Falling's Fantastic
To be succint, Gravity Rush 2 is a gorgeous, captivating adventure with a whole lot of verve and a few bum missions.
If you want to get a bit more specific, it's a game where you fly (or fall, to be precise) around a pair of marvellously realised cities as Kat, an amateur and somewhat scatterbrained superhero. The game also keeps you busy with opportunities for street photography, kicking soldiers, and chucking debris at strange gelatinous beings known as Nevi, but falling's where it's at: thanks to the dazzling kinetics of tumbling through the air and the colourful vistas, moving through the world of Gravity Rush 2 just might be the best thing about it.
Hell, calling them colourful vistas is a disservice. The game's first city, Jirga Para Lhao, is just brilliant: a mix of Spanish Colonial architecture, Hong Kong highrises and signage, and even a hint of busy Southeast Asian street markets. Children play with water pistols besides fountains, musicians busk in train stations, and people sell pretzels out of holed-out shipping containers. It's eclectic, cosmopolitan, and original. A lot of the game can be described in those terms, from its oddball cast to Kohei Tanaka's stellar rock-jazz-classical chimera of a soundtrack.
The writing throughout is suitably light-hearted and often quite funny, but isn't shy about bringing its emotional chops where it counts. Playing the original Gravity Rush isn't necessary, even if it is recommended for anyone looking to get the most out of late game plot developments. Crucially, the game's first and best storyline - one of social inequality and upheaval in the vein of A Tale of Two Cities - needs no context. Indeed, it's there where all that pretty environmental design becomes more than just set dressing: Gravity Rush 2 uses architecture and empty space, particularly along the vertical axis, to emphasise the disparities between the rich, the poor, and the really, really poor. Now, a flying city hiding its enormous shantytown beneath the cloud cover isn't the most subtle of metaphors for institutionalised poverty, but when it takes actual minutes to reach that shantytown after plummeting at terminal velocity from street level - well, that's one way to put your seamless open world to use.
In terms of side content, you're looking at a bunch of asynchronous time trials and a neat treasure hunt feature where you try to find cosmetics using photos from other players as hints. There are also a good forty-nine side quests, which are mechanically thin but almost universally well-written. Whether you'll find it worth spending time on them depends on how invested you are in the characters, and your appetite for bounding, blundering, and skidding your way through the world. If that ends up not being for you, no biggie - the main quest is lengthy and well executed, managing to capture more intimate moments while working its way up to a really pretty considerable scope. The main missions themselves don't always find interesting ways to make use of Kat's unique set of powers, but when it comes to spectacle they dream big, and the journey is well worth it.
Gravity Rush 2 took me thirty-four hours to see the credits roll (taking the time to smell the roses and, uh, just maybe finish every side quest along the way) - and there were times where the camera was a mess, or the stealth sections acted up, or a school of flying fish shot me with fireballs and tanked the framerate. But, overwhelmingly, my experience with Gravity Rush 2's strange worlds and endless spirit was delightful, and one of the best I've had with a video game in years.