I think about this constantly. Something about its earnest, yet goofy and uncanny vibe just resonates with me so hard. Some real hard hitting drama as well and the music is legit some of the best jazz fusion of all time. I just want to hang out with these flamboyant racing himbos (and all the really great female characters too) and wear giant jackets and live in a world where everyone is constantly talking about racing and randomly challenging everyone they meet to street race as well. Chicken race is a freaking awesome racing mini game and all racing games need to have it imo.

I played this is Japanese with a friend like months before the fan translation was announced and translated for him as we played and man it was an experience. From what I've sesen of the translation it looks like they did a pretty good job transferring over the vibe from the original which is really respectable NGL considering how much of the original Japanese is sprinkled with unnatural sounding English phrases.

It'd be a 5/5 for sure if it wasn't for all of the clunkiness, loading screens, and wildly complex stats, but playing through an emulator helped to mitigate a lot of these issues.