathedral. There, you’ll meet a powerful person who talks like an old friend of yours that wants to “help you”, by giving you an accursed power: You can take hours away from your friends and give them to yourself. Although this might sound like a relief for some, the idea of killing your friends for your own benefit is nothing but sickening, and it doesn’t help that every single one of them was written in the story to be a good willed android, trying to survive while helping others. This is the only place in the game in which Iris won’t accompany you, as she feels a malevolent presence nearby, which means that you’re the judge, jury and executioner of yourself while in there.

You can by all means challenge her to an absurdly hard secret boss fight that will give you 10 dusts, however it not only takes a lot of effort, but also gives a reward that doesn’t benefit you as much. By working with the current dystopian system, you can guarantee yourself a safe future in this cruel world, as it’s easy to live at the cost of others, specially when your job is to be selective to who has the rights to live, however, even challenging them, won’t help as much unfortunately, as the entire fundamental aspect of being an unsighted won’t change by dethroning a single individual within a intrinsically corrupt order. There is a secret ending that requires you to beat the self proclaimed angel, however I won’t get into details because I’d have to explain a lot more elements in the story, but to summarize: You can’t vote your way into revolution, fight for what you believe in.

So now to properly answer the question: Why is Unsighted so special, even when not considering the gameplay? In an interview for Screenrant in October 2021, the devs Tiani Pixel and Fernanda Dias answered the following question “...Could you talk about what gaming was like when you were younger, and compare it to what's happening now?...” made by Leo Faierman.

“One big thing here in Brazil, and it kind of ties in with some of the discussion that has been going around lately, is with piracy. Because, for example, in the city that I lived throughout my childhood, you could never find an original game to buy. Like, it wasn't even an option. I'll be honest with you: I never saw an original PS2 game in my life, and it's common for all Brazilians. Like, I even doubt that those exist, because there was never an original game being sold here in Brazil. However, this came with a lot of positives. English is not our native language, so we received pirated games from all over the world, so there's a lot of Japanese games that are famous here that a lot of people in the US don't know, and kind of ended up being inspirations here for game designers in Brazil.”

Transforming and adapting cultures from around the world is how Brazil became Brazil. Independent if it were the natives, or the portuguese in the 15th century, or the spanish a couple years later, or the dutchman in the 16th century, or the germans and the italians in the following years, or the japanese in the 19th century, or the many other that I forgot to mention: We are in the end, a mixture of cultures from around the world, trying our best. The cultural difference between some states in Brazil is higher than the ones from entire european countries, and yet we’re all stuck in the same tropical paradise. In the end Brazil was molded by those who were molded by Brazil, therefore making something made in Brazil only possible if it was made in Brazil.

We had a lot of games in the past that captured the brazilian essence, like 171 or Tcheco in the Castle of Lucio, however those were projects made in mind to be enjoyed by mostly brazilians. We’ve also had games that tried their best to abandoned that convention, accepting their own existence as a product meant to be mostly enjoyed for those that aren’t from Brazil, but seen as the same foreign product for those that are, like Heavy Bullets or Spark. Unsighted is the first project that not only doesn’t follow that convention, but also actively tries to display such ethos for those that weren’t born here or the ones that do but fail to recognize it.

Unsighted is a game made by 2 trans women fighting not only to survive in one of the most transphobic countries there are, but also to make a project that will never get mainstream attention. Unsighted tells the story of those that struggle, for those that don’t care. Unsighted is the essence of a story forever doomed to be praised yet not seen by many. Unsighted to me, is the most important brazilian game of all time.

for a while, i had a review of this game left up as "playing this game is a form of self-harm" or something to that effect. that was the result of me trying to get a platinum not only the PS3 version, but also the PS4. now that i've done both, i can actually try to be fair to this game, or at least approximate it.

rayman legends' design philosophy is "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks". there is frankly too much content here, most of it not worthwhile. 1/3rd or maybe even more of the levels in this game are just recycled from origins; there's a character selection/unlocking element that only speedrunners have convinced me has any impact on the actual platforming; there are daily and weekly randomly generated levels that are indefensibly terrible; there's fucking dailies with "collectable monsters"... there's just so much here that does not matter. and i get that there's a strong proponent of this game who would say "why focus on what doesn't work or matter if the core gameplay loop is good?". but that's just it: when you break it down to the base platforming aspect, rayman legends is just okay. nothing terribly special.

in terms of level design, most of them blend together for me. i can say this because, having 100%'d the game twice, only a handful of levels stick out in my memory. i don't think the majority of this game's levels are bad, per se, just very standard platformer-type levels. you have the chase levels, you have the underwater levels, you have the autoscroller levels... so much of this just feels done before, you know? i struggle to think of very many things about this game that were creative in that sense. i might be cynical and harsh, but i just can't feel that passionate or enthusiastic about a game that gave me such a "been there, done that" feeling.

i think some of this could've been remedied if i really liked the presentation of the game, but it's just... it doesn't do anything for me. the art style isn't bad, i just struggle to describe it in any meaningful way. and the music is very forgettable. maybe that's the risk you take when you go with a heavily orchestral soundtrack, but i could not for the life of me tell you any song from this game outside of the autorunner music ones (which overstay their welcome).

there were passionate people behind this project, i can definitely feel that, but none of it translates for me. i am the minority in that this game did gangbusters in reviews but i just feel left out in the cold. i'd rather play a game that's more focused and concise, something with tighter creativity and more unique ideas. when i think of the 2D platformers i love, i think of something like Donkey Kong Country or Wario Land 4 or VVVVVV. all of those games had such fun and unique ideas and outstanding presentation to match. i can't say the same about this game. it makes me a bit sad to end this review on such a "i don't GET IT" note, but there has to be someone out there who had this same reaction, right?

right?

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.