Have You Seen My Graffiti Soul?
The soul of the streets has been lost, and it is up to you to find it! But first you need to find cronies to join your crew, along with flags, platforms, and every last piece of graffiti that is plastered on the glorious face of Tokyo! That sounds fun... Right?
Jet Set Radio Future is a weird little game, its half extreme sport, half platformer. All wrapped in mind warping cell shaded graphics, and doused in trip-in hip-hop tunes. The game looks and sounds great, and has a great sense of style that is all its own. The gameplay however suffers from a server identity crises, often making the game a frustrating experience.
The gameplay in Jet Set Radio is suppose to be fast and frantic. There seems to be a clear focus on kinetic energy, so its weird that the game is just an extensive form of hide in seek. Most of the missions require you to find things; from graffiti, to flags, to maniacal evil totalitarian dancing robots. All these things are spreaded out chaotically in a open world environment. This in turn causes a lot of pausing of the game so you can look at your map, so you can find the next object. This really hurts the flow of the game, which is a shame since the skating itself is generally fun, when its not anchored down by poorly designed missions, which lack variety.
Other problems persist as well. From clumsily conceived police and boss battles, which range from laughably bad, to down right irritating. To poor story and characters, that water down a colorful and vibrant world. All this is accompanied by an evil camera that makes platforming harder than it needs to be. Even the inclusion of graffiti seems baffling. You are almost always spraying your aerosol can on the run, thus never getting a chance to enjoy your masterpieces… or in my case the batman logo. (complements of a cool, but ultimately poorly implemented graffiti creation tool.) This game constantly feels like its on the verge of greatness, but ultimately ends up falling short in virtually every category.
This game is not at war with art oppressive govement, or robotic robots, but itself. For everything it does right it does something equally wrong. The skating itself is fun, but the missions are not. The world is colorful and looks great, but the characters are flat and uninteresting. The game is actually at its peak once you beat it. It is surprisingly enjoyable to skate around leisurely, enjoying the graphic and sound as you just play around with the actual skating. Jet Set Radio Future, much like graffiti shows flashes of brilliance, the potential to be artistical masterpieces, but more often than not it just comes across as a mess of spray paint that belongs at the back of Mr. G’s pawn shop.
