Jet Set Radio

The end result is aesthetically coherent and unique, but does not borrow enough gameplay ideas from the extreme sports titles of the era such as Tony Hawk and Aggressive Inline.

On one hand, this approach seems to be the smart sort of simplification - JSR is not about racking up big trick combos, it's about tagging walls and running from the police. To limit frustration, the control scheme had to be simplified to the point where everything felt fluid while doing one of those two things. But in your mission duties you will still wall-ride, grind poles, and build speed in halfpipes, and this is the part of the game that feels the least developed. Grinds on slightly wider objects or corners of large objects drop often, jumps will suddenly not carry your momentum, and the camera is very often not up to the task of any high-flying you're encouraged to try. After a while it starts to feel more like a clunky 3D platformer than an extreme sports game.

The major gameplay loop is that as you tag more locations throughout the stage, the cops call in progressively more ridiculous units to take you out. These include helicopters with machine guns, canine units, SWAT teams with tear gas grenades, tanks, and so on. You generally are gonna have a harder time staying alive as the level goes on, but depending on which tags you go for first, the difficulty is significantly impacted. The most recent (read: dangerous) cop unit does not actually camp out every tag in the area, just a handful. Whether or not you were lucky enough to do those before the big guns rolled in is usually the key to your success. That sort of trial and error was not rewarding to me as it was very drawn out guesswork - many of these levels are upwards of 10 minutes. Many tag locations require significant speed to get to as well, and as you might guess getting show slows you down significantly. Depending on how you map out a stage the first time, you'll either have a relaxing time or be pretty miserable, and this continues for the entire game.

The previous two paragraphs slightly hurt me to write, as I find pretty much everything non-gameplay to be outstanding. The soundtrack has gained notoriety outside of gaming circles for its funky, distorted, punk turntablism. The art direction is highly stylized with cel shading, cartoonish and fashionable character designs, and a bright palette. The plot of a graffiti turf war in a highly anti-expression and militarized Tokyo is engaging, and the base of operations for your crew being a pirate radio station is pretty novel and ties the turntablist musical themes into something with in-game meaning. But how much does all of that mean when I just don't have that much fun playing it?