When you first launch Gran Turismo 7, a splash screen will inform you that this year marks the 25th anniversary of Sony’s flagship PlayStation racing game. As of Gran Turismo 6, released exclusively for the PlayStation 3 in 2013, more than eight years and one platform generation had passed since the release of a mainline, numbered edition in the series. The weight of these eons hangs heavily over the new game. Maybe they provide light on its fixation with the past.
Our connection with automobiles has shifted in the quarter century since “the actual driving simulator” became a phenomenon because of its complex mechanics and grainy photorealism. Because of climate change, conventional internal combustion engines are being phased out. In 2022, will vehicles still be hip? Kazunori Yamauchi, the director, recently said, “You won’t find as many people talking about automotive culture anymore,” and he went on to say that GT7 was designed with this new reality in mind.
With Gran Turismo 6, our connection with racing games has evolved. The Forza Motorsport series, which was modeled by GT, was its major rival at the time. In the modern day, a spinoff of those games has become a phenomenon by prioritizing atmosphere and copying the concept of open-world adventures, with the pinnacle being the exquisite Forza Horizon 5, in which the vehicles and the racing were secondary concerns.
Polyphony Digital, however, took a detour into the future in 2017 with Gran Turismo Sport, a multiplayer-focused take on the series inspired by live services. It did a lot of things well, like bringing iRacing’s advanced driver and safety rating systems to a more casual audience. Nevertheless, it debuted as a pale imitation of what fans of drift hunters of the Gran Turismo series have come to anticipate; the game lacked the series’ trademark vehicle customization system and the single-player campaign was added as an afterthought.
With Gran Turismo 7, Yamauchi and his colleagues want to take on this kind of environment. They want it to include all the elements that made Gran Turismo great in the first place. They apparently need badly to rekindle the public’s interest in automobiles. The creators hope that this anthology series will be able to take a century’s worth of automobile history with it into the future.
Their widespread success attests to their extraordinary talent and dedication. It’s great to see Polyphony bring its famed technical shine to the PlayStation 5, and Gran Turismo 7’s huge goals and amount of content never seem overwhelming. Yet it’s still not exactly nimble on its feet. It seems constrained by custom and restrained by the authority at times.
That’s not to say it lacks the wacky imagination that’s long enlivened a series with a false reputation for tedium. (After all, GT6 brought you to the lunar surface.) Gran Turismo 7 immediately launches you into Music Rally, a delightfully obnoxious new time-attack minigame in which you attempt to drive as far as possible during the duration of a song before you can even access the main menu. Yamauchi’s initial move seems to be an attempt to appeal to the wealthy elderly by placing you in control of a 1956 Porsche while playing “Hooked on Classics (Parts 1 & 2).” In the following round, you’ll be rapping at Idris Elba while whizzing around Tokyo in a little Honda. It’s the antithesis of cool yet endearing all the same.
The GT Café is yet another new feature featured in the main game of GT7. While taking in the soothing atmosphere and soothing music, you may pick up “Menus,” which are basically tasks that both gate and curate your progress in the game, eventually unlocking courses, championships, features, and automobiles. At the cafe, you can strike up a discussion (of sorts) with a cast of stock-art talking heads who are just as happy to tell you about the history of cars as they are to show you the ropes of the game. Some of them are actual vehicle designers or Gran Turismo players, yet they all sound like the voice of Gran Turismo: stiff, clumsy, and oddly nostalgic. (Maybe Yamauchi’s voice.)
The Café helps and hurts GT7 in different ways. It’s a smart introduction to the game and its collection of vehicles, and a nice change of pace from the standard event grids that were often dumped on players in past GTs. But, as the backbone of the whole campaign, it is limiting and one-dimensional. It’ll take you tens of hours into the game before you’re free to choose any vehicle you want to drive and discover an event to fit your preferences since unlocks are doled out cautiously and steadily.
The economy moves at the same glacial speed. Several of the best automobiles are unattainable until late in the game due to the sluggish pace at which credits are earned. It’s also feasible to waste a large portion of your savings on modifying your dream car. Sometimes it’s necessary to travel off-road to grind for credits just to stay up with the admission criteria of tournaments. (Gran Turismo has long had close ties to the role-playing genre in Japan; the series has always welcomed elements like grinding and over leveling that are often avoided in Western racing games.) It seems that the economy in GT7 was designed with the sole intention of getting people to spend money at the PlayStation Store. But, the ludicrous “it’s raining cars” oversupply of Forza Horizon might seem like a welcome correction when you need to think about how you spend your money and desire for exotic automobiles that seem out of reach.
On the track, though, this is classic Gran Turismo, with the same attention to detail and commitment to the series’ founding ideals that made the original games so popular in the late ’90s. In contrast to Forza Horizon’s over-the-top drifting, the handling model in this game seems more grounded and realistic thanks to the game’s emphasis on a rooted, tactile driving experience. Sony’s DualSense controller features the finest ergonomics and haptic feedback of any of their racing game controllers. Brake and throttle response stiffness are conveyed by adjustable triggers, and the car’s wide-ranging rumble brings the vehicle’s physicality to life. An important factor is the game’s revamped soundtrack, which, like the visuals, forgoes the hyperrealistic style of competing titles in favor of something subdued but more communicative, particularly when it comes to wind and tire sounds.
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