As of this writing, the latest entry in the Gran Turismo series is Gran Turismo 7, released in 2022 for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, while the latest entry is Forza Motorsport (8; 2023) released in 2023 for Xbox Series X/S. Reviews from publications like IGN rated GT7 better than FM (2023) but I can't agree with them on this. There are things that I like about Gran Turismo, but there is a lot that has been wrong with it for quite some time and continues to remain wrong with it, and some of them are major problems.
I dabbled with early GT titles but didn't get into them until later on. GT5 was the first GT in which I spent any meaningful amount of time, and in fact I completed everything in the career except the longest of the endurance races; the ones greater than four hours in length. There were things I liked about it. The car models were accurately detailed, there were over a thousand cars, I enjoyed the driving, and the content created for PS3 looked great.
That brings me to glaring issues with GT5. It had over 1,000 cars, yes, but only 220 or so were built for PlayStation 3. The other 800+ were copy-pasted from older games on older hardware and it shown, badly. The same went for tracks, with newly-modeled tracks looking great but some looking grossly outdated. If it was just the 220+ newly-modeled cars and however many newly-modeled tracks, it would have been a great-looking game. Unfortunately, the great content was buried under mountains of garbage.
Above is an actual photo I personally took in GT5, using the game's own photo mode. There's no manipulation of any kind here. It has not been edited in any way. This isn't some distant object in the background not meant to be seen up close. This is a car I was driving on the track. This is a PS3 game. The problem is that the bulk of the game was pre-PS3 content running as-is on PS3. The only obvious change is the tires, which were GT5 tires. This would have looked great on PS1, but not so much on PS3.
I have many other issues with GT5, including sounding like vacuum cleaners, lack of vehicle damage, or the lousy elevator music. I swear to God, the first time I heard a particular "song" in GT5, I didn't know it was supposed to be music. The shrill noise sounded like something was going terribly wrong inside my PS3, like the disc drive eating my GT5 disc or perhaps the hard drive being chewed to bits. I won't name the song because the band has a profanity in its name.
One of my top gripes with GT5, and subsequent GT games, is what I call overtake-the-parade. I've commonly seen it referred to as "chase the rabbit." Regardless of what you call it, it's you starting at the back of a parade of cars strung out quite some distance ahead of you, one by one, like a parade, with you tasked with catching up and passing within X-amount of laps. This isn't a race, but more like a driving challenge, except it's not driving challenges on the side in some sort of extra game mode but the core career mode content.
That overtake-the-parade gameplay isn't limited to GT5 and GT6 but continues in GT7, and God only knows why. The game is fully capable of actual races, yet for some baffling reason Polyphony Digital decided that we aren't interested in racing but instead want to start at the tail of a parade of old ladies sprinkled one by one half a lap ahead of us. Why honestly enjoys this over actual racing? IGN does, evidently, as they decided that GT7 is better than Forza Motorsport. Personally, I can't accept a game with such mediocre gameplay as being a superior product.
Don't get me wrong. There are things I like about GT7. It does look nice, and the cars seem to me to be better, more accurately modeled. However, there remains not only the lousy parade-chasing gameplay choice but a near complete lack of vehicle damage and three-generations-ago number of cars on track. Regarding the damage, GT fans argue that we're not supposed to crash, so we shouldn't need damage. However, simultaneously GT fans make clips comparing AI behavior in both games when a car is spun around and stationary on the track, with Forza AI appearing more confused by it. Just as we're not supposed to be wrecking and taking damage, we're also not supposed to be spinning around and parking in the track. Wrecks and damage do happen in real life motorsports, though, so even though it's not desirable it still has a place in a racing game, or what should be a racing game but forgot what racing is.
Here I've posted screenshots of GT7 and FM2023, both at the start of career race events; or "races" in quotation marks, in the case of GT7. Note that GT7 has the player in 10th and last place at the rear of a parade strung out far enough that they player can't even see the front cars, while Forza has you in a field of twenty-four cars, all bunched together on a starting grid. The latter feels more like an actual race, while the former feels more like a game, and not a good one. FM2023 consistently has fields of twenty-four cars, while GT7 regularly has less than half of that. While my example here has ten cars, I often see as few as eight, which is a third of the field FM runs.
Nitpick Forza as much as you like, but I can't accept that GT7 is somehow better despite all of its major, glaring flaws and shortcomings. Remember, I don't hate Gran Turismo or GT7 specifically. I just don't accept it as superior to Forza Motorsport (2023.)