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Though from a technical standpoint, each of the series’ mainline installments has improved upon its predecessors, a game’s true quality is perhaps better measured by the impact that it made around the time of its release. The best Gran Turismo games really shook up the racing sim genre, while others merely toed the line.
Updated June 23, 2022, by Tom Bowen: It’s been a few months now since the release of Gran Turismo 7 and the dust kicked up by the game’s aggressive monetization has finally begun to settle. Though a lot of series fans are still unhappy with how costly some of the game’s more expensive cars can be and the title’s ridiculous always-online requirements, most have now made the leap from Gran Turismo Sport. Despite all the controversy, the game is reported to have enjoyed the series’ best-ever launch, with hundreds of thousands of copies being sold in multiple territories during its first few weeks on sale. Whether or not the uproar surrounding microtransactions ended up putting the brakes on sales remains to be seen. Either way, at this point, it seems unlikely that the game will come close to dethroning the best Gran Turismo game; either in terms of sales or critical acclaim.
9 Gran Turismo Sport
After a four-year wait, series fans were both eager and excited to get their hands on Gran Turismo Sport. Unfortunately, however, much of that excitement quickly evaporated in the weeks following the game’s release when it became clear just how ordinary this installment really was.
To be clear, Gran Turismo Sport is far from a bad game, but it’s not exactly revolutionary either. Even with its excellent post-launch support, it featured fewer tracks than its predecessor as well as a much smaller catalog of cars. This is also the game that introduced microtransactions to the series, with them also showing up in the game’s 2022 sequel.
8 Gran Turismo 6
Despite offering more cars and tracks than its predecessor, Gran Turismo 6 only sold around half as many units. This is because a lot of prospective buyers felt that it was just a little too similar to the series’ fifth installment, with very little innovation to be found.
Strictly speaking, GT6 does offer more depth and so is arguably the better of the two games, but much of this depth ends up being superficial. Once the new cars are taken out of the equation the two games were remarkably alike, leading many to stick with what they already had.
7 Gran Turismo
Despite first being announced at Sony’s E3 2004 press conference, it would not be until late 2009 that Gran Turismo was finally released for the PSP. Whether or not the end result was worth the wait is perhaps a matter for debate, though if sales are anything to go by, most series fans would probably agree that it was.
The game ended up selling just shy of 5 million units, making it one of the best-selling PSP games of all time. It didn’t fare quite as well with critics as it did consumers, however, with the game currently sitting on a 74 Metacritic average. Despite mixed reviews, it’s actually quite impressive for a handheld driving game of its era, not just in terms of visuals, but also when it comes to realism.
6 Gran Turismo 7
Following the disappointment of GT6 and GT Sport, Gran Turismo 7 had a lot of weight on its shoulders, particularly with Microsoft’s Forza series having now well and truly overtaken it in the eyes of many. The good news is that the game was able to deliver on these lofty expectations, offering a marked and noticeable improvement over the series’ two previous installments.
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Gran Turismo 7 is beautiful to look at and provides one of the most realistic driving experiences to date. That said, its single-player campaign can become a little monotonous, and the return of Microtransactions sour the experience somewhat. Even so, those looking for a realistic racing sim will struggle to find better when all’s said and done.
5 Gran Turismo 5
Gran Turismo 5 is the second best-selling game in the series’ history, and for very good reason. The increased power of the PS3 allowed for a huge step-up in visual fidelity, helping the game to blow all of the other racing games of the era clean out of the water.
With over 1,000 cars and 72 tracks, Gran Turismo 5 was the biggest Gran Turismo game at the time of its release and also the most realistic. The amount of care and attention that went into perfecting the driving physics is plain for all to see and a big part of what made the game so fun to play.
4 Gran Turismo 4
Building on the fantastic work of its predecessor, Gran Turismo 4 was everything that series fans could have ever hoped for and a whole lot more. With nearly four times as many cars and twice as many tracks, the game helped to enforce the “bigger is better” mantra, while also benefiting from some fine-tuning under the hood.
Granted, the lack of online play was a little disappointing, and the lackluster arcade mode held it back a little. Even so, the sheer volume of things to see and do ensured players could sink hundreds of hours into the game if they wanted to without ever getting bored, and more than just a few took advantage of this fact.
3 Gran Turismo 2
The first sequel to a smash-hit video game can be a difficult thing to get right, with many developers having struggled over the years. Polyphony Digital had no such issues with Gran Turismo 2 though, as evidenced by the game’s solid sales figures and its impressive reception from both players and critics.
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GT2 took the number of cars from 140 to 650 and almost tripled the number of tracks. New game modes and improved mechanics only served to further sweeten the deal and helped to cement the series’ position at the very top of the racing sim genre. Perhaps more importantly though, it showed that the first game was not just a fluke.
2 Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec
Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec is the best-selling Gran Turismo game to date and arguably offers the single greatest game-to-game improvements in the history of Sony’s long-running franchise. Given how impressive GT2 was, this was by no means an easy thing for the developers to pull off.
Though the number of cars did fall to a much more modest 181, GT3 offered more tracks and game modes than either of its predecessors. Better still, the big step-up in both power and disc capacity from the PlayStation 1 to the PlayStation 2 allowed the developers to crank the details up to incredibly impressive new levels.
1 Gran Turismo
Other than perhaps Virtua Fighter and Resident Evil, there’s an argument to be made that no one video game has made a bigger impression on a genre than Gran Turismo did. Its heavy emphasis on realism and unmatched visuals allowed the developers to really capture the fun of driving, without ever needing to resort to cheap gimmicks.
With only eleven tracks available, Gran Turismo may seem a little threadbare when compared to a modern racing game, but, at the time, eleven was more than enough. The 140 available cars were arguably a little too much, in fact, with many of the competition at the time only having around ten to fifteen vehicles for players to choose from.
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