Games You Should’ve Played (But Probably Didn’t): Jet Set Radio Future
Remember when you were a budding post-adolescent and started having this almost instinctive urge to start “raging against the machine”? That feeling of needing to fight The Man, whoever That Man may be, though in retrospect probably juvenile and almost assuredly stupid, has become the basis for untold stories, films, and video games, though none have been created with such bravado and outright Japanese insanity as one of my most treasured experiences from my youth, Jet Set Radio Future.
I feel the need to start this off by saying that as I put digital ink to fictional paper, I’m listening to the JSRF soundtrack, which if you haven’t had the chance prior is something you need to remedy posthaste. And I’m not even saying that in the sense that it’s good for a video game soundtrack; if you’ve ever had even the slightest interest in jpop, jrock, electronica, or The Beastie Boys (of which one of their side projects, The Latch Brothers, is heavily featured), then you should at least go on youtube and give a track or two a listen. In fact, here, there you go.
Though without a doubt JSRF’s lasting influence on me definitely dwell’s within its soundtrack, there’s a hell of a lot more to appreciate here. In a time when developers were just starting to get their legs for showing off modern, realistic modelling and graphics, the developers over at Smilebit (a now defunct in-house team over at Sega) went in the complete opposite direction, showing just how wild and wicked one could go with cel-shading, resulting in an art-style that (to my plebian eyes) looks like what you’d get if you dropped Andy Warhol, neon, and punk rock into a blender. It was beautiful, but moreover it was something unique; you just didn’t see a game that looked like this.
…Unless of course you consider JSRF’s prequel, Jet Grind Radio, for the Dreamcast, which I guess technically “started that gangsta’ shit”, but I have to admit my lack of owning a Dreamcast stopped me from ever getting a chance to see how JSRF’s predecessor played out.
As for the story of Jet Set Radio Future (and, getting back to my original point in as long-winded and laborious a manner as I can), you play as a gang of rough-and-tumble street youths called The GG’s, with a devil may care attitude, a set of roller blades, and a penchant for graffiti art. Unfortunately, they reside in a future Tokyo where the insidious Rokkaku Group, a mega-corporation with ideals about what you’d expect a mega-corporation to have, rules the roost. They’ve got the cops in their pocket, and they’re damn well determined to make sure the streets of Tokyo go untagged.
So what better way to fuck with the man than by drawing sweet street art on as much of the cityscape as you possibly can? Hence the foundation of JSRF’s gameplay, roller-blading around the beautifully detailed Japanese landscape, graffiti-tagging as much of it as you possibly can. The movement was fast and fun, graffiti-tagging was simple and satisfying, and you could even create your own graffiti art in the editor mode.
But there was so much more going on! There were rival skater gangs, looking to get into your turf with their own graffiti. And we’re not talking about modern-day interpretations of gangs here; this is some straight-up The Warriors shit here, with gangs like The Love Shockers, The Immortals, or The Doom Riders, you half-expect at any moment to turn a corner and come face to face with the Baseball Furies. It’s gangsters at their most stylized, and like everything else Jet Set Radio Future was putting down, I couldn’t get enough of it.
Yes, they were actually called “The Doom Riders”. How fantastic is that?
Whether it was their art style, the setting, the story, or (and I say without hyperbole) one of the best contemporary soundtracks in gaming, Jet Set Radio Future was a goddamn work of art. It’s too bad the IP’s gone completely silent in the years since its release; I would personally go to Japan and plead my case to Sega’s Board of Executives why they need to take the craziest developers they have on staff and have them make a new Jet Radio game. It would certainly beat the hell out of throwing an emaciated and downtrodden Sonic out once again to the blood-thirsty masses.
