Jet Set Radio Future was one of the many fruits of the burst of creative fecundity that followed the demise of Sega’s Dreamcast; created by the newly devolved Smilebit studio, it sold only 30,000 copies in its native Japan. Partly that’s because so few Xboxes were sold in the territory; partly it’s because Jet Set Radio Future is one of those games that thumbed its nose at commercial conformity, choosing instead to deliver a riot of style and colour and sound and action that was apparently too difficult for a lot of gamers to get their heads around. It’s their loss. Jet Set Radio Future is a game that was innovative and unusual when it was released in 2002. Five years on, and still the only game to bear comparison to Jet Set Radio Future is the original Jet Set Radio (aka Jet Grind Radio).
Wilfully bucking the inexorable march towards photorealism, the game depicts a futuristic Tokyo as a cel-shaded, sci-fi neon jungle, full of colourful characters and continual motion. Players join a spiky gang of sharply dressed rollerbladers in order to speed around the city, laying down graffiti tags to reclaim territory from opposing gangs. Ultimately, though, the object of the game is to take on the corporate evil of Rokkaku Gouji, head of a ‘mega-enterprise’ with an eye on imposing bland corporate compliance over ‘industry, society, and even our culture’ in its quest for profits. The game’s very narrative is a metaphor for the urgent need for creative non-conformity.
Returning from his stint in the original, DJ Professor K (the ‘master of mayhem’)continues to lay down the soundtrack for the game’s constantly moving capital. And it’s some soundtrack. There’s the infectious Aisle 10 (Hello Allison) by Scapegoat Wax; the slightly bewildering Birthday Cake by Cibo Matto; a few contributions from the darling of Sega fanboys, Richard Jacques; and the brilliantly block-rocking title theme, The Concept Of Love, by Hideki Naganuma. It was, at the time, a huge list of licensed tracks, and it established an ineffable sense of style.
Equally sassy is the character design, from the recruitable playable characters, to the mean gangs who stalk the metropolis. Characters like the pilot-hooded, mini-skirted heartbreaker Gum, or goth chick Cube. Or there are the rival gangs, like the Love Shockers and Doom Riders. And they’re all given their own dance motif, from the angular body-popping of bug-eyed Beat with his crazy antennae, to the militaristic near-march of the Poison Jam’s breaking moves.
The sense of style also stretches to the city itself, thanks to a couple of important tweaks that Jet Set Radio Future introduced over its Dreamast prequel. First, there’s the removal of the time limit that had curtailed the scope of levels in the original. Second, the tagging system is streamlined, giving the game a more high-tempo sense of pace and rhythm. The two combined gave the designers the freedom to create much more interesting urban spaces, expanding them in every direction, but particularly extending them upwards.
Every area in the game, from Dogenzaka Hill to Chuo Street, is a densely packed network of nooks and crannies, with elaborate sequences of grinding and leaping across boards and rails revealing the vertiginous scope of the city, and demonstrating the 3D engine’s eye-bleeding draw distances. Skating through flocks of birds to see them disperse, or triggering the new boost dash to fill the screen with heat haze and leave the camera for dust, also confirm the technical capabilities of the technology, but more importantly, the startlingly original aesthetic created by Smilebit.
On top of the basic missions, a series of unlockables encourage players to grind, wallride and handplant their way around these majestic spaces, exploring every last corner. There were other extreme sports games around at the time of the game’s release, most notably the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, but there was nothing with this giddy sense of scale, or this vibrantly original Harajuku cool, or the sheer design variety, from exploration to evasion, from racing to combat.
The game isn’t perfect, of course. Playing it now, the dodgy camera demonstrates how far thirdperson gaming has come, and its various splitscreen multiplayer modes are adequate rather than outstanding (including races, a ball hog game, flag grabbing, and a couple of graffiti competitions). And the graffiti edit mode might have predated the YouTube generation that modern developers and publishers are so keen to attract – if it hadn’t been ironically divorced from the Dreamcast console’s connectivity.
But in a world in which some publishers still strive to impose bland corporate orthodoxy over the games that get made and played, the very existence of Jet Set Radio Future is a metaphor for the urgent need for creative non-conformity.
This article was first published in Edge Presents: The 100 Best Videogames in July 2007.
The post Retrospective: Jet Set Radio Future appeared first on Edge Online.
Source http://www.edge-online.com/features/retrospective-jet-set-radio-future/
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