crazy taxi with the combos and driving complexity stripped out for pure route management and surprisingly that works for me. the cute almost-choro q-but-not-really graphics made a lot more sense when i found out tamsoft made the first 3 on the ps1 and that's kinda the reason i cared initially. 505's localisation is kind of awful (at least they figured out "norma" should be "quota") but the comic sans everywhere is endearing enough

really the one complaint is some of the customer "missions" are plain evil. mostly just "drive without exceeding 90kph" and "drive without steering left/right" they take so excruciatingly long, the speed limit one fails for no reason half the time, and you can't really even kick them out cause your reputation drops so quickly. evil.

pcsx2 says i beat this in 5 hours over 3 sessions in an evening and that sounds about right, the progression is just enticing enough (maybe i'm too used to grinding lol) to carry the game through that period and i found myself doing free mode runs coming back to write this review lol

i always wonder if any of these 505 localised games ever sold cause surely misleading the audience into thinking these are the most generic games of all time didn't work right? were people really still scared of things being "too japanese" by the mid 00s or had anime made enough of a jump to europe by then? just confounding really.