In the early 2000s I was still a poor student, and gamers were deep in the console wars of the sixth generation. The main competition took place between the PlayStation 2, Microsoft’s Xbox and the Nintendo Gamecube – with Sega‘s Dreamcast ending up as an early casualty. Here in the UK, shelves of DC hardware and games were quickly cleared out to make way for more PS2, Gamecube and Xbox games. In fact, this is actually how I bought my Dreamcast – a used console was in the bargain bin for around £20 of your early 2000s money, and as I never had the patience to save for the newest tech, I was content with staying one generation behind the curve. That being said, this meant that I already knew which games I wanted to try when I bought the console: Sonic Adventure, Space Channel 5, Virtua Tennis, Soul Calibur… Jet Set Radio. Magazine coverage had made the cel-shaded skating game look impossibly cool, and adverts naturally cast it in the best light. I was being sold the idealistic vision of what the game was trying to be, and I became that guy who tells you about Jet Set Radio. I was rambling about the game to my friends on the bus into college – even though they all played games on Xbox or PS2 – and I had fully bought into the dream. The thing is, it’s much easier to appreciate a game like Jet Set Radio when you’re a carefree youth without adult responsibilities and with plenty of free time, and playing the games today definitely requires a certain mindset.
Nobody tells you about Jet Set Radio and its intended gameplay
In Jet Set Radio you control one of several characters and complete missions where you skate around open urban areas, collecting spray cans and finding locations where you can tag graffiti through a QTE minigame or a single button press. When a given number of tags have been put down, police units will drop in and attack you – resulting in a game over when your health is drained. If you put down all of the required tags in a stage without running out of time or being defeated by the police, you complete the stage and move on. Later on in the game you unlock new maps to explore and new characters to use, and the story escalates until you have a showdown with the main antagonist. If you have youth and lots of spare time, the original game can be a fun waste of an afternoon – but what nobody tells you about Jet Set Radio is that failure is a natural symptom of the game’s design, and you’ll be hitting some excruciating lows before reaching the highs. From a developer’s point of view, the goal of every stage is to put down the tags before the time runs out – but from a player’s point of view, the objective is more like trying to create that euphoric run promised in the pre-release coverage where you’re flying down the street evading cops and completing tags. You know, instead of wrestling with the camera, running out of spray cans at the worst moments and failing to snap onto a rail that you needed to grind on, as you now fall down to street level and lose a chunk of health. Again.
For all the fronting of the characters being hip streetwise youths, the player drops into each new stage having to become familiar with the map layout, the placement of the tags, the requirements of the tags (which tags require one can and a single button press, and which tags require long QTE sequences in two places after you’ve restocked your spray cans), the locations of the spray cans and health pickups, and the timing of the scripted moments where the authorities arrive on the scene. Then, all of this needs to be pieced together in a route that covers everything whilst beating the clock. You’re not a carefree rebel moving to your own rhythm – you’re a member of Ground Force (a garden makeover show that aired on TV over here until the mid 00s, for our younger readers) meticulously crafting a plan to decorate an environment in the window of time you’ve been granted. And this might not be so frustrating if the rest of the game didn’t have such inconsistent quality, but this is a sixth-gen 3D game with all of the camera issues, clipping nightmares, twitchy analogue control and cheap environment transitions (later on in the game various zones are connected and you “travel between” them by skating into a flat image of the road leading into the horizon, as if Wile E. Coyote is trying to send you speeding into a wall) that come with that classification. Even when things are going to plan, the pacing of each stage shatters the dream of hi-octane action – with moments of slick tag placement and fleeing the authorities broken up with lengthy trips back to where the health and graffiti cans would spawn. It’s an experience where resource management and engaging gameplay are permanently at odds with one another. For the longest time, I just didn’t get it – why was this game looked back on so fondly when a player has to wrestle with so many dissatisfying interactions?
Nobody tells you about Jet Set Radio and its loop of failure
Today, I think I kind of understand. Earlier this year I finally managed to reach the end credits of Jet Set Radio. I failed stages many times along the way, but each failure brought knowledge with it – how many tags you can complete before the authorities arrive, which tags require the most amount of cans, where the cans respawn, how to reach certain areas of the map. I ended up making plans for each stage – Shibuya GG, Benten Boogie, Monster of Kogane… all the way up to the likes of Fight or Flight. And with each failure, I refined my plans. By the time I’d nailed an approach for every stage in the Steam copy I was gifted, I was so confident in my knowledge that I did it all over again on the Vita version I had bought years ago. This is what nobody tells you about Jet Set Radio – it’s intended as an experience of learning through failure and repetition right up until you know how to complete each stage, and then all of the associated frustration evaporates and you wonder what you were even complaining about. Which is why anyone familiar with Jet Set Radio will think that those who raise similar issues with the game are exaggerating – from their point of view, the issues don’t exist.
I’m confident that with a few variants of maps and mission goals, 90% of my “issues” with Jet Set Radio would never have existed. Let the player practice the same mission but with an unlimited timer. Let them practice a mission with infinite health, or without the police escape sequences. There was a time when Jet Set Radio Future used to be in my list of all-time favourite games, and its improvements over the original – the absence of a timer allowing for more pleasant exploration, the denser maps that were able to be designed, the one-button tagging preventing any lapse in momentum – shone through. Everyone’s had the experience of going to a new town or city for the first time in their lives and finding out where certain stores or attractions are, but they’ve usually been able to book the time they think they’ll need – rather than having to do everything in 900 seconds before returning home.
The revival
However, there’s still hope. Earlier this week, a new Jet Set Radio game was unveiled as one of several teases for “revivals” of classic Sega IP (including Crazy Taxi, Golden Axe, Shinobi and Streets of Rage.) To many people, the return of Jet Set Radio represents another sequel to one of their favourite games. To me, it represents another chance. I believe that the gameplay loop of Jet Set Radio can be harnessed into something both challenging and satisfying; something that can be admired by veterans and newcomers. More than two decades later, I’m still waiting – but I hope that the next game proves me right.
