Just finished Gravity Rush 2.
The game - a PS4 exclusive - obviously benefits from being the "bigger and better" sequel to an original that was ported and remastered from a portable console. There's more of everything in terms of scope and variety, and you get the feeling that this is what the first game was going for with its overworld. On the other hand I also feel it was the technical limitations of the Vita that kept the development of the first Gravity Rush on a tight leash. Even if the story is episodic and unfocused, gameplay is straightforward and centers on simple, fun concepts that can be applied to different scenarios. Gravity Rush 2 instead opens with a lengthy first act that has you walking across cutscenes for the sake of building up intrigue for the story, I guess, Kingdom Hearts 2 style. And once you get down to actual meat and potatoes gameplay you find yourself constantly being interrupted in the middle of every mission or side mission with cutscenes and changing instructions, complete with annoying fade in/fade out, so you wind up with 5 minute breaks of gameplay where you do the thing they told you to do or wander about aimlessly because the game can be so goddamn cryptic sometimes.
The story is and isn't more focused. Ostensibly it's about Kat getting back to Hekseville, which she does about halfway through, although nothing she does in the first half of the game furthers that goal (she winds up there entirely accidentally, again) and then you spend the rest of the game just sort of helping around town one mission at a time, like in the first game. And then you get to the final act of the game, which renews Kat's interest in her past and identity (which the first game completely forgot about after bringing it up in the first 5 minutes, and so did this until the last hour or so) and proceeds to dump a truckload of twists, new characters and exposition that could've easily filled up an entire other game on their own. It's all incredibly convoluted and gratuitous and kinda made me hate the ending. If only they doled it out throughout the game. I also hated how anime the ending gets with its unending 100-stage bosses and harem of magical girls, each with 2-3 different identities, who keep unlocking hidden level after level of TRUE POWER as they fuse and transform and die and revive and on and on. Bleh.
I liked my downtime with the overworld. The cities are beautiful and lively and I enjoyed exploring them for collectables or just for the hell of it. Traversal is even more fun with three gravity styles to choose from; combining them for more efficient movement and racing is a lot of fun and one of the few things the game doesn't tutorialize. I liked many side missions because at least you get a little story or joke out of each. I was more incentivised to do them for the stories than whatever reward I was getting. And I do like Kat and the rest of the cast (many returning from the first game), even if the story lost me by the end. Like the game, the charm and cheerfulness tends to win you over the nonsense.
