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Gravity Rush 2 (Gaming)

by Ragashingo ⌂, Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, January 11, 2018, 00:03 (2268 days ago)
edited by Ragashingo, Thursday, January 11, 2018, 00:09

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

For me, this was a game I saw a trailer or review for sometime early last year but quickly wrote off as yet another “I guess I’ll never play that because I don’t own a PS4.” Between now and then I got a PS4, and a few days ago I remembered this game. Small warning, I will be mostly avoiding main storyline spoilers but I’m gonna talk a lot about the game including some of the initial plot setup and some of the activities you do. Those looking to be spoiler free may want to check out now.

Gravity Rush 2 is a continuation of the adventures of Kat, a teenage-ish girl who for some reason has the power to alter gravity in her vicinity. This power comes from her pet cat named Dusty whose coat looks almost exactly like the weird, distorted black star field effect used for the Darkness in Destiny. If Dusty is not nearby or is trapped or incapacitated, then Kat loses her gravity powers.

So, what does Kat do with gravity powers? First and foremost, she uses them to fall through the skies! In game terms, you press R2 once to activate Kat’s powers which leaves her floating stationary above the ground, then you point the camera/cursor where you want to fall towards and hit the button again.

The game, and even Kat herself, has no illusion that she flies anywhere. She falls to where she is going and her animations show that. While you can do some things to have Kat strike a more traditional superhero flying pose, holding X to fall faster for instance usually works, for the most part she is fine with twisting and tumbling about as she falls in whichever direction she chooses. It’s an unexpected delightful way to transverse an open world.

Kat’s other core gravity based power is picking up various objects in a “stasis field” and effortlessly holding them in midair as they float and tumble near her. She does this for people and objects to take them safely to other destinations, and she also can pick up and launch debris in combat to damage enemies. (And sometime the people she picks up and throws are her enemies!)

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.

Kat’s final core gravity ability, which I do like a good bit, is that if you fall into the side or even the bottom of a flat structure, Kat will instinctively flip gravity around so she can run and jump across it as if she were standing right side up. This means you can stand on the side or even on the bottom of buildings. This also works on other objects like the sky flying cars and ships buzzing about the sky. It’s a little mind boggling to move around the bottom of a building as if you were right side up, but it’s also pretty awesome and the game handles this kind of thing perfectly. Like, your ability to clamber up a wall Destiny 2 style works just as well on the bottom or side of a structure as it does when you are right side up. (I like game engines that just seem to do the right thing effortlessly vs engines where something works sometimes and not other. /me glares at Horizon: Zero Dawn’s clambering, for instance)

The open world of Gravity Rush 2 can be summed up in one word: “Super Great” … Ok… that was two words. Let me try that again. The open world is: “Very well done” …. Well darn. One more try? No? Fine. The point is, I like it a lot. The game starts with Kat indentured to a small flying trading town that took her in after she was sucked from her home dimension via a gravity storm. 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.

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.

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.

All in all, the playable space is decently big and surprises you at being bigger than you thought it was when you first step foot on the flying boat dock. Oh… then in the mid to late game the map size and complexity will double!

I don’t really have much to say about the graphics and animation of the game, other than they are really good. Kat’s character animations are especially superb. And the use of fog to partially obscure distant parts of the city works really well. Up close everything is colorful and vibrant and just all around well done. Oh, and the dogs are super cute!

So, what is there to do in this delightful open world? Well, two things, really. The main story, and a bushel of sidequests.

The main story is pretty long and is split into at least three main segments. A lot of it is told through a fairly unique series of comic book style panels. You’ll start at one panel then press X and a character will maybe move in from off panel or someone who was in the panel will get a speech bubble usually accompanied by a word or short phrase of spoken dialogue to give a touch of tone and mood to what you read in the speech ballon. Then you press X again and maybe another character replies or another speech bubble appears. Each panel gets two or three little events like that then you shift left or right or up or down to the next panel.

A typical “cutscene” is usually around 5 to 10 panels long and the art is great. It fits very closely to the game’s graphics. One thing this game doesn’t have is fully voiced dialogue. Often the characters will speak a few words along with their speech bubbles, but the speech, which sounds like a strange half French half Japanese, is more for tone and almost never has enough words to match what was actually said. Still, it works well enough and was never really a negative or a distraction.

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.

But, maybe the real draw of Gravity Rush 2 is the sidequests. These too have fun, comic book style cutscenes, and cover a surprisingly wide variety of tasks. Of the top of my head, over the course of the game Kat has:

  • Gone mining for minerals in a ruined city
  • Helped deliver a last crate of cargo to a departing airship that forgot it on the dock
  • Delivered a ton of newspapers all across one of the larger islands
  • Tracked down a shop and its owner based on a photo where you had to pay attention to the direction and distance of objects in the background
  • Run annoying errands for the wealthy high class jerks on their private floating islands
  • Watered some trees (one of Kat’s powers is picking up nearby objects and if she does it near a source of water she will hover globs of water around herself until she throws them)
  • Starred in an action movie
  • Impersonated a local hero in order to trick people into buying ice cream
  • Tailed a cheating boyfriend through the entertainment district
  • Flew a little girl around a park to keep her entertained
  • Helped a journalist uncover corruption by taking a photo of a government guy and a criminal during a secret business deal
  • Survived police training
  • Helped a daughter buy a present for someone
  • Looked for a new place to live
  • Raced a bird to prove who is ruler of the skies
  • Broke up a student lead demonic cult
  • And... I don’t know... a whole bunch of other stuff


While a couple of these missions do nearly repeat their basic gameplay elements, no two is exactly alike and even the ones that are still have you doing those similar things for very different reasons and at the behest of entirely different characters. And, as you can see from the list above, most of the things you do are just delightful!

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.)

So, there’s a ton of side quests, many of which involve fetching or finding things. But there’s also a fair amount of combat. Certainly the main story gets very combat heavy by the end, and some of the side quests have a fair amount of combat as well.

On the ground, Kat can chain together a few rapid kicks and you have a dodge function that has you tumble out of the way. It’s not exactly Arkham style where you try and keep a flow going, but it doesn’t feel bad. In the air, though, is where you’ll be doing a lot of your combat. And there you have a variety of options from lock-on kicks to picking up and throwing things, to charged attacks, to special attacks like slamming through a bunch of enemies or hovering in place as you constantly bombard enemies with debris.

The combat is probably just a little clunky but not terribly so. A lot of it is anticipating the direction you need to swing the camera around to keep attacking enemies. You have pretty good control of your own movement and you are generally in big open environments so combat is fairly fun. Occasionally, though, you are forced to fight in an enclosed space. And there things become somewhat more annoying. Not a huge turnoff or anything, but fighting in enclosed spaces as a character than can fall in any direction… doesn’t work nearly as well as when she has room to move.

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.

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 was the way the late story threw in a few characters that I had never seen before. Some of them Kat had clearly met before but they needed more introduction, for sure! Also, Kat’s solution to the final boss, using her gravity power to sacrifice herself while sealing it within a singularity pretty much came out of nowhere and wasn’t even well shown. :(

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

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Gravity Rush 2

by cheapLEY @, Thursday, January 11, 2018, 06:46 (2268 days ago) @ Ragashingo

I just asked Korny about the game a few days ago, after seeing him playing it so much. After I finish Origins (and maybe Nier, I haven’t decided if I’m going to go back to that), I’m going to look into Gravity Rush 2. Do I need to play the first game?

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Gravity Rush 2

by Ragashingo ⌂, Official DBO Cryptarch, Thursday, January 11, 2018, 06:58 (2268 days ago) @ cheapLEY

Maybe..?

I did not play the first one and I'd say that most of the returning characters and previous happenings were reintroduced pretty well. But, as you get closer to the end it does drop a few characters on you who Kat seems to have dealt with before but who I was just clueless about.

Oh, if nothing else, track down the short two part anime on YouTube. It doesn't exactly bridge the gap between the two games, but it does give slightly more context to the state Kat finds herself in at the beginning of the 2nd game. And its just a bunch of fun to watch.

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Gravity Rush 2

by cheapLEY @, Thursday, January 11, 2018, 07:42 (2268 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Maybe..?

I did not play the first one and I'd say that most of the returning characters and previous happenings were reintroduced pretty well. But, as you get closer to the end it does drop a few characters on you who Kat seems to have dealt with before but who I was just clueless about.

Oh, if nothing else, track down the short two part anime on YouTube. It doesn't exactly bridge the gap between the two games, but it does give slightly more context to the state Kat finds herself in at the beginning of the 2nd game. And its just a bunch of fun to watch.

Thanks! I'll do that.

Now I just need to decide between this and Persona 5.

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Gravity Rush 2

by Vortech @, A Fourth Wheel, Thursday, January 11, 2018, 10:49 (2268 days ago) @ cheapLEY

I just asked Korny about the game a few days ago, after seeing him playing it so much. After I finish Origins (and maybe Nier, I haven’t decided if I’m going to go back to that), I’m going to look into Gravity Rush 2. Do I need to play the first game?

IIRC it was a freebie for PSN plus a few months back, so you may have it already.

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

by Korny @, Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Friday, January 12, 2018, 09:29 (2267 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?").

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Two bonus things about the game...

by Korny @, Dalton, Ga. US. Earth, Sol System, Saturday, January 13, 2018, 08:05 (2266 days ago) @ Korny

The first is that the server cut-off date has been pushed back to July of this year, yay!
[image]

And second is that I was reminded of the fantastic short made to advertise Gravity Rush 2, that's worth a watch even if you're not interested in the games!

Good stuff!

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