It's adorable!
Okay, what I mean is that you can tell just how much everybody involved in this game cared about getting absolutely everything perfect, and it's an astonishing accomplishment given what they had to work with. It was probably the best looking console game ever made to this point (Final Fantasy VII was earlier in the year, and at its best it definitely looked better, but the overworld in that game was very famously low-poly triangle people walking across jpegs). And as someone who has a pretty good amount of technical familiarity with the Japanese cars of the 1990s this game's roster is based off of, the way that they have painstakingly recreated the details of them is really clear and gives the game this incredible sense of texture. The basic feel of the game was there right in the first one (provided you buy the expensive tires for cars, cars in this game on their stock tires turn into hilarious understeer-ers).
All of that being said, the difficulty curve in this game is all over the fucking place. The license tests are the hardest part of the game, and there are no upper limits on power for most of the events (there aren't actually any explicit ones but there are some de facto ones because of car restrictions). So you'll go from having a reasonably hard time to start the game in the B-tests, then sleepwalking through the early stuff, then tearing your hair out for the A and International-A license tests, and making everything from there on feel much tamer. The car roster is genuinely quite limited, though if you're going to make a game pretty much entirely out of one setting's cars, 90s Japan isn't half bad (I would do unholy things for an 80s German car game) and the track selection is small enough that you know every one like the back of your hand by the end of the game. All of these however are problems of budget (licensing) and of technology (getting the AI to be tougher in a way that doesn't involve insane rubber banding), the core was there, a core that I'm excited to see perfected as I play other games in the series.
Okay, what I mean is that you can tell just how much everybody involved in this game cared about getting absolutely everything perfect, and it's an astonishing accomplishment given what they had to work with. It was probably the best looking console game ever made to this point (Final Fantasy VII was earlier in the year, and at its best it definitely looked better, but the overworld in that game was very famously low-poly triangle people walking across jpegs). And as someone who has a pretty good amount of technical familiarity with the Japanese cars of the 1990s this game's roster is based off of, the way that they have painstakingly recreated the details of them is really clear and gives the game this incredible sense of texture. The basic feel of the game was there right in the first one (provided you buy the expensive tires for cars, cars in this game on their stock tires turn into hilarious understeer-ers).
All of that being said, the difficulty curve in this game is all over the fucking place. The license tests are the hardest part of the game, and there are no upper limits on power for most of the events (there aren't actually any explicit ones but there are some de facto ones because of car restrictions). So you'll go from having a reasonably hard time to start the game in the B-tests, then sleepwalking through the early stuff, then tearing your hair out for the A and International-A license tests, and making everything from there on feel much tamer. The car roster is genuinely quite limited, though if you're going to make a game pretty much entirely out of one setting's cars, 90s Japan isn't half bad (I would do unholy things for an 80s German car game) and the track selection is small enough that you know every one like the back of your hand by the end of the game. All of these however are problems of budget (licensing) and of technology (getting the AI to be tougher in a way that doesn't involve insane rubber banding), the core was there, a core that I'm excited to see perfected as I play other games in the series.