![]() The economy has a similarly sluggish pace. It doles out unlocks at such a cautious, steady pace that you can be a dozen hours into the game before you truly have the freedom to just pick something you fancy driving and can find an event to suit. But as the main spine of the campaign, it’s linear and restrictive. As a guided tour of the game and its garage of cars, it’s thoughtful, and a welcome contrast to the basic grid of events that previous GTs would unceremoniously dump on players. The Café is both a boon and a handicap for GT7. Some of them are real-life car designers or GT players, but they all speak with the same stilted, awkward, yet strangely sentimental voice: the voice of Gran Turismo. The Café is also where you fall into conversation (of a sort) with a collection of stock-art talking heads who are as eager to educate you on automotive history as they are to guide you around the game. Here, while enjoying the relaxed ambiance and smooth jazz, you pick up “Menus,” which are essentially quests that both gate and curate your progress through the game, gradually unlocking tracks, championships, and features, as well as rewarding you with cars. ![]() Once in the game proper, you are introduced to another GT7 innovation, the GT Café. It’s the exact opposite of cool, but it’s very charming. As if making a play for the lucrative octogenarian demographic, Yamauchi’s opening gambit is to sit you behind the wheel of a 1956 Porsche to the strains of “Hooked on Classics (Parts 1 & 2).” The next round has you buzzing around Tokyo in a tiny Honda while Idris Elba raps at you. ( GT6, after all, took you to the surface of the moon.) Before you even see the main menu, Gran Turismo 7 throws you into a round of Music Rally, a hilariously gauche new time-attack minigame in which you try to cover as much distance as possible in the length of one song. That’s not to say it’s without the eccentric flights of fancy that have long livened up a series with an undeserved reputation for dryness. At times it seems hemmed in by tradition, and at others, held back by a heavy guiding hand. ![]() But still, it’s not what you would call light on its feet. Despite its big ambitions and wealth of content, Gran Turismo 7 always feels slick and manageable, and it’s a treat to see Polyphony bring its renowned technical gloss to the PlayStation 5. It’s a testament to their enormous skill and passion that they largely succeed. They want this all-encompassing series to carry all its baggage, plus over a century of motoring history, into the future. They want - quite desperately, it seems - to get people excited about cars again. They seem to want it to be the Gran Turismo that fans remember, with all the features they love. This is the world Yamauchi and his team strive to confront in Gran Turismo 7. But it launched as a slender shadow of what the public expects of a Gran Turismo game a traditional single-player campaign was only patched in as an afterthought, and many GT features, including the car modification system that has always been a hallmark of the series, never made it in. It got many things right, not least the way it brought driver and safety rating systems from hardcore simulator iRacing into a more approachable arena. In 2017, though, developer Polyphony Digital looked to the future with Gran Turismo Sport, a multiplayer-first, live-service-inspired detour. ![]() Image: Polyphony Digital/Sony Interactive Entertainment Today, an upstart spinoff from those games has become a popular phenomenon by putting vibes first and borrowing the design of open-world adventures, culminating in the magnificent Forza Horizon 5, in which the cars - and the racing - were only part of the point. Back then, its main competitor was the Forza Motorsport series, which was made in GT’s image. Our relationship with racing games has changed, too, in the years since Gran Turismo 6. Can cars even be cool in 2022? “You won’t find as many people talking about car culture anymore,” director Kazunori Yamauchi said recently, adding that GT7 had been built with this new reality in mind. Climate change has forced a reevaluation, and the internal combustion engine is on the way out. In the quarter century since “the real driving simulator” became a sensation with its involved physics and grainy photorealism, our relationship with cars has changed. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences.
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