"A man can change, as long as he lives."

If there's one thing Ridge Racer Type 4 trades on, it is vibes. From the moment you boot up the game you're assaulted by an AWESOME opening movie, which continues into the game's smooth-yet-fuzzy PS1 graphics and importantly the extreme...I think it would be called house style music on multiple tracks for a bunch of it but there's plenty of variety here. Seriously a top tier OST on display here which is funny since when I looked it up apparently the composers butted heads a lot with the sound director over that style. Sorry guys, Okubo pretty clearly won out in getting the right vibe. Lucid Rhythms has got to be one of my favorites and it really puts you in a flow state. Honestly I am just going to copy DoctorQuark here and link the entire soundtrack because it is quick to listen to and absolutely baller.

The vibes extend from there to. The menus are stylish and the Grand Prix mode even has some light story modes to it with some very 90s-looking anime portraits, these are hardly total winners on their own but I quite liked them. They added some more to each Grand Prix and did get me more interested in beating the Grand Prix with each racing team (which I did do!), with the different teams having different feeling storylines although Pac Racing Club and Racing Team Solvalou have overlap. The announcer is on point, I undeniably got pumped in higher difficulties when I would be getting to the home stretch, see the first place car and hear "Take care of that loser!" like yeah lets DO this. Or even the inflections and ways he introduces courses. "Real Racing Roots '99 in...Helter Skelter." is a pretty strong way to start a GP. You even get the announcer absolutely popping off in his own special ways whenever you win a GP on the final race unique to the team you picked which is cool.

The entire game oozes the era it was made, the late 90s, and the cool thematics of the last track put that into effect: After starting with the sweltering Helter Skelter in the heat of summer, the final race is run 15 minutes before the New Year at the Turn of the Millennium, and as you screech down the final lap you'll see fireworks going off in the distance and even take a look at the screen above to see "Happy New Years!" flashing up there. Nowadays it evokes an intense sense of nostalgia, but thinking back to my time as a young'n when that happened it also has the wistful smile vibe to it. The way the games 90s, city vibes go off actually reminds me a lot of Street Fighter III with more house/club music vs. SF3's more up tempo hip hop styles, but that way that it oozes 90s style, stuff like color palette choices, memorable announcers, both of those games feel like peak 90s having gone through them. Type 4 had actually been on my 300 Games Bucket List for a long time and starting to make a list for favorite art styles kicked me into gear playing it.

I've talked a lot about the vibes and style of Type 4 because I would say that's what the game primarily trades on. The gameplay is pretty good, an arcade racer that doesn't go TOO arcade-y, but I do feel like it is on the straightforward end. The main mechanic as befitting a Ridge Racer game is powersliding, knowing how to take extremely sharp corners with a proper slide to avoid smashing into a wall OR oversliding and losing too much speed. Outside of that it is usually just a matter of driving well, cutting some corners, not drifting too much and setting yourself up for the next slide. No worrying about fuel, tires or even car damage here!

I loved the Drift style of cars but here's something I am going to complain about with the controls. The basic way to drift is to cut the acceleration for a moment, jack the wheel to spin out the back wheels and brake for just a moment to go into a slide without losing any juice. Then get back into the acceleration and go go go! This works great. But there's an alternative method to do it: Let go of the accelerator, then put the accelerator back on while turning the wheel at the same time. It might sound great, but the bigger issue is that if you want to cut corners you want to be able to let off the acceleration for just a moment and then get back into it, and of course turn. End result: Too many accidental power slides at high levels of gameplay that can scuttle or make a run much more difficult. I wish this just wasn't in the game at all because the basic method works great.

Following that, Ridge Racer Type 4 I would say is a bit on the low end in content. There's a total of 8 tracks, which feels a bit low to begin with, plus 8 reversed forms of the track. But also a lot of those 8 tracks will take portions from other tracks. For example, Heaven and Hell takes about a third of the course design from Wonderhill and Brightest Nite does the same with Edge of the Earth. It IS neat how it makes the earlier Heats like "practice" runs for part of the track design, but it does mean that while they trade well on vibes the track designs could be a bit more unique. I'd love, I dunno, 10-12 tracks where 2 out of 3 are chosen for the First Heat. Or maybe put the reverse tracks in a Grand Prix mode too, like a continuation of the storyline? Would add some replayability outside of grinding out the game's 130 cars, of which there are too many for how many are just "the same car but +/- 3 MPH". You DO get a lot of delicious extra modes and some neat secret cars at the very end, but I want some more meat outside of grinding out single races.

I think this is played into by the game largely being pretty easy. Mappy/PRC were both beaten first tries by me, with only Solvalou and Dirt Racing Team providing a lot of challenge, and even then that challenge pretty much exclusively lies in Brightest Nite + Heaven and Hell. Apparently people think Phantomile is hard but while the short racing does mean you don't have long to recover from mistakes it also features largely easy corners and lots of room to overtake cars. I never had to restart a GP due to it, and in fact I did not have to do so for any other tracks in the entire GP. Shooting Hoops is actually REALLY easy for a final course albeit in a way I like for how it plays into the final race vibes: I only had to retry a single time until DRT (which is the highest difficulty team), where I needed a few tries, and the first retry was just because I didn't realize it was a no-powerslide course my first attempt. Gently massage the first corner while staying on the lower end of it, take the last corner with a hard dive inside to either land on the brim or go under it, take the second corner pretty hard inside as well and NEVER let off the gas. As long as you don't crash into any cars overtaking them or constantly take super wide turns you'll be fine, and on anything below DRT level you'll be able to recover from at least one big mistake.

And overall the game felt like it almost had "anti-rubberbanding": I swear it seemed like the first place car refused to get TOO huge of a lead in most circuits and it was near impossible to not get 3rd/2nd even when I crashed way more than it felt like I should. Multiple races I felt like I did bad and should not have won but did. It was kinda wild.

Now Heaven and Hell, THAT one was getting me kinda salty, along with Brightest Nite SPECIFICALLY on Solvalou / Hard mode and not Expert. I did need to retry the GP and Brightest Nite multiple times but on Expert mode it felt like it was because I was perfecting my gameplay, meanwhile I swear the Solvalou car speeds I had were perfectly aligned for cars to be next to me in the tiny tunnel areas and then they would just decide we had a before-not-known suicide pact together that I had thoughtlessly forgotten about and smash into me for no reason and then by the end I would lose by a hair. Combine that with some accidental drifts and too many of my runs that time around felt like they ended with what I would term as "bullshit". Heaven and Hell felt like it had less bullshit and more is just a tough track, I never fully got the powersliding on some of the full tight turns down (TBH it felt inconsistent at times, but given I got the first of a double drift turn very consistent later I think I was just bad), I had to retry that one on Expert a LOT. Not so much on any difficulty below Expert mind, I had to retry it a few times on Hard w/ Solvalou and like...a single time when I barely got 2nd in Pac Racing Club I think? I want to point out the time I won I repeatedly wiped out on the same corner and had some other small time losses too, the game is overall pretty generous with what it lets you get away with. It does feel like just going into Mappy or Pac for some time to play and vibe is a pretty good and easy time, so given it is an arcade-y game for replayability not a bad idea.

Definitely worth anyone's time who wants to try out a racing game I'd say, the vibes pull the game up a lot and it is plenty of fun. Despite beating all four GPs I can see myself coming back to this one in the future just for fun. It sits as a high end racing game among the ones I've played. Honestly, why hasn't this franchise come back? I know the last non-mobile games weren't good but a lot of that seems to be either not caring or becoming Burnout for no reason. I feel like if you took a game like this and expanded its size for the modern age it could absolutely still sell well, a Ridge Racer Type 8 if you will. There isn't exactly a ton of competition in the space right now I'd say either.