Jet Set Radio is right up there with Sonic as a true Sega classic.I love video games with my entire heart, but few of them truly matter. Just like most pieces of film and music they are ultimately for our amusement. And perhaps, in its own way, amusement matters. But that's a whole other stack of words. Jet Set Radio's music, its message, and its soul have never felt fresher, but to be honest the part that exists for the player's amusement – the levels, the mechanics – haven't aged gracefully. The touch screen controls on the iOS version only hurt it further, badly marring what was, in many ways, the first successful “art game”.
For those of you who aren't old and wrinkled enough to have a clue as to what I'm going on about, Jet Set Radio is a 3D platformer developed by Smilebit and released on the Sega Dreamcast in 2000. You play as one of several members of a Shibuya-based graffiti gang called the GG's, who rollerblade around a fictional version of Tokyo while besting rival gangs and, more importantly, rebelling against the fascist police regime that dominates the streets. The core gameplay consists mostly of traversing open urban environments via jumping and rail grinding while dodging the cops and tagging key areas with your graffiti.
While it sounds like a recipe for good times, the original's execution was barely on this side of passable, and the inevitable realities of virtual gamepads push it over the edge into frustration.
The controls were already just sluggish enough, and the collision detection just vague enough that you never quite felt in complete control of your character. But throw in the inherent lack of precision of an on-screen analog stick and the poor camera control and the gameplay simply falls apart. Other recent versions on PS3, Xbox 360 and Vita used the right analog stick to give players full camera control, something mimicked in this version by swiping the screen. But all is not well.The issue here is twofold. Due to the obvious lack of a shoulder trigger, you can't manipulate the camera while performing a dash, a vital technique throughout the game. Additionally, camera movement works the way swiping through menus would, which is the opposite of how an analog stick operates. This will confound any returning fans. Worse, there's no way to invert the camera despite the option existing in every other recent port.
This becomes a somewhat larger problem when you're scrambling aimlessly around a map looking for the one graffiti target you missed as time is running down, or trying to complete a series of jumps and grinds that demand a lot more precision than the controls are willing to lend you. No one element of the game 's design is bad enough on its own to condemn it, but when the pieces start coming together they don't fit quite right, making many levels a chore. While it's possible to work around these shortcomings, it feels like exactly that: work.
But the game didn't enslave a throng of loyal fans because of its gameplay, odd as that might sound. It was its style and spirit that made it worth experiencing and I'm elated to say that age has only helped in this regard. Though the colors don't jump off the screen in quite the same way they do on the other platforms, the game's one-of-a-kind neo-punk visuals still show how age-proof brilliant art direction truly is. Aside from a blocky texture here and there and some noticeable pop-in, it looks like it was made today rather than 12 years ago. In an age when the term “art game” has become synonymous with pretension and minimalism, JSR shows that art can be in your face and full of attitude too.
Though you get all the modes, features and songs from the console re-release ordered to go, it's still tough to imagine breaking the game out in the subway or on the bus. In this regard, it suffers in the same way any console developed title does when it gets ported directly to a mobile device. They're designed to be fun over the course of 30 minutes or even several hours, not in five minute bursts. And when you consider how ill-suited the hardware is for these kinds of control schemes, you get to wondering who represents the market for this game. Perhaps iPad owners who loved the original, but don't own a modern console or Vita and don't mind unwieldy controls? I honestly don't know those people.
The only real draw left is composer Hideki Naganuma's outrageous tunes. I'm not sure if I can say definitively that this is the best soundtrack in video game history, but it certainly belongs in the discussion. It takes chunks of indie rock, trip-hop, and acid jazz, and melts them down into a punchy, psychedelic soundscape that never stops smiling. Most fans went through the gameplay motions just to experience the verve and energy this music created in tandem with the visuals. But in this case, the gameplay has suffered so much that they'd probably be better served by simply downloading the soundtrack.