Falling with style... (It's a great game, try the 1st one!) (Gaming)

by Korny , Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, January 12, 2018, 09:29 (2295 days ago) @ Ragashingo

I recently started playing Gravity Rush 2, and... I’m loving it!

This short clip showing the transition between the different sections of the first city is one of the things that I really appreciate from this game, and something that was greatly improved over the first game, where different towns were a long train ride/flight/fast travel away.

As cheapLEY pointed out, I've been spending a ton of time with this game, saving the story missions for last while I went around doing everything else that there is to do. That said, I had more fun with the first game, which seemed to constantly barrage you with things to do, changes of scenery, challenging fights, and a real sense of progression. For the most part, all of that's here, but this game spaces them out more (also helped that the first game comes with all of the DLC add-ons, so it has more front-loaded content from the get-go), so you're constantly tricked out a stream of things to do, rather than having a bunch of different things to try out, especially as you unlocked your powers, whereas Kat has many of her abilities available to her from the get-go (well, once you find Dusty) in the sequel, so there's no implementation of her (and the player) learning to use them.

For $20, though I'm happy with what I paid so far for the sequel (even managed to get the 6000 Dusty Tokens that won't be available after the 18th of this month), and judging from the locked stuff in the photo collection, I've still got a whole lot more content to go. The first game was $11 the past few weeks, though I think the sale is over. If you can grab it the next time it goes on sale, it's definitely worth it!

Kat also has the ability to “gravity slide” which sorta tilts gravity at an angle and lets her slide down any surface as if she was always sliding down a very steep incline. It can be useful for traveling along a curving surface since she is constantly adjusting which direction “down” is. She could slide along the inside of a Sonic the Hedgehog loop, for instance, by using the power. I don’t use this one much because there was very rarely a reason to and because it makes moving around more tricky than it should be. Your ability to aim yourself is very finicky.

You definitely used the slide mechanic more in the first game. The trick is to make short turns. If you hold the thumbstick too long, Kat will end up hitting the sides of wherever you are and will lose all momentum. The second game doesn't give you a whole lot of reasons to slide (so far), so you're often better off just falling.

This little town made of a dozen or so small buildings flying far above the clouds is a nice training area, especially since the game starts you out without your gravity shifting powers. So you learn to navigate around the town on foot before you regain your pet cat (and thus your gravity powers) within the first 30 minutes of gameplay.

Oh man, don't tell cheapLEY that, he hates games that don't throw you into endgame mode the minute you hit start. :P

From that point what was a sorta difficult area to navigate around (since most of the buildings of the town are not connected to each other forcing you to always take the long way around) becomes dead simple to make your way around as you just fall to where ever you want to go to. The game and initial story setup/training really does a nice job of showing you just how useful your gravity powers are by forcing you to move around without them at first.

Agreed. It was a great choice to start the game off like that.

Not long after that, the mining town finishes its work and returns to its port city to resupply. It’s here where the game really begins. The flying city of Jirga Para Lhao is big, beautiful, and decently complex. At first glance, it appears to be made up of multiple small-ish floating islands, most of which have a purpose. The island your little mining town docks at has a market right off the docks but also has a small residential area and a few tall buildings. In the distance are other islands, some sporting skyscrapers, some are clearly shipping docks or warehouses.

Though this is a game you usually spend above the ground, landing and walking around is a joy because of all the little things going on in the city islands. There’s people shopping, people running the shops, people moving crates around, people juggling, people sitting on benches, groups of friends having conversations. There’s even kids and birds and dogs and cats and ducks.

This is not a game like Arkham City / Knight where everyone goes away. Each island feels alive and more than sufficiently detailed. Plus the architecture is nicely detailed and varied. There’s bridges and water towers and lighthouses and all sorts of cool things all over the place. In some ways it feels like a somewhat more modern version of Bioshock Infinite’s Colombia... remade as an open world… without the racism.

Then, within a few minutes you remember that you can fall wherever you want so you decide to test the limits and fall as far up or down as you can. When you do that you soon find that the set of islands you can see around you are just part of the flying city you are in. High above the main city is a series of flying estates sporting mansions, parks. Rich people and high class pets dot these more sparsely populated areas. And above them is a government building and above that is a fortified Flying Fortress complete with anti-air cannons.

Go down, and for the first few seconds you think you’re just gonna descend into the clouds but then you sorta break through and find that there’s an entire flying shanty town populated by the poor and downtrodden. This group of twenty or more mini islands is definitely far more rundown than even the “normal” mid level islands.

One of the things that I love is how the game has these subtly dark undertones. The people you first meet seem happy-go-lucky, but looking in deeper, and you'll see corruption, people stressed out about taxes, little work, conscription, hunger... And while Kat is aware of these things, she also knows that she can't change anything. Even when she does something great and generous for the poor, it doesn't change anything for them beyond feeding them for a couple of days, before they're back to being oppressed and downtrodden, which again, Kat is aware of. But that's Just The Way Things Are.

In the first game, Hekseville had a different set of issues, or rather, the same issues but through a different lens. Kat started off by living in a sewer that she had to cozy up by gathering trash and thrown-out stuff, and she never really left that state of poverty (though she does slowly make the sewer a better place to live in).

I liked the main story. Some pretty big things eventually happen, but Kat does her best to maintain a cheery, upbeat attitude. My only complaint is that it sorta forgets that I didn’t play Gravity Rush 1 and a few characters I didn’t know pop up to help or hinder Kat in rapid succession without much or sometimes any real introduction.

Kind of normal. There are a number of characters that Kat met in the first game that don't get explained, and I assume much of it has to do with her backstory (she doesn't remember, but the game shows that the Hekseville world revolves around a giant tower that ascends to the skies as much as it descends into the slowly-encroaching abyss, and Kat seems to be from a place much higher up on the tower than anyone else has ever seen/been to, possibly even the top).

There's also a connection between time and gravity that the first game hints at (Raven is much, much older than Kat, though they age at the same rate, but are physically around the same age because of Raven living way, way lower on the tower than most people... It kind of gets explained in the first game.

But maybe the best part is Kat who, while not one note by any means, is pretty consistently upbeat about things. She very often jumps at the chance to help people and even when things don’t go her way she still usually find a bright spot to hold on to. Her charming, adorkable personality is a nice, refreshing change to even modern open world heroes and heroines (such as Aloy or Geralt or… uh Batman who all tend to be more cynical and grim about everything.)

I never felt that Aloy was cynical. She harbored some resentment towards the Nora, sure, but she always inspired hope, and shows patience towards those who don't understand technology the same way she does... But yeah, while Kat does get bummed out by things, she rarely ever ends a cutscene without a smile and a goal, which adds to her charm.

One thing I did enjoy was the boss fights. I’ve battled everything from giant walker robots that would be right at home in Sonic Adventure, to a boss I had to destroy parts of before I could attack its actual weak spots, to one boss that was perhaps the biggest enemy I’ve ever fought in any game, to at least a couple of bosses that were comparable in size and power to Kat.

What's funny is that some of my favorite boss battles in the games (and one that I wanted to use while suggesting a good Destiny boss fight) is against a Challenge version of one of the smaller enemies, that you had to go out of your way to fight in well-hidden areas. Special green Nevi that turned their enemy class up to 11, and you had to "solve" them besides just fighting them like you would one of their normal class.

All in all, Gravity Rush 2 is a delightful game, with an adorkable main character, a detailed, charming world, a ton of interesting side quest, and a main story that covers a lot of ground and eventually ups the stakes to epic levels.

+

My biggest likes were Kat’s personality and movement powers. Falling through the skies as an upbeat character works very well.

My biggest dislike for these games is the way they lack satisfying closure, and I don't know if we'll ever get it, since Gravity Rush 2's sales were weak enough that they're shutting down the social aspect of the game a year after release.
The first game almost literally just ended at what felt like the third quarter of the story, and the story threads that were opened (such as the way Kat was regaining her memories of who she really was, her relationship to Raven, the status of the missing children trapped on the Ark) were all just flat-out dropped, and the credits rolled literally seconds after a side-plot boss battle. It was worse than Halo 2, and not only did the animation not bring any of this up, but the second game has so far had zero mention of anything regarding the first game (though I know that the Raven's Choice add-on for Gravity Rush 2 aims to bridge the two games better).

If you haven’t played Gravity Rush 2, do so. I highly recommend it.

The social aspects of the game are neat, and I plan to make a video about them. It's a shame they're getting the plug pulled on them in a week. Still, I really liked these games way more than I could have expected (they're one of the games where Sammy repeatedly asks "how are you not bored of this yet?").