Gran Turismo 7: The Definitive Review
Hooked on the classic.
In the first few weeks of owning a PlayStation 4, I was hankering for a driving sim to replace the gaping hole left by the corruption of a 500hrs+ save of Gran Turismo 5, which Gran Turismo 6 had failed to heal. I’d played nearly every Gran Turismo at some point, even the PlayStation Portable version1, but Gran Turismo 5 was the one that I took to with absolute commitment. This is partly due to the incredibly generous (perhaps reckless) credit facilities offered to me by the RBS group in 20102, which saw an in-person invitation to casually add an additional £1000 to an overdraft clearance loan, a sum that very neatly paid for a new TV, a PlayStation 3 slim, a Driving Force GT wheel and a copy of Gran Turismo 5. Thus began the romance with Kazunori Yamauchi’s beautifully idiosyncratic fifth take on the Real Driving Simulator. For my PlayStation 4, dalliances with the thoroughly decent Driveclub and the intoxicating Assetto Corsa3 did fine until the arrival of Gran Turismo Sport4, but as with Gran Turismo 6, the increasing focus on online competitive racing meant I didn’t muster quite the same passione automobilistica as I had for 5.
This leads to my unexpected ownership of a PlayStation 5. As I was almost obliviously flicking through the PS Plus game catalogues, I didn’t realise that a seed had been planted which would rapidly germinate as a niggle in the unconscious that I couldn’t shake. I felt I was missing something that would be really good to play but couldn’t place it. And then, it broke through - GRAN TURISMO SEVEN EXISTS, YOU IMBECILE! Hilariously, I’d been so conditioned to think of Turismo as a wheel-only game, I’d almost deliberately ignored it as a possibility to play. Over in Xbox land, I was plodding through some non-Cuban jungle in Far Cry 6 with a sense of ennui so spectacularly unfulfilling that I almost tried to drown myself when I felt a Turismo twinge. Revisiting Cyberpunk to invite Judy to my flat for some of the most embarrassing dancing I have ever seen in a videogame prompted the twinge again. Having promised myself that after Far Cry 6 I’d go for Phantom Liberty, I felt this novel tug in an entirely new direction. Was it now time to commit to a brand new Gran Turismo grind? Without a wheel?5 Of course it was!
Beautifully, I paid full price for it. This did not horrify me. However, upon inserting the disc to be greeted with a download of over 100 gigabytes chilled me to the core. On my broadband, that was going to take a long time. A long time. Days passed and progress seemed glacial. Then I went menu-diving and fiddled with the options. Turns out the PS5 was defaulting to dribble downloading if the TV was turned off, but unchecking a couple of HDMI options put paid to that. Nonetheless, some four days after buying the game, I was finally able to start. But first, it’s probably worth making an aside about Music Rally. I cannot describe the emotion I felt when witnessing that the very first contact I would have with Gran Turismo 7’s handling model would be soundtracked by the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s deliriously kitsch Hooked On Classics. This cursed precursor to Jive Bunny is an absolutely astonishing choice on Kazunori’s part, especially given the rest of the Gran Turismo 7 soundtrack. But in a very emblematic way, the choice of Hooked On Classics expresses the wonderfully individual nature of Gran Turismo as a whole. Being attributable to just one human, the series is the life’s work of Kazunori Yamauchi and his specific cultural tastes, and this gives Gran Turismo an irreplicable charisma that literally every other racing simulator simply lacks.
We can be Euro-sniffy about Forza Motorsport and its somewhat corporate US-centrism, or the oddly flat, unemotional presentation of Assetto Corsa or Project C.A.R.S., which perhaps took po-faced and furrowed-brow simulation credentials a bit too seriously. While they’re all admirable stablemates in terms of driving, racing and car selection, there’s a reason why Gran Turismo gained a retrospectively-named music genre and the rest didn’t6. And this does revolve around Kazunori’s position as the series creator. He sits in a tradition of specifically Japanese auteurs that seemingly inject charm and unique qualities into their work. Like Miyamoto, Suzuki, Kojima, Mikami, Kamiya, Ueda or Takahashi, Yamauchi’s games are indelibly marked with personal stylistic features that cohere into a clear and definite personal style7. Gran Turismo 7 is unmistakably Gran Turismo, boasting a quirky career system that seems in flagrant, obstinate defiance of whatever focus-grouped ‘optimal onboarding funnels’ its less quixotic competitors may deploy. And settling into this is a unique pleasure.
Quite a bit was made at the time of release regarding Gran Turismo 7’s apparent age; this is not, by any means, a ‘young’ game. Almost in complement with its temporal status, the game itself is old. And comfortably so - centering career progression around a café and chatting to car design luminaries about whatever you’ve rolled up in is absolutely a country for old men. Its emphasis on car collecting after the competitive focus of Gran Turismo Sport shifts its perspective away from the savage urge to win and towards affluent hoarding, something far more resonant with me personally. However it has me wishing for a spectator mode where I can stand at the edge of some racetrack, watching youngsters compete while I gossip away with other 40-somethings about paint colours, interior options or induction noises. On embarking the game, It was lovely to get a lottery ticket for my Gran Turismo Sport save, but the ludicrous GT Vision monstrosity it shat into my garage was far less welcome. Oh well, back to the cafe and its delightfully weird idea of forcing me to collect the cars that Kazunori wants me to have. It’s counter-intuitive hand-holding that does feel restrictive, but certainly trains you to get the most out of the limited prowess of small-capacity hatchbacks and vintage cars8. The game’s opening stages are gentle, they’re mild challenges for a more laid-back approach to building experience and confidence in tandem with establishing a car collection.
A CEX customer review asserted that Gran Turismo 7 is a game to be played slowly; to be savoured. And that certainly seems to be the case. It feels like there’s such a long tail here that I could be grinding for years before I can come close to the collection I had in Gran Turismo 59. I certainly don’t expect to be showered in Koenigseggs and Mustangs for coming 309,589th in the world ranking for going fast along a straight road. In terms of my personal goals, I just want to buy a Ferrari. And then maybe a BAC Mono. Or perhaps get to the Legends dealership. And then buy everything. That’s what, six years of grinding at my current pace? But what a zen-like grind it is. Racetrack driving is an original gaming flow-state, with it predating the shooter with a vast array of electro-mechanical ancestors where smooth control and knowledge of the bends and curves were rewarded just as satisfyingly as they were in Night Driver and all the driving sims that came after it. I find an odd tranquillity when knowledge of car and course blend into the sublime rhythms of time-trialling a track. My main objective being to clear the other competitors as quickly as possible in a race, so you can live out the rest of the laps in pursuit of the fastest ‘pure’ time, of the closest harmony between you, the machine and the place. And engineered speed isn’t always everything, a lesson that Gran Turismo has always upheld with its celebration of the everyday and mundane alongside the wildest exotica and track-specific racecars. I squealed with delight to find my daily driver as a default starting car (Mazda 2, if you must know10) and curiously, I find its low-excitement traversals of the Brands Hatch Indy circuit as satisfying and calming as when I was tearing around it in top-tier Toyota Le Mans machinery, way back in Gran Turismo Sport. But then, the driving sim lap is about a level of surrender that other games don’t have. There’s no survival challenge, that primer mover so common to everything else. From fail-state puzzle games to FPSes to fighting games, your flow state is about winning to live and living to win by defeating things. In driving games, we’re almost abstracted away from such earthly weaknesses. It’s about getting the lowest number, the shortest time. To focus correctly is to seek a kind of unholy union with the game. Use the high, become the car. At its most transportative, within a driving sim the notion of a driver avatar is surplus to requirements, for your inputs flow through the vehicle directly; there are no modifiers for wobbly hands or unsure feet, sweaty fingertips or slippery soles. In the sim, you interface directly with the physical modelling of the vehicle and in the time trial, commonly the only thing you have to defeat is your previous best efforts. It’s a unique purity, perhaps only finding kinship in the venerable parkour challenges of Mirror’s Edge and its superlative abstraction of the rooftops as racetracks.
I think I’m going to try and thread Gran Turismo 7 around the rest of the games I want to play this year. But then I think I could roadmap a five-year plan for it quite easily. And in a way, it’s lovely that the game’s deliberately meandering opening pace lets it fade in and out of your attention. Not so much a game for the gaps between bigger and shinier attractions11, but a game for those whims to find tranquillity at speed, to thread the entry to apex to exit with the spacial music of momental grace. To dance for just a little while and earn just a little money along the way. To sit with a game that’s comfortable with its age, and comfortable talking to the ages who perhaps most appreciate the depth of its catalogue and the depth of its commitment to the culture it celebrates. Grand Turismo is a common misnomer, but you know what? it really fits.
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I can proudly say that the reason I never hacked my Vita was because of the Gran Turismo Portable save I had on it, which had treasured cars I'd bought during heroic grinds undertaken between 5 and 11am while trying to stay awake for an entire 24 hours of Le Mans.
I'm not kidding - the bank guy literally said "Sure we can clear your overdraft, but would you like a new TV or anything?"
Seems unfair to leave out Project C.A.R.S., but I really didn't give it the same beans as I did Assetto Corsa.
For which, of course, I bought a wheel. A Thrustmaster this time, without force feedback. It was actually not too bad!
I actually felt OK about taking on Gran Turismo 7 with a pad. I haven't even checked to see if my PS4 wheel will work, as I suspect it won't, but I actually want to take it back to those original PS1 roots with pad-based play. I remember many years ago, when working on PR for a racing sim, being part of a discussion between the publishing figurehead and a journo where pad controls were brought up. The journo bemoaned how no contemporary racers had Gran Turismo's twin-stick config for pad control. Obviously with steering on the left, the right stick was for up for throttle, down for brake. "It's so smooth, so sweet - just like a radio-controlled car", he remarked. I was struck by the beautiful translation it represented, how this immediately showed how wide Kazunori Yamauchi's experience was, and how he'd channelled it into his game. It made perfect sense. Wonderfully, Gran Turismo 7 still supports this control method, though I went with the triggers like a fucking lightweight because some assholes said the triggers where really special. THAT'S IT, I'M CHANGING THE SETTING RIGHT NOW.
What do you mean you don't have a playlist named "GRAN TURISMO MENU JAZZ"?
It is fascinating how many Japanese game creators can qualify as auteurs in the AAA space when you consider how few there are in the West. I mean, I didn't even mention Suda 51, Mizuguchi, Nagoshi, Sakurai, Maegawa and Iuchi and SO ON.
The menu challenge to modify a 60s car to 500PP saw me perform such ludicrous weight reduction on a Mini that it became wonderfully planted at high cornering speeds. This gave me such confidence that I drove like an absolute hooligan, loving every non-braking, gap-threading second.
Gran Turismo 5 introduced online races, which included permanent challenge races with big bucks for winning. A real favourite was a five-lap blast around Spa in Group C cars for 100k. Having hard-way grinded my way to a Jaguar XJR-9, this race was a mainstay that let me fill out my Le Mans collection in reasonable time. A sizeable chunk of grinding that I treasure fondly.
I drive a Mazda 2 because the post-2015 models have the Skyactive 4-cylinder engine from the MX-5 Mk4/ND. I've had two MX-5s and loved them so very dearly that when needing a school-run hatchback, there was no other choice.
Yes, yes Phantom Liberty but omg it turns out Like A Dragon Hawaii is really fucking good? Who could have guessed that? Man, I need a back injury that means I absolutely must sit on a couch for three months, moving only my hands.