Review: Gravity Rush Remastered [Script]

I just released an At A Glance video for the new Gravity Rush Remastered, a game which I have some fairly strong opinions about. I wasn't able to include all my thoughts I had in the video so I decided it would be best to repurpose the script into a makeshift review and post it here. Please check out the video as well, if this interests you.

I feel I should apologize. I meant to simply do an At A Glance video and give my impressions for Gravity Rush Remastered, but I fell so deeply in love with the game that…well, I accidentally got the Platinum trophy. Not a rare occurrence, given that I am the height of video game perfection. Gravity Rush is a third-person action platformer by Keiichiro Toyama and developed by Project Siren, the studio behind the survival horror series…well, Siren.

Gravity Rush began life as a Playstation 3 game by the name Gravite before being pushed over to the Vita for the handheld's launch window; in the process, the game was renamed Gravity Daze with the subtitle Gravitational Dizziness: The Perturbation of Her Inner Space Caused by the Repatriation of the Upper Stratum. As much as I like the subtitle, I can see it possibly driving away potential consumers. What a shame.

 This was remastered by Blue Point games, the geniuses behind the HD ports of the Ico games, Metal Gear Solid, God of War and recently the Uncharted trilogy. Some people consider Blue Point to be wizards, and I would probably agree. Gravity Rush Remastered offers a smooth, flawless sixty frames per second presentation and all of the game’s original Vita-oriented touch screen controls have been translated perfectly to the Playstation 4 pad.

The gameplay of Gravity Rush is a mix between simplistic third-person action and surprisingly Mario Galaxy-esque plat forming with a very unique twist. Add a vibrant, gorgeous open world an amazing cel shaded art style and you have what might be the most criminally overlooked titles in recent years. I personally got the game free from PS+ on the Vita and only got about a third of the way in before the PS4 port was announced, and let me be the first to say I really wish more people had given it a shot when it came out.

Everything here feels polished and nothing is left to waste, as can be expected of Project Siren. Challenge missions can be found to test your abilities and power crystals, a rather boring name for an item pickup, if I’m being honest, litter the open world. Power crystals can be used to open new challenge missions and, more importantly, level up your character, Kat. This can range from improving your attack strength to simply moving faster with the gravity mechanic.

The game‘s main, unique mechanic is the ability to shift gravity at will. Kat and her…cat…Dusty can manipulate gravity at will, which means you, the player, can move in any direction and fly anywhere as long as your gravity gauge doesn’t deplete. You can level up how slowly your gauge depletes and how quickly it recharges, which gives Gravity Rush a real sense of progression just through its intricate suite of light RPG mechanics.

Platforming has the same Mario Galaxy weightlessness to it, but instead of physically jumping around and maneuvering around areas of low gravity you’re using the absence of gravity to move around relatively massive areas. It’s not too challenging, certainly not as much as Nintendo’s games, but the plat forming is enhanced by a small, but functional, combat system. And this leads me to my only real complaint with the game.

In leveling up your ground combos you’re not really increasing your melee damage all that much--rather, you add longer strings to your basic attack. In addition you have a dodge that has a fairly liberal amount of invincibility frames, and on top of that you can attack in the air to do a dive kick. With all this in mind, the dive kick basically breaks the game while the ground combos are functionally useless. Much of Gravity Rush reminds me of the masterpiece action game Bayonetta, but Bayo has in-depth mechanics for every type of combo whereas Gravity Rush…falls flat. No pun intended. Bayo even has its own gravity mechanic, dive kicks, and an equally-powerful rival with similar skills--but I digress. It’s not fair to Gravity Rush to compare it to something with immaculate combat, especially since the primary mechanic here is gravity, not combat. I just can’t help but feel something is being put to waste here.

Let me use an example. In Bayonetta you have a mechanic called dodge offset, where if you dodge in the middle of a combo you can pick it up to finish that combo so long as you dodged an attack correctly. The fact that you have a dodge in Gravity Rush, one tied to the exact same button as Bayonetta, really made me feel like there was nothing stopping the developers from incorporating a similar mechanic. Of course almost every encounter in the game is aerial, but the problem with that is fights become very, very repetitive--dodge in midair, dive kick, dodge, dive kick, repeat until it’s dead. Gravity Rush 2 appears to fix this by having a basic version of Devil May Cry 4's style-switching mechanic which will allow for mid-air combos and heavier attacks, but that doesn’t negate my issues with this game's ground combat. I know I’m harping on this but it really is a sticking point for me.

Gravity Rush has enough forethought to have stun locking in combat. If you don’t know what this is, stun locking refers to keeping an enemy in place while stringing a combo together. Most games have some form of stun locking, and with stylish action games like the aforementioned Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, stun locking is your primary means of stringing combos together. I show examples of this in the video, including an example of how not allowing players to stun lock can seriously hamper an action title. Furthermore, games like Devil May Cry open combos by giving players more three- or four-hit combos; where Gravity Rush fails is that upgrading the ground combo simply adds more hits to your basic string.

While you have access to a ten-hit combo by the end, there's absolutely no way to ever fully implement it as monsters either die in three or four hits, wind up their own attacks by then, or are fully based in the air. For the latter, the only way to deal with them is by repeatedly using Kat's dive kick. It becomes extremely repetitive and outright boring after a certain point. For Gravity Rush to have a framework that so closely resembles these action-oriented games and drop the ball so close to the goal is very disappointing and I only hope the footage we’ve seen of Gravity Rush 2 means Project Siren has taken this into account.

Combat is not the focus of the game, however, so take all that as the insane ramblings of a guy who just wants another stylish action franchise. If none of that is important to you then consider it a moot point. Gravity Rush is a game which deserved to be seen on a big TV without any weird touch controls, and this port proves it. The presentation is phenomenal, the writing and story are absolutely engrossing, the gravity mechanics are flawless, and the open world is just small enough to be fun to explore while being big enough that you can stretch your proverbial wings and fly. The length is just right--it took me about twenty hours to get the platinum trophy, and the RPG mechanics are deep enough to encourage low-level play throughs for a harder challenge. Every last detail about Gravity Rush is immaculate aside from the combat. Even the music is a step above most games. The soundtrack is by Kohei Tanaka, a long-time anime and video game composer--and man, did he do a fantastic job.

The game is out now for $30 digitally, I picked up a physical copy through Amazon but currently that’s the only way to get one. Now that it’s left the confines of the Playstation Vita I highly recommend you try it for yourself.

The video:

Review: The Revenant

Alejandro Iñárritu seems to have come out of nowhere, having only directed a handful of movies before he dropped 2014's excellent Birdman, an experimental masterpiece that gleefully played with many film conventions like toys. His new film, The Revenant, was met with a fairly large amount of hype that I'm glad to say was completely justified.

The Premise

Based on a true story, The Revenant follows Hugh Glass, a fur trapper and navigator in the historical Rocky Mountain Fur Company. After their camp is laid to waste by the Native Arikara Tribe the survivors flee into the wilderness and attempt to return to their outpost; Glass is viciously mauled by a bear and the party debates his ultimate fate. Left for dead in the dead of winter, Glass is forced to navigate an unforgiving path while barely remaining one step ahead of the Arikara who want him dead and desperately search for the man who ruined his life.

The Evening Redness

While The Revenant itself is based on a book (which in turn is based on true events), the tone of the film reminds me of a different Western tale taking place in the 19th century. With its long, stark description of a sprawling wilderness, shocking depictions of brutal violence and heavy religious imagery, The Revenant takes (likely unintentionally) cues from Cormac McCarthy's Western masterpiece novel Blood Meridian. If asked before seeing The Revenant I would have said very emphatically that Blood Meridian was unfilmable--a work that could only exist as literature and nothing more. The Revenant has shaken that belief pretty heavily, to a point where I'd actually be very excited to see an Iñárritu-helmed film adaptation of McCarthy's work.

Very few films handle symbolism as well as The Revenant. The plot is less important than the experience of the protagonist: when we see his feverish nightmares, the point of each scene is less the impact to the plot and more of what we learn of this fictional version of Hugh Glass. Tormented by visions of his wife and wrestling with his faith, the audience grows to understand both his struggles as well as the viewer's interpretation of each carefully-placed symbol. I won't give any away, but more than a few scenes have left such a profound impact on me that I'm still puzzling away at not only what it meant to the character, but what it means to me. This kind of expertly-crafted writing alongside such striking visuals are very strongly something I'd consider art, and The Revenant is oozing with such talent.

Although it's been a major advertising point of the film, the specific filming method really does deserve mention. The lighting conditions add a subtle layer to the movie; nights look impenetrably dark and the brights, where the sun glares down on endless blinding whiteness, are stark and mesmerizing. The lighting isn't the only striking film technique in The Revenant. The camera work is often very slow, panning carefully across scenes to truly give breadth to every moment. That said, one criticism I would give is that due to the slow pacing of the film it can really feel its two-and-a-half-hour length. Every scene is essential to the overall experience but in retrospect many of the long takes feel like they linger a bit too long.

Regardless of the pacing the camera is very deliberate in its movements; even the famous bear scene calmly sticks to one angle before slowly panning around. The long takes and slow camera movement gives the film a distinct style which, while not as jaw-dropping as the apparent single-shot style as Birdman, works shockingly well for a movie as brutal and shocking as this. For instance, one scene may begin barely in focus somewhere in the sky and the camera will slowly sweep down directly onto a wandering character or group, pan over to an intimate shot of another character in the middle of dialogue, then continue panning down to focus on something like a stream or waterfall. For those of you who might take something from this analogy: if Birdman was Iñárritu's long, paranoid constant stream-of-consciousness Sound and the Fury, The Revenant is his far more accessible, larger-scaled As I Lay Dying. The style is very similar, but there are distinct merits to both.

(I have no idea why the line spacing changed for the upcoming paragraph but I'm not going to bother changing it.)

It should be noted that the film is very deserving of its R rating. There are big comparisons to be made between The Revenant and The Hateful Eight, another Western-themed film from this year (and one which you can read my review of on this very site) which is also noteworthy for its subject matter. These two films cannot be any different in almost every single way, but I want to point out the difference with gore and violence--a point which gave me a bit of annoyance with The Hateful Eight. With The Revenant the gore is very horrific in its own way; whereas Tarantino's recent film featured blood exploding everywhere and splattering all over the scenery, this film is soft-spoken about its brutal displays of violence and I found it much more tasteful. Even when some characters are completely torn open with bone and sinew exposed, the film never glorifies its violence. It comes off as a natural consequence of the horrific scenarios the characters are placed in, and it's not merely aimed at Leonardo DiCaprio and his (overly) dedicated suffering. The movie is very graphic in all aspects, from the environment to animal-based gore and even a scene of sexual assault. Unlike The Hateful Eight none of these intense depictions could have been taken out without impacting the film in any way. If you're sensitive to gore you might want to be cautious in going to see this movie, although I'd also tell you to get over yourself and go see it anyway.


Based on a Novel Based on a Tale Based on a True Story

The Revenant has nearly nothing in common with the tale it is based on, so please don't assume you're going to be taking away a sort of documentary experience from the film. Before writing off the film's deceptive marketing let me be the first to tell you this movie is far more interesting than the real story of Hugh Glass, not in small part due to the fact that some very heavy thought was put into creating a plot about revenge with its own symbolism and period-specific historical details.

Hugh Glass did not, as far as I can tell, have a Native American wife. Fitzgerald, the arguable protagonist played magnificently by Tom Hardy, was not a man bearing a grudge against natives undergoing a moral crisis. I've pondered whether or not it is dishonest to credit this as being based on true events and have come to an objectively correct opinion: The Revenant only benefits from the historical embellishments added to the plot. No, you're not going to be getting a heavily fact-checked version of true events confined to a two-hour running time. Instead The Revenant chooses to present a message, a story of subjective morality which never would have happened if it was simply the true story.

The film's poster acknowledges this perfectly: "Inspired by true events," and there aren't too many other words I would use to describe The Revenant than simply inspired.

The Verdict

The Revenant is not going to be for everyone. The film is over two hours long and sometimes feels its length, thanks in part to its slow pacing as well as its brutal subject matter. Not many films have successfully presented a tale so brutally honest in its attempt to create a hardened tale of survival and morality, but with a cast that truly brings out their characters (no really, I cannot do justice in describing how perfectly Tom Hardy fills the role of Fitzgerald) and the immaculate directing of Alejandro Iñárritu The Revenant drags itself through hell and back to create one of the finest, most hard-hitting movies in recent years. Your mileage may vary, but at the moment I have no clue how film could possibly top this for the rest of the year.