I haven’t written a game review in quite some time, and I can attribute it to not playing anything particularly noteworthy.  However, I managed to come into some Xbox games recently, and one of them stuck out to me.  I remember years ago I played a demo of Jet Grind Radio for the Dreamcast, and I always wanted to really play it.  I had my opportunity with its successor, Jet Set Radio Future.  It’s been nearly a decade since its release, so let’s see how it holds up over time.

The game has a fairly simple framework.  The city of Tokyo-To has come under siege by various gangs vying for control of the major city sectors.  In addition, a corporate enterprise led by the mayor of the city wants to enforce police rule and take away the people’s freedoms.  You play the role of the GGs, a group of teenage skaters intent on taking back the city.  Really, the story does nothing more than provide a means to move you from point A to point B to point C.  Along the way you seize control of sectors by tagging over your rival’s graffiti.  Taking the area prompts them to come out of hiding and confront you for a challenge.  In addition, you have to fight off the corrupt officers who want nothing more than your body on slab in the morgue.  All of this roughly translates to 10-15 hours of game play to complete the chapter-formatted storyline.

You might easily mistake this for one of the great number of “extreme sports” games like the Tony Hawk series.  You would make a terrible mistake.  JSRF is actually an action/adventure game with roller blades glued onto your feet.  Thus, you work with a stripped down control scheme.  The analog stick moves you around, and it must always be engaged to move.  Touching a rail with your feet immediately attaches you to it, and you do not need to deal with balance.  Pressing the X or Y buttons in a rhythm changes your grind and increases your speed.  You can only attain max speed while grinding, so you want to stay on rails as much as possible.  Air tricks automatically execute when you jump with enough speed, and you can again press X or Y to chain more air tricks together.  You need to pick up spray cans to tag objects, and you can sacrifice 10 of them to activate a speed boost.  Two big problems exist with the control scheme.  First, everything in the game handles loosely, including collision detection.  Second, the only way to disengage from a rail is to jump.  This can make for a frustrating time trying to get off a rail to land in a specific area.

You spend much of the first half running around the city reclaiming areas by tagging them.  This sounds very simplistic until you realize these gangs put their graffiti in the most out of the way locations.  A mechanic like this almost demands some level of customization.  The game provides many premade tags, and also gives you the option to design your own.  When the police show up, you switch into combat mode.  Your objective is to make the targets vulnerable and then spray them with paint.  Rival skaters and gangs will pose a variety of challenges.  Some areas naturally resemble a circuit, and so they challenge you to a lap around the area.  A team race also exists, where you and a CPU ally have to complete a lap without losing possession of a ball.  At other times, they literally challenge you to a game of tag, where you must spray them down until they submit.  All of these different styles of play help keep the action from becoming too repetitive.

In a game about the streets, much of the experience rides on the style and atmosphere provided by the game.  Over eight years, the graphics have lost a bit of their edge, but they still look decent.  The designers went with cell-shaded models, and all the characters have their own special touches.  The game also plays up the slightly futuristic setting in the main character designs.  The total area covered spans over a dozen different maps.  Each one of them contributes to a cohesive whole while incorporating new designs to make them unique.  You start in the bright streets and bustling bus station of the city.  Over time, you expand your influence to cover the suburbs, sewage system, slums, and skyscrapers.  My favorite area is a continuous hill made up entirely of houses, which you navigate by riding crisscrossing power lines.  The game provides a decent variety of music with 30 tracks in total, mostly in the hip-hop and techno genres.  Each area has a preset selection of tracks it plays in a cycle.  The soundtrack has some real winners, such as Aisle 10, Funky Dealer, and I Love Love You.  It also has a few very poor choices, like Birthday Cake, which made me want to mute the game every time it played.  Since you have no control over the playlist, you just have to take the good with the bad here.

Time for the bottom line.  The game will turn some of you off right away with its style and themes.  I can’t blame you, it’s not for everyone.  The game can be difficult at times, but for the most part, it maintains a fair difficulty curve.  They developers also packed the world with optional goals and collectables to keep you playing after the credits roll.  JSRF does have flaws, but they never detract too much from the experience.  If you can find the game used, it is definitely worth the low price of admission.

Final Score: 8.5/10 GGs