Gravity Rush 2 lets players equip Talismans, which essentially function as perks, adding “special effects to your character.”
The most interesting Talismans will be earned through the game’s new mining mode. “I can’t give you too much information about it, but… [these] are separate stages that allow players to gain power-up items that are different from ones they would get from ordinary gameplay,” Toyama explains.
Interestingly, the mining mode will have an asynchronous online element where players can have their friends help them. That’s not the only online integration. “There’s a challenge mode,” Toyama tells me, “where your friends can challenge you to complete missions at a certain speed, and their ghosts will be imported into your game and you can race them.”
The focus, however, is very much on the single-player, story-driven experience. “We got a lot of feedback from players [of Gravity Rush] wanting more,” Toyama says. “They wanted to play longer, they wanted to see more of the world, and we’ve responded in this title. The overall size of the map – of the world – is 2.5 times as big as the original, and there are over three times as many missions as there were in the original.”
I ask about how the team is trying to ensure that missions are varied to avoid one of the major criticisms of the first game – a reliance on repetitive fetch quests. “We actually got lots of positive feedback about the game,” Toyama replies, “but as you say, there were some people who had issues with the types of missions and also just the overall amount of gameplay and playtime, so we really wanted to respond to that and you’ll find in this title, like we said, there are many more missions, the world is a lot bigger, and we made sure that there’s lots of things you can do in the missions, it’s not all the same thing. And that holds for even side missions, not just the story missions, so I think you’ll see that you get to do a lot.”