I have been a very long running fan of the Gran Turismo series. I can quite clearly remember getting the first one upon release on PSX back in 1998. Which recent advertising for Gran Turismo’s 15th anniversary has reminded me that it was released 15 years ago and made me feel quite old. I have got and played every instalment since then including most of the weird single make demos and Prologues and such. But for some reason, I didn’t get into this one very much when I first got it. Most likely because I was swamped under by many other games at the time and I knew it would be a huge undertaking.
But with the impending release of Gran Turismo 6, I decided that it was finally time to get this one done. But decided to just “Beat” it for now (i.e. get to the credits roll) rather than 100% it which I had done with all the previous entries in the series. This would at least allow me to go into Gran Turismo 6 having experienced the majority of 5 beforehand.
The most obvious upgrade in this newest instalment in the series is the enhanced visuals thanks to the power of the PlayStation 3. But due to there still being some technical limitations, some cars do look nicer than others. Certain important or expensive cars are classed as “Premium” and will be rendered in exquisite detail with full lighting and shadowing and such. Whereas all the other cars will simply be rendered normally and while these still look better than PlayStation 2 cars, there is a very noticeable divide in their visual representations. There is now also car damage both visual and mechanical which was forbidden by Honda for a long time but they have finally allowed now. As well as a lot of manufacturers not previously available such as Ferrari and Lamborghini.
One new addition that I did not approve of is enormous loading times. Everywhere. Both in menus and getting ready to race, you seem to spend more time watching loading screens than you do playing. Despite it installing the game to the hard disk gradually as you go to reduce loading times, they never really seemed to get any better. One other new addition I did not like is the introduction of an RPG-like level system. You gain experience by doing events and level up, but the levels are only really there to provide entry barriers to later events stopping you from moving through the career at a pace faster than the developers wanted you to.
A-Spec and B-Spec are now also separate careers altogether. Rather than having one set of races that you can complete in A-Spec mode, B-Spec mode or both, now there are 2 entirely separate careers with separate sets of races and separate drivers with separate levels meaning you have to do a lot of things twice over. I did not particularly care for this change either and preferred the old system of being able to choose which mode I wanted.
The racing itself is the usual excellent simulation handling that we have all come to expect from Gran Turismo. There were many tweaks put into the engine this time around to make it even more realistic and you can notice them over time and trying out a number of cars.
This is the first game in the series to have an online mode, but I did not touch that for obvious reasons.
Most of my time was spent racing through various events (when I had reached high enough levels), winning cars, doing license tests (when I had reached high enough levels). I did the usual Gran Turismo thing of using one of the better cars that I won earlier on (A Toyota Scion FR-s) and continuously tuning it up to its limit so that it was in races against cars that far outclassed it but still won. I did this for as long as possible, then did some single make races and was lucky enough to win a Mazda Concept Le Mans car that I could use in the World Championship.
Left: The Toyoya FR-S that took me most of the way to victory.
Right: The Mazda Furai Concept that won me the world championship.
As mentioned before, I only went as far in this game as to hit the end credits and consider it a win, but I did have a lot of fun with it and it is another game that I want to return to after the backlog is defeated and do more of because it brought back a lot of good racing memories. That were only slightly hampered by some annoying new features.
On to Gran Turismo 6!
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