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:
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