Enthusia: Professional Racing

By the time Enthusia came out on the PS2, you would have thought it would be impossible to add something unique or worthwhile to the racing game genre in a world where Gran Turismo 4, Need for Speed Underground, Burnout 3, Colin McRae Rally, and dozens of other classics already existed. Yet, Konami thought it was worth their effort to get their hat in the ring. Prior to Enthusia, Konami had not developed a single racing game on either Playstation in the US region. They would never do it again after this. Perhaps if this game didn't come out within a month after Gran Turismo 4's American release date, Enthusia might have seen more success. Today, it remains a curious novelty of the PS2 library. Though, after finishing this game, I would say that it was well worth their effort!

There are over 200 different cars and around 20 unique tracks in Enthusia. This is considerably more content than Gran Turismo 3, and only slightly less content than the yet to be released Forza Motorsport 1. And for what it lacks in numbers, it makes up for in variety. This strange vehicle selection would not be replicated in sim racers until the later Forza games 10 years afterwards. For starters, this is one of the only racing games I know with a Bugatti EB110 in it (though I'll warn you now that it's practically undrivable). Looking at the lower class, however, we see a Smart car (which I've only ever seen in Midtown Madness 3), a Toyota Land Cruiser (which I've only seen the likes of in 4x4 Evo), and an honest to god Chevy Astro van. In addition to this are all the car game essentials. Nissan Skyline, Mazda 787B, Toyota AE86, Corvettes, Mustangs, TVR, Viper, BMW, etc. Similar to the upcoming Forza games, these cars are all seperated into different classes, which gets explored in the game's unique progression system.

Most of the tracks in this game are fictional, yet showcase the same levels of variety with some attractive visuals to go with it. Of course the game has the Nurburgring in it (making this one of the earlier racing games to feature the Nordschleife), though the fictional tracks don't disappoint. The track list contains a kart track, a dirt track that goes through a cave, a speedway oval, an uphill/downhill Japanese mountain sprint, a city race through France, short tracks, long tracks... The variety will keep you busy.

The sense of variety continues into the selection of modes when you boot up the game. At first, it's unclear what mode is what (Enthusia Life? Driving Revolution? Free Racing?), but there are two 'main' play modes for the game. Enthusia Life is the primary experience that makes the most sense to start out with. This is the equivalent to Gran Turismo's 'simulation mode', though Enthusia is more focused on leveling up stats rather than grinding out money. Free Racing doesn't feature the same organized progression system, though you can still unlock cars by winning on whatever races you decide to play, rather than choosing from a pre-set selection. Driving Revolution is a goofy reference to 'Dance Dance Revolution', which uses a comparable system of visual-timing cues to sharpen your accuracy on different types of corners. It's Enthusia's version of a 'license test' mode.

I never managed to make progress in 'Free Racing' because of one major problem with the mode. You can't unlock anything if you don't finish the race cleanly. This means you cannot go off the track once, you can't bump a wall, and most importantly, you can't touch the other AI cars! This includes moments where the AI cars bump into you, which they usually try to do at the very beginning of the race. I never could avoid getting bumped by the AI cars at the start of the race, so I quickly gave up on this mode in favor of Enthusia Life.

The first surprise of Enthusia Life, the game's main mode, is that there is no currency system at all! There will be no money grinding in this game. Instead, you'll be fighting for Skill Points to further progress into more difficult racing classes. The skill system weighs your car's performance stats against the AI cars, and lets you know the 'odds' of beating them. Simply put, if you beat a fast car with a slow car, you get more XP. This means you don't have to come in first place for every race in order to progress. The car unlock system is similarly unusual. Once you finish a race in 4th place or better, the game plays roulette with your opponent's cars, and you win whatever car the game lands on. You can unlock faster cars quickly this way, though the problem with this being random is that if you want to unlock a specific car, it's completely up to chance whether you can get it or not. And that's if you can find it in a race to begin with! Your own car's stats get upgraded the more you race with it. The three main stats are Weight, Power, and Tires, though unlike an RPG, you can't pick which stat you want to level up. Once you reach the next 'level' for your car, it will pick whichever of the three stats is the lowest, bringing them all up one by one at the same pace.

Racing recklessly will end up hurting your skill points. Like I mentioned with the 'Free Racing' mode, the game encourages clean racing. Thankfully in Enthusia Life, you don't have to race perfectly, though you will lose points for going off the track, bumping walls, and bumping other cars. After you finish the race, the game will give you a lap-by-lap rundown of the track that you can look through in map form. It will show you exactly where you've run off the track or bumped into things, as well as where you used full braking and where you overtook your opponents! I've never seen anything like it in another racing game.

The game features other point systems, such as 'Enthu Points', which represents your own stamina. Enthusia Life functions on a day-by-day system, where your recent performances are totaled into your 'Ranking Points'. Your ranking will determine which class of cars you can race against. You can rank up into a higher class, but if you start doing poorly, you can lock yourself out of the higher classes again. Driving poorly will hurt your Enthu Points, meaning you'll have to take more rest days, which hurts your ranking. The one major problem with this system is that changing your car also counts as a rest day, which hurts your ranking. Let's say that you change your car, and decide you actually wanted to drive something else, so you change it again. This counts as TWO rest days, which further hurts your ranking. Is there some reason why changing vehicles is discouraged in a game where you are unlocking new cars constantly?

Despite its problems, I love the creativity and unique experience that Enthusia gives the player. No other racing sims function like this one. The physics are surprisingly good, the variety in content is impressive, the game looks beautiful, and I almost forgot to mention how amazing the soundtrack is! This is Konami, after all. The guys who made the music for this game aren't well established, though they did well enough for this game's soundtrack to have its own official CD release. Any racing sim fan should give this game a shot.

It's by far my favorite driving game, but once you've played Enthusia Life enough you'll just steam past everyone., except the 2005 Ford GT. The soundtrack is the best for a racing game I've ever heard. Best enjoyed with a steering wheel peripheral--the physics can't be beat. I had a PS2 and this was the one game I played on it.

Enthusia is a love letter to some of the world's most uncool and mundane cars. At least for me, the game's appeal is its lineup, which features somewhere over 200 cars, many of which you will probably never see in another racing game, and for good reason, because many of them are shitboxes that no sane racing game developer would want to see on the track. Vehicles like your mom's Honda Odyssey and your creepy uncle's Chevy Astro are part of what make Enthusia a racing sim that's just a bit on the weird side.

Enthusia does away with the traditional singleplayer format of console simracers like Gran Turismo and Forza, in which you buy cars and upgrades, in favor of "Enthusia Life," a calendar-based career mode with a heavy emphasis on roulette, mathematics, and utter confusion that will be a huge pain in the ass for me to explain. This game has no money. Instead, you start the career with a garage of twelve cars, most of which are awful. Instead of buying cars, you finish in the top 4 in race events to get the opportunity to spin a roulette wheel featuring all the cars that you raced against (that you don't already have) in hopes of getting one of them. A blank space is added to the wheel for added frustration. In addition, you are also sometimes rewarded with experience points both for you as a player and for the car you took to the race. Car XP takes the place of upgrades. By leveling cars up, their parts will be upgraded up to level 10. Player XP is another animal. Before I can talk about it, we first must talk about Enthu Points (EP). EP is used to calculate whether or not you were a good boy on the track. Every collision (either with a racer or with the environment) and off-road encroachment costs EP. Losing EP will reduce (if not eliminate entirely) the amount of XP you receive after a race. Running out of EP entirely will result in a week-long suspension from racing, forcing you to sit in your garage for a week straight, possibly hindering your racer ranking which is yet another damn number I haven't talked about yet. Your ranking starts at 1000 and it goes up and down sometimes. I honestly have no idea what the algorithm for it is because you can get first like three weeks in a row and still rank down. Every 200 ranks unlocks a new batch of events to play, but ranking down below those thresholds will lock them back up. Resting and changing cars are the only ways to make weeks pass without racing. Yes, getting in a different car takes an entire week of your life, potentially lowering your ranking and locking you out of events. When you're finally ready to enter a race, you're introduced to a new number called the odds system. Basically, each event available has a number below it. The higher it is, the more underpowered your car is for the race. The game encourages players to take really shitty cars into high-end events for potentially more XP, provided you don't lose all your EP for driving like a maniac. Overall, the career mode is an obtuse mess of numbers and algorithms and I apologize for my near-incoherent synopsis of it.

The driving model in Enthusia is much, much easier to talk about, despite sometimes being equally as nightmarish, The core of the game's driving model is the Visual Gravity System (VGS), a HUD element place very prominently in the middle of the screen to show the car's center of gravity, the movement of the chassis, and wheels, and the amount of pressure being put on the tires. It's really interesting and gives you a more intimate view of the game's physics than just about any other racing game does. Despite its name, the VGS goes beyond being purely visual. You feel your vehicle's weight transfer more intensely than any Gran Turismo or Forza game. Play in bumper cam to really get the sense of your car deliberately lurching forward in those tough braking zones. The feel of driving the car overtakes the game's lacking sense of speed. The only major flaw with the game's driving, and it can indeed be a major one depending on what you want to drive, is how absurdly easy it is to experience oversteer and spin out in rear-wheel drive cars. Even with assists, they are extremely sensitive and seem to spin out at the slightest touch. Being released after the Logitech Driving Force Pro, there is also native support for 900-degree racing wheels. However, even on high settings, the force feedback is extremely weak.

There aren't many tracks in Enthusia. Only two of them are official race courses and the rest are fairly uninspired original tracks. Many of them are enjoyable to drive on, but they are visually very repetitive and plain, with almost all of them trying to look somewhat like Monaco in terms of scenery.

The car lineup on the other hand is easily Enthusia's most fascinating aspect. There are somewhere over 200 cars in the game, representing 46 manufacturers from across the globe, each with their own text bios featured in the game. What really makes the game's car lot so interesting is the amount of (mostly really mundane and pedestrian) cars that have never been featured in a racing game before and probably never will. Hulking multipurpose vans like the Mercedes G500L, Chevy Astro, and Nissan Elgrand are given enough real estate in the game's car list to have their own class. Manufacturers largely ignored by racing devs like Saab, Smart (yes, the Smartcar Smart), De Tomaso, and Austin-Healey get some time in the limelight as well.

Despite having an extremely obtuse career structure and an occasionally frustrating driving model, Enthusia is definitely a game to look out for if you're into racing games and want one that's a little unconventional.