# 51
It was Ok. Enjoyment was hampered by a lot of little bad game design decisions.
It's something as simple as how they dealt with the challenges. You have to find them in the world and then pay a little of your upgrade currency in order to activate them. Before you play them, they are green and easy to see on the map. Once you finish it, it changes to the same shade of gold as the icons on the map for the train stations. The icon shapes are similar enough, it is difficult to tell them apart. So if I am looking for a train station or a particular challenge, several times I clicked the wrong type of icon by mistake. In addition, there is no change in the challenge icon which indicates its completion status (just finished, bronze, silver, or gold medal) which means you have to go through the map and click on all of them to see whether you have 100%ed it.
The city map is large enough that you can only look at it in sections, you zoom out, click a region of the city, and then you can see the challenges in that section. However one of the challenges ISN'T
ING viewable on the map. At max zoom-out in the factory district, the northernmost tip of the map is cropped off at the top of the screen. You have to click the manhole (what you use to fast travel) at the very top of the map right near it which pulls the challenge down from off the screen so that you can set a waypoint to it. At first I thought the trophy had glitched out on me (as it has for others) until I clicked on the challenges in each section of the city individually and compared it to the list to see that one was missing.
Further hampering my enjoyment of the challenges was the implementation of the move gravity slide. You press and hold your fingers on the two lower corners of the touch screen and Kat will skate across the ground, you turn the vita like a steering wheel to steer your direction. Not only does that turning mechanic not work very well, but use of gravity slide in the challenges caused my touchscreen to constantly become unresponsive in the lower 2 corners after a challenge. At first I had to completely shut down my vita in order to fix it, but eventually I was able to google a solution. Press the button on the top of the vita to put it to sleep and wait for the green light to go out. Then bring it out of sleep and the touchscreen will be reset.
Another little challenge related annoyance, there is an option to retry a challenge once you complete it or the time runs out, but not on the pause screen. Your only choice is to cancel the challenge, which means a long load screen back to the city in order to retry if you mess up a race and want to restart.
The narrative was also pretty threadbare and haphazard and yet by the end they managed to resolve almost none of it. I guess they just assumed a Gravity Rush 2 was a given.
The actual gameplay and graphics are pretty much the game's only bright spot as shifting gravity for traversal and combat is fairly unique and quite enjoyable, when the camera doesn't get in the way. Enemies become more varied / challenging and each of the 3 other dimensions offers its own traversal challenges. Pretty much the only section I really didn't enjoy was the long slog flying down to the bottom of the world near the halfway mark of the game as you sporadically lose your gravity powers so if you slip you'll be falling uncontrollably bouncing off ledges for several minutes like some endless game of Plinko. The game is still exceedingly pretty even though it came out a couple of months after the vita's launch with a steady framerate and a colorful art style.
Hopefully they smooth out all the rough edges for the sequel as if all the little problems were fixed the experience would have been much more enjoyable and I could have overlooked the weak story. Maybe a lot of this stuff was already fixed in GR: Remastered.
