Gravity Rush and What Handheld Gaming Has Lost

Portable gaming has reached unprecedented levels of popularity in the last decade, quite possibly at an all-time high. Frankly, gamers who want to take their virtual experiences on the go are spoiled for choice. With the Nintendo Switch series, you can take the biggest and most fleshed-out version of Super Smash Brothers with you anywhere, with no compromises or concessions. Purchasing a Steam Deck or other comparable portable computer allows you access to thousands of actual PC games – including massive award-winning games like Baldur's Gate 3 – in their entirety, whether from the comfort of your couch or the top of a mountain.

This doesn't even touch on the incredibly robust mobile game market, which includes and contributes to some of the biggest video games the world has ever seen. Whether you want to drop in for a few rounds of Fortnite or build a castle in Minecraft, the ability to do so with surprisingly few limitations lives on the same device you carry with you every day. We are finally living in a future many of us could only dream of as children – console-grade experiences, whenever and wherever we want.

Yet, as we stand on the precipice of limitless portability, a play-through of Japan Studio's excellent Gravity Rush on native PlayStationVita hardware presented me with a question: in our quest for ever more expansive, console-quality experiences on the go, have we lost the very essence of what made handheld gaming special?

The tale of the Vita is old as time: Sony released an excellent piece of technology with little marketing and explanation, balked at the fact that it was received extremely well but sold poorly, refused to support it in any financially risky capacity, and allowed it to die a long, slow death as it gasped for breath, languishing in a sea of obscure and mediocre titles. Is that a bit dramatic? Yes, but the Vita really is a special little machine that was never given the chance to achieve its full potential. The Vita's hardware placed it squarely between the PS2 and the PS3 in terms of power, which allowed the handheld to have some truly groundbreaking and excellent experiences, including Gravity Rush. Released on June 12th, 2012 and despite the Vita's small install base, Gravity Rush was extremely well-received and quickly captured the hearts of those lucky enough to play it.

While the game itself is truly fantastic – it has a unique concept, intriguing characters, a gorgeous game world, and movement mechanics so fun it rivals Marvel's Spider-Man – that's not really what kept passing through my mind as I shifted my way through Hekseville. Instead, my thoughts swirled with the idea that Gravity Rush feels so perfectly tailor-made for a handheld environment, and that concept is sorely missing from our modern console offerings. Pinpointing exactly what makes this phenomenon occur can be difficult, but I narrowed it down to two key factors that define the true handheld experience.

First, many handheld games were tailored to let us enjoy their experiences in short bursts, not just typical home console binging for hours at a time. Gravity Rush has the uncanny ability to feel expansive and more than the sum of its parts, despite Hekseville itself being relatively small, thanks to the verticality of its design; there's an astronomical amount of explorable space both on top of the buildings and below the city. Thanks to the city's layout, playing for 30 minutes is just as satisfying as playing for 3 hours. The game's numerous challenges are short and to the point, while remaining challenging, re-playable, and engaging. A player can sink as much or as little time into Gravity Rush with each session as they see fit and still make meaningful progress.

When a handheld game jumps to our television screens, there's almost always something lost in translation

Secondly, the game has to operate within the confines of the handheld's limitations and features. For Gravity Rush, this means taking full advantage of Vita's gyroscopic motion tracking, touchscreen capabilities, and impressive hardware (for the time). The best handheld games – Gravity Rush included – don't try to create an amazing experience in spite of handheld limitations; instead, they lean heavily into them to craft an experience that can only be felt on that specific handheld. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, a 3DS darling, is a perfect example of this idea in action. It isn't just a good Zelda game, filled with dungeons and puzzles. It's a good handheld experience, utilizing the 3D effects and touchscreen of the 3DS to craft an adventure you couldn't have anywhere else.

The opposite rings true as well. When a handheld game jumps to our television screens, there's almost always something lost in translation. Whether it's one of the numerous PSP games that were ported to PS2 or even the Gravity Rush Remaster for the PS4, something always feels off while you play. With Gravity Rush Remaster, it's the scope of Hekesville itself. With a Vita in hand, Hekesville feels like this massive world inhabited by tons of people, complete with distinct neighborhoods and unique transit systems to visit all of them. After these areas are unlocked, the transit system can be forgone completely, instead opting to allow Kat to zip around to the different neighborhoods. This allows you to really feel the transition between spaces and gives a genuine sense of awe that this huge world could fit on this tiny Vita.

When played on a console that saw massive open-world games like The Witcher 3 and Ghost of Tsushima, however, the whole experience becomes much more quaint. It creates a significantly emptier experience; moments of astonishment are replaced with a general sense of lackluster indifference. That feeling goes to show that these games are designed around and best experienced on the hardware for which they were originally created.

Today, we have the hardware that dreams are made of with the Nintendo Switch series and the Steam Deck. That said, there is a strange feeling of loss when one returns to the handheld games of yore. You don't know what you have until it's gone, and while the ability to take these huge console experiences on the go is a better experience overall, there's something to be said for the beautiful simplicity and innovative creativity that accompanies purely handheld experiences.

While some of this certainly is nostalgia – go back and play some of the more obscure games on a handheld like the Game Boy Advance and you'll quickly find they haven't aged particularly well – the sentiment has become "this works very well in handheld" and not "this is made for handheld." That sort of specialty being lost to the annals of time is a shame; it forces a homogeneity between on-the-go gaming and home gaming that causes the former to lose a bit of what made it so special in the first place. The future of handheld gaming may look brighter than ever, but some of that sheen was bought with the identity of the glorious past.