Forever in search of the sauce...
When the first trailer of this game dropped, it had my attention hook, line, and sinker. Ever since sega themselves dropped the Jet Set Radio IP like a 10-ton weight, many have tried to create a game to match the style and vibe of the series with middling results. I knew that I had to give this game a go, and when it finally dropped, I knew that it was time to see what they were cooking all this time. Now that I've given it a play, I have very complicated feelings.
The game NAILED the look of the Jet Set Radio games, with the perfect level of low-poly cel-shading that the series is famous for. The music is also fantastic, as not only are there the expected bangers created by everyone's favorite family guy funny moment, but most of the OST as a whole has that bumpin funky vibe to it. Mechanically things are solid as well, with controls feeling a lot more tight, grounded, and responsive. The JSR series is probably as infamous for filtering players with its floaty controls and awkward character physics as it is famous for its art style, so this really feels like the controls were made so that kind of thing wouldn't happen. The game looks and sounds great, and is fun to play.
But deep down as I was playing through the game, something felt off, and I still even after putting the controller down don't really know how to put it to words. The game just wasn't giving me that same visceral "kick" that playing the JSR games do, likely due to various small things that just kept stacking atop one another. The plot didn't grab me whatsoever, and there were far too many cutscenes for my liking. The writing was kinda eh, the characters lacked the charisma that the GG's and Professor K had, and things were taken far too seriously for me to really vibe with it. The game also left me feeling rather directionless a lot of the time, as in the JSR games finding where you need to tag is only a press of the start button away, but in this game being able to see where tag points are on the map requires an upgrade, so I spent a lot of time just kinda aimlessly skating around. The tag points also aren't really as clearly defined as the big arrowed markers that define them in the JSR games. The trick/score system is kind of braindead in that manualling is piss easy by holding down a trigger and getting high multipliers just requires grinding on rails and doing wallrides. If this game took more inspiration from the tony hawk games in terms of its trick system that would have activated every neuron in my monkey brain and I would have went crazy, but instead we get this kinda boring way to rack easy points. There's also like some of the most boneless combat I have ever seen in this game, as attacks feel extremely weightless and your auto-regenerating health pool is so big that it makes encounters feel more like a waste of time than anything meaningful. JSR just had you paint people on the back a few times and cops served more as obstacles rather than full-blown fighting encounters.
It's probably not the fairest to keep comparing this game to JSR, but it's really hard not to when everything about this game just feels like it's trying its absolute hardest to be JSR, and the things that it does differently like the focus on story just really wasn't clicking with me. There are these segments where you have to platform through these Mario Sunshine Psychonauts ass floating levels of stuff, and those parts were probably the highlight of the game for me just because the game was trying to do something unique. I think a portion of this weird nothingness I felt when playing this game just came from me wanting this game to be JSR, and the game itself wanting to be JSR, but it just isn't. Maybe I set my expectations way too high (another reason why zero expectations are the best expectations), maybe part of my enjoyment of games like this comes from the context in their creation whereas the original JSR games are actual products of their time vs this game being made as an homage to said time but isn't an actual product of its time itself, thus giving me uncanny valley type beats, i have no idea. I even went back to play a fair bit of both JSR games during my play of this to see if the appeal of these games had lost their luster to me over time, but nope I was still having a blast playing those and not so much over here.
It's extremely frustrating seeing something that by all of my understandings and definitions should be hitting the same as the series that it takes so much inspiration from just not doing so. It's as if the appeal of JSR comes from this secret sauce that Sega put into it that I haven't been able to see anyone else effectively recreate. I may not know what's actually in the damn sauce, but I'm gonna keep searching for it especially given how Sega ain't ever using it any more and I'm sure by now even they have thrown out the recipe. All of this isn't to say this game is bad. Despite all I have said there are still solid vibes and I think this is a much more accesible way to experience the style of JSR than playing the old games in a modern sense. It's absolutely clear to me that Team Reptile cares a lot for this particular aesthetic, and I on principle cannot hate anything that keeps the Y2K vibes going in our present day. By all means, please give the game a go if it looks interesting to ya. I just wish I was as ecstatic about this game as all the other JSR fans/people on this site. Either way, this will probably still be better than whatever the fuck sega actually could have in store for the JSR series. God help us.
When the first trailer of this game dropped, it had my attention hook, line, and sinker. Ever since sega themselves dropped the Jet Set Radio IP like a 10-ton weight, many have tried to create a game to match the style and vibe of the series with middling results. I knew that I had to give this game a go, and when it finally dropped, I knew that it was time to see what they were cooking all this time. Now that I've given it a play, I have very complicated feelings.
The game NAILED the look of the Jet Set Radio games, with the perfect level of low-poly cel-shading that the series is famous for. The music is also fantastic, as not only are there the expected bangers created by everyone's favorite family guy funny moment, but most of the OST as a whole has that bumpin funky vibe to it. Mechanically things are solid as well, with controls feeling a lot more tight, grounded, and responsive. The JSR series is probably as infamous for filtering players with its floaty controls and awkward character physics as it is famous for its art style, so this really feels like the controls were made so that kind of thing wouldn't happen. The game looks and sounds great, and is fun to play.
But deep down as I was playing through the game, something felt off, and I still even after putting the controller down don't really know how to put it to words. The game just wasn't giving me that same visceral "kick" that playing the JSR games do, likely due to various small things that just kept stacking atop one another. The plot didn't grab me whatsoever, and there were far too many cutscenes for my liking. The writing was kinda eh, the characters lacked the charisma that the GG's and Professor K had, and things were taken far too seriously for me to really vibe with it. The game also left me feeling rather directionless a lot of the time, as in the JSR games finding where you need to tag is only a press of the start button away, but in this game being able to see where tag points are on the map requires an upgrade, so I spent a lot of time just kinda aimlessly skating around. The tag points also aren't really as clearly defined as the big arrowed markers that define them in the JSR games. The trick/score system is kind of braindead in that manualling is piss easy by holding down a trigger and getting high multipliers just requires grinding on rails and doing wallrides. If this game took more inspiration from the tony hawk games in terms of its trick system that would have activated every neuron in my monkey brain and I would have went crazy, but instead we get this kinda boring way to rack easy points. There's also like some of the most boneless combat I have ever seen in this game, as attacks feel extremely weightless and your auto-regenerating health pool is so big that it makes encounters feel more like a waste of time than anything meaningful. JSR just had you paint people on the back a few times and cops served more as obstacles rather than full-blown fighting encounters.
It's probably not the fairest to keep comparing this game to JSR, but it's really hard not to when everything about this game just feels like it's trying its absolute hardest to be JSR, and the things that it does differently like the focus on story just really wasn't clicking with me. There are these segments where you have to platform through these Mario Sunshine Psychonauts ass floating levels of stuff, and those parts were probably the highlight of the game for me just because the game was trying to do something unique. I think a portion of this weird nothingness I felt when playing this game just came from me wanting this game to be JSR, and the game itself wanting to be JSR, but it just isn't. Maybe I set my expectations way too high (another reason why zero expectations are the best expectations), maybe part of my enjoyment of games like this comes from the context in their creation whereas the original JSR games are actual products of their time vs this game being made as an homage to said time but isn't an actual product of its time itself, thus giving me uncanny valley type beats, i have no idea. I even went back to play a fair bit of both JSR games during my play of this to see if the appeal of these games had lost their luster to me over time, but nope I was still having a blast playing those and not so much over here.
It's extremely frustrating seeing something that by all of my understandings and definitions should be hitting the same as the series that it takes so much inspiration from just not doing so. It's as if the appeal of JSR comes from this secret sauce that Sega put into it that I haven't been able to see anyone else effectively recreate. I may not know what's actually in the damn sauce, but I'm gonna keep searching for it especially given how Sega ain't ever using it any more and I'm sure by now even they have thrown out the recipe. All of this isn't to say this game is bad. Despite all I have said there are still solid vibes and I think this is a much more accesible way to experience the style of JSR than playing the old games in a modern sense. It's absolutely clear to me that Team Reptile cares a lot for this particular aesthetic, and I on principle cannot hate anything that keeps the Y2K vibes going in our present day. By all means, please give the game a go if it looks interesting to ya. I just wish I was as ecstatic about this game as all the other JSR fans/people on this site. Either way, this will probably still be better than whatever the fuck sega actually could have in store for the JSR series. God help us.