Part of the joy of video games is that they can offer a
level of control that’s so often lacking from real life. They allow you to take
your fate in your own two hands – a cool head and nimble fingers will decide
whether you dodge a blow in Dark Souls, pull off an outrageous feint in FIFA,
or make Mario leap the extra hair’s breadth that separates life from death.
Gravity Rush takes the opposite tack, sacrificing precision
and finesse for the thrill of the unpredictable. Your character, Kat, can
manipulate gravity, able to decide which way is “down”, allowing her to tumble
gracelessly through the sky in any direction, the world tilting and lurching
around her. This isn’t flying, it’s falling sideways through crowded cities,
crashing through crates and knocking off chimney pots.
The first Gravity Rush was released for the PlayStation Vita
in 2012, and has become a cult favourite almost despite itself. It was lauded
for its beautiful, anime art-style, open world gameplay and free-flowing
mechanics (despite its insistence on showing off the Vita’s unwieldy motion
controls), but its storytelling was obtuse to the point of senselessness.
It asked interesting questions about the nature of time that
it was either unable or unwilling to answer; it didn’t so much as leave things
on a cliffhanger as leave every major plot thread dangling.
Five years later, Gravity Rush 2 is both a realisation ofthe first game’s potential and a doubling down on its flaws.
On the Vita, Kat was always straining to escape from the
prison of her tiny screen, and the panoramic quality of the PS4 sequel looks
glorious. The floating islands that make up Kat’s world bring to mind a Studio
Ghibli animation. Every frame is filled with rare and unexpected beauty, from burnt
orange sunsets fading behind dizzying skyscrapers to circular rainbows ringing
the horizon.
Kat is a wonderful heroine and her joyful tumbling is the
perfect way to traverse this world. Every street is thronged with passers-by
who flee in terror whenever Kat comes crashing into their lives, cracking
paving slabs as she thuds to the ground. This apparently bustling world does,
however, flatter to deceive. Unlike the densely textured world of, say,
Arkane’s Dishonored games, Gravity Rush 2 is all surface: nothing but
inaccessible, empty polygons lie behind the brightly lit windows and grand
facades.
Combat has been tightened, with two new gravity “styles” –
very heavy and very light – adding variety without overly complicating things.
Kat’s ability to whisk piles of debris into the air and launch them at her
enemies feels more intuitive than before, although her main attack, shifting
gravity to fall feet first towards her foes, is still prone to sending her
hurtling away from the action.
Things go a little awry, once again, when it comes to
storytelling. Some designers would have used the sequel to clean up the mess
left in the wake of the first game; not Keiichiro Toyama (the wunderkind behind
the game, who also created the first Silent Hill when he was just 21). Not only
do you need to have played the original Gravity Rush to have any hope of
understanding the plot, you also need to have watched the two-part anime movie
released at the end of last year. And even then, good luck following it.
Toyama pays little heed to the prevailing wisdom of game
design. His sequel is packed with anachronistic mini games and collectibles.
Much of Kat’s time is spent completing repetitive tasks that feel like chores
during the first attempt and drive you to distraction by the 20th. Most of the
dialogue, presented as neat interactive comic strips, exists only for
exposition. And there are far too many inexplicable, tedious stealth missions
that have no place in a game where the protagonist cannot slow her pace beyond
a brisk jog.
The main story is divided into three chapters, the first of
which sees Kat fighting against social inequality in a land where the working
classes live in shanty towns literally beneath the rich folk in their gleaming
sky-mansions. The second chapter continues the story from the first game, while
the final section delves into Kat’s mysterious past, where the game’s most
unforgivably dull and protracted sequences take place.
All three are really just excuses to pack in lots of
increasingly overblown and oversized bosses, many of whom come with giant
glowing weak spots, as if it were still 1995. The second half of the game is
made up of one climactic fight after another, with the narrative importance of
each lost amid the ceaseless torrent of action. In one mid-way mission, for
instance, an entire city comes to life, is destroyed, and is never spoken of
again. Some of these fights are fun, while others are a maddening and seemingly
endless battle against the game’s unpredictable mechanics.
But to get bogged down in these frustrations is to miss the
point. The joy is in the little things: taking a young boy on a flying tour of
the city to recreate his grandfather’s photographs; chasing after a seagull
that’s stolen your lunch; handing out flyers for a local food wagon.
Kat is never more fun than when she’s hurtling horizontally
across the sky for no reason other than to feel the wind against her face. At
its best, Gravity Rush 2 recreates the sense of reckless abandon that came when
riding a bike as a child, the feeling of limitless potential combined with the
intoxicating thrill of knowing that the tarmac could come up to meet you at any
moment.
No comments:
Post a Comment