Sure it’s fair criticize it, critic is very important, but to say these cars „shouldn’t exist in this game“ is just arrogant and to be honest a little bit fanatic.
You can think that if you want, but the Tomahawk and the Chapparal VGTs probably shouldn't exist in the game. The VGTs that obey the laws of physics are one thing, but I think it's absolutely fair to say that some of the VGTs simply shouldn't be in a game of this type at all.
Yes, that's me judging Kazunori's design of Gran Turismo and I'm fine with it. I've thought laser powered cars were dumb from the day they announced it.
Having some „out of the norm“ cars is even part of the franchise like the JayLeno Tank Car, the Moon Rover, the RedBull Cars, Benz Patentwagen, some fictional race Versions of real world Cars etc.. Some exist in real life, some not, so shouldn’t some of them exist in these games? Kaz just took it a step further with the VGT program, actually creating cars with the brands themselves, actually being part of the automotive history now. Maybe this was his dream for a long time and then he made it come true, the same as he did with his dream of a racing game like GT1. So is there any rule book that says which dreams he should make come true and which not? (It’s a rhetorical question)
Again, it's design decisions, but I think that there's a reasonable argument that the game is worse for having these entirely fictional cars in it. It becomes this weird halfway house between extreme realism and pure fantasy, not really committing to either and doing neither of them well.
That's before we get into the VGT program itself, which has no strong direction or definition about what the cars should be. It results in this wild spread of cars that mostly can't even reasonably race against each other, let alone other real cars. It's unclear what the VGT program is supposed to add to the game beyond marketing for the manufacturers - it lets them have "halo cars" in the game without the expense of actually making a halo car in the real world.
Having unusual cars is a good thing, it's arguably the reason GT1 took off in the first place. Street cars just didn't get much showing in video games, and so having everyday cars was unusual. VGTs aren't unusual, they're the sort of unstructured fantasy that ten year olds draw in the back of math books. When you're making a racing game based around competition, the bar probably needs to be a little higher than "wow, cool".
Let's make up an example of how a game like Gran Turismo could use fantasy cars well to show that there are better ways to do this stuff.
How about this - Gran Turismo wants to showcase what cars might look like in the future. So they design a road car for each decade of the 2000's, with varying design languages, powerplants, and whatever other odd variables they care to throw in. Because apparently it needs to be said, we're sticking to things that are actually technically feasible and would be viable mass production commercial products - no laser cars. They choose a performance specification (say, roughly the speed of a performance sportscar like a Porsche 911) and make sure that the cars are all roughly equivalent on track so that they can race together in a "Cars of the Future" series that they put together in-game.
Now these cars have a function as a showcase for potential future technologies and they could include text/movies as to the reasons why the car for each decade was designed the way it was, which could be educational and interesting (and Kaz would get to make little movies, which he likes). And they have a purpose built series in which they can race with a varied field of cars (which makes for good gameplay and means they get used). I think that's much better than random race cars. Then they have a purpose which expands the game in a direction that it didn't address before (the future of motoring), instead of just being a marketing ploy.
And that's just me, not a video game designer, in my free time at home. I would hope that a real game designer could do even better. These people are supposedly professionals.
In the context I wrote it, yes there is, it’s about the attitude.
Your problem is that you feel like people are being disrespectful to Kaz by saying how they think the game should be? He doesn't need you to white knight for him.
It's the internet. Part of the fun is that we get to back seat every design decision a developer makes. The exact same way any creative product is dissected and analysed. If you say something is wrong with a product, it's considered good form to at least make some effort to try and identify how it should have been instead. That's constructive criticism, and apparently you don't like when it's applied to Gran Turismo.
How interesting.