Jet Set Radio

Adam and Austin rewind back to the year 2000, skate the streets of Tokyo-to and soak in the sonic chaos of its notorious underground radio station, JET SET RAADDIIOOO!!!!

Join them as they dig into what holds up, what doesn’t, Hideki Naganuma’s musical legacy, the Future of the franchise, and how the game's impact is still felt in the industry 25 years later. 

Music/Sound credits (by order of appearance):

Hummin' The Bassline - Hideki Naganuma
[Voice] - DJ Professor K from Jet Set Radio - Billy Brown 
Rock It On - Hideki Naganuma
That's Enough - Hideki Naganuma
Sweet Soul Brother - Hideki Naganuma
Sneakman - Hideki Naganuma
Oldies But Happies - Hideki Naganuma
Jet Set Groove #2 - SEGA SOUND TEAM
Let Mom Sleep - Hideki Naganuma
Like It Like This Like That - Hideki Naganuma
Oldies But Happies - Hideki Naganuma
Everybody Jump Around - Richard Jacques
Like It Like This Like That - Hideki Naganuma
The Concept of Love - Hideki Naganuma
Jet Set Groove #1 - SEGA SOUND TEAM
Birthday Cake - Cibo Matto
Sweet Soul Brother - Hideki Naganuma
Funky Dealer - Hideki Naganuma
Sneakman - Hideki Naganuma
Everybody Jump Around - Richard Jacques
JACK DA FUNK - Hideki Naganuma

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro & Background
• 11:41 "I don't understand what's going on here!" - JSR's Story
• 16:21 "It's a tough one, but somebody's gotta do it." - JSR's Gameplay
• 34:40 "Fly... like a butterfly." - JSRF's Gameplay Differences
• 50:36 "Rock that #$%!, homie!" - Cel Shaded Legacy
• 1:01:48 "Tune in, turn on, drop out." - The GOAT Soundtracks
• 1:14:49 "I said it before, I'll say it again." - The Spiritual Succesors
• 1:32:40 Legacy, Recommendations, and Outro

Transcript

0:11

and welcome back to another episode of the game gone by podcast it is saturday november 15th at the time of this recording i'm your host adam and joining me as always the gaming expert and enthusiast austin austin are you excited to talk about jet set radio you know i don't know if you can call me expert on this one this might be an episode where expert is a bit of a stretch but i'm excited to discuss this game excellent and you know i really should have uh saved using the words jet set radio so i could throw it in like dj professor k there but um today we're going to be rewinding to the turn of the millennium to the streets of tokyo to back when cell shading still felt like the future a relic of a bygone era a pre-911 stylistic powerhouse jet set radio radio oh man that is one of honestly like the just the most hype parts of the whole game it really is like every time i booted up the game i was just like it really gets you in the zone just this man going jet set radio the actor is so into it the character is so over the top and it just it just like defines the energy of this game like right off the bat uh and this is a game that you know i think is sort of hard to define in traditional genre terms uh but i would say it's some sort of like action sports game where you're in a gang of battery powered games and you're in line skate wearing teenage thugs who are running from the cops while grinding rails and spraying graffiti and i mean all of those things in just the greatest way possible it's it's so funny because every time you boot up this game it's just like graffiti is art but also don't go spray things because you'll go to jail it's like graffiti is art however graffiti as an act of vandalism is illegal right like like graffiti is awesome please don't go vandalize your local thanks please just graffiti your backyard fence and nothing right it's so funny so this game was actually released in the u.s in 2000 under the title jet grind radio because there was some sort of trademark dispute with the words jet set i don't know what game that was or what became of that because when they re-released it on steam 10 years later it was just jet set radio so i guess that was no longer in dispute uh it came out of an internal sega studio called smile bit so you know how nintendo has the like development team 1b or whatever the hell that just does yeah like like ead1 or whatever their internal departments are yeah yeah exactly so this this studio would actually get a similar name later on uh as they kind of went the same route but at the time it was called smile bit and their whole thing was to come up with new titles for the dreamcast and the art director on this project his name was ryuta ryuta ueda and he was basically saying that the youth and pop culture scenes of late 90s tokyo were just huge inspirations for this game's atmosphere so like you'd walk down the street and there's kids playing like ddr and rhythm games uh just some like little things on the side of the road coming out of a shop right you have all these vibrant colors it's really high energy and he said uh quote unquote cute character things were a big deal i don't know hello kitty i'm not sure exactly what that refers to but i have to imagine that really inspired like the character designs for a lot of this and so i i got all this information from actually a documentary that's on the game disc or at least it's on the hd version on steam i don't know if it was on the dreamcast version or not but they talk about a lot of this and he was saying uh that the cel-shaded style really kind of grew out of just a rejection of what all the other popular video games were about and he was at the time where they were trying to become more and more realistic uh we talked about shadow of the colossus a few a few episodes ago that is a game i think that was like yeah everything needs to be gray and brown because we're trying to look like gritty and real and you know that art style has more in common with like gears of war than it does this game right um this was a total rejection of that whole thing and uh i mean even even games at the time i'm trying to think like when did tony hawk come out was that 98 the first one uh that sounds right yeah yeah so even that game you know 2000s cool like edgy cool like dark colors cool right going for a more realistic like you're grinding through the mall and the mall is all like dim and dark and it's like you know because only posers hang at the mall and right exactly you got it so so he really wanted to move away from where that aesthetic was kind of heading and so he researched cell shading as a technique and decided that this would be able to capture some of the spirit of like manga and anime that were really popular in japan and what's crazy is like you'll watch a lot of video essays or whatever talking about this game it's like one of the first cell shaded games no no no the first cell shaded game and the guinness book of world records recognizes them as like jet set radio is the first cell shaded game that's actually really crazy i didn't know that until you brought it up and it just shows how like i always attribute cell shading to things like um you know like beautiful joe or like um you know even like win waker had that kind of cell shaded approach and so it's like i attribute it to like the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the to that but it's it's so much earlier and pioneered here with jet set because i never played this growing up right like this is this is a game i played for the first time here so seeing that it's the first game is pretty cool like that's a pretty big legacy to leave for sure yeah absolutely and we're going to get more in depth into that later um but another thing we're talking about this documentary is of course the other big thing this game is known for the music scene was just thriving uh in tokyo at the same time and it was like it was a little bit of a rock revival that mixed with dj culture and a lot of sampling of like big beat and hip-hop influences it just merged to form this like really cool style that composer hideki naganuma who i will be talking about a lot in this because he's the goat um he just ends up fusing all these different styles together you know uh the way the wikipedia describes it is it's like j-pop funk dance metal hip-hop rock acid jazz and more it's just so many blends um and he was saying that he was really inspired by the hip and cool nature of the characters and environments right so the art talks about how the visual style of the game was like the first thing they nailed down before they even knew it was going to involve skating or graffiti it was they had that art style kind of settled on so the composer himself looked through all these and got really inspired by that and he said he ends up spending a lot of time quote playing with the voices so he was chopping up some vocal samples from like random sounds in the game he's getting them from these cds that were lying around the office that you know like voice pack volume 35 um and he just takes all of each like this style of music that's really interesting to me because it's not something that i've really ever listened to outside the context of this game i also don't know that it exists outside of the context of this game it's it's just this you know you really have to hear it to what i'm talking about and if this episode goes as i want it to i will drop bits of songs throughout it and and listener you'll know what i mean but it's just it's just an incredible thing uh you really like the soundtrack as well right maybe not as much as me but you know who would oh yeah i mean i'm not listening to it quite as much outside of the game as you are i think that's been like your only way to do it i think that's been like your only way to do it i think that's been on repeat on spotify like every time i look over at your discord i just see like you listening to hideki nagaruma i'm like ah he's still in jet set jet set radio mode the music just turns me on look i want my spotify wrapped number one artist to be siba sibo mata so all i have to do is listen to birthday cake about 578 more times extra sugar um it yeah no this soundtrack is awesome like this is definitely the highlight of the game for me and i think for a lot of people and i think it it kind of is similar to almost like house music but like way more upbeat and all those things like it's way more sampling and everything but i knew a guy who used to dj and a lot of his inspiration for like the stuff that he would do with the music that he made was inspired by jet set radio oh that's awesome and it was like he felt inspiration from the of all the mixing and sampling and like putting everything together and his music didn't quite sound like anything here but that was the inspiration for it because of all the mixing and the you know different sounds and the way it blends all these different genres is is really cool i mean it is one of the coolest things about the game for sure yeah the art and music are a big deal in this game um another aspect of the art is just the character designs so ueda was saying like he really wanted these characters to feel more like icons and symbols rather than just humans uh and the stage designs kind of flowed out of the designs of the various gangs that inhabited them so i would i'd probably have to dive a little deeper into that i definitely see like a sort of a vibe between you know like poison jams and the sewers that makes sense um love shockers are sort of on the surface with a lot of great colors like that makes sense even though they're like goth mommies so i'm not exactly sure but uh i definitely believe it here there's there's a lot of interesting like stylistic decisions and i and i i feel the character designs are just awesome like they're they're kind of simple you know there's only a with it being that cell shaded style there's not a lot of uh sort of like fine textures and whatnot right you have a lot of these flat blocks of color but i just think they look so cool i think it's really the colors and the brightness of the colors and like the way they use color contrasting like beats got like the yellow shirt with like the red uh headphones unless i'm crazy but i'm pretty sure that's what yeah i think you're right yeah like that that that color the way those colors blend but also kind of contrast a little bit really make make all the characters pop because they all kind of follow a similar approach so it really pops whenever you have these kind of contrasting and and different colors yeah and there's also all the really vibrant graffiti art now i'm not i don't i a lot of times graffiti is just unreadable to me like i can't really figure out what's going on i did have a lot of fun making my own shitty graffiti that was just like a drawing on an analog stick of the games gone by logo which was a lot of fun to spray all over but they actually brought in a real life new york city graffiti artist named eric hayes and he just had a bunch of art that he just gave them he was like yeah you can just use this and you can just use that and i'll help you you can also consult on like anything new you want to make so they really put a lot of time into resources and nailing that style and i think it paid off for him that's really cool i didn't know that uh until you know reading this and i think that's a lot of that's a lot of a testament to like how serious they took it all like that approach the the way they wanted to emphasize the graffiti culture and the art and all that stuff yeah they said we are no culture vultures we are we are right right we we we want to be directly involved with the new york graffiti scene obviously the biggest graffiti scene i guess i don't know um but yeah that that's that's cool to know for sure yeah and so the director of the game uh masayoshi kikuchi that sounds right uh this was actually the director of the game masayoshi kikuchi first game that he directed and you know as i mentioned earlier he was noting a little documentary that like we we knew the visual style long before anything else and a lot of trial and error kind of brought them to the to the final like a stretch of like gameplay and level design and he was saying that a lot of that was influenced by the fact that american skate culture had like revived in the late 90s there partially because of tony hawk right so they i think they saw a lot of that and was like oh man this this group of hooligans are gonna go around spray painting they need to be on wheels of no that definitely it definitely brings it all together right like i think not being on wheels would have would have made this a really weird experience so why don't we go ahead and start with just kind of an overview of the narrative of the first game because that'll take about 45 seconds um this game has a narrative what do you mean so you know you have dj professor k kind of narrating things in between uh the various stages and but there's really just not that much going on because there's a lot of narrative going on and there's a lot of he's always just like really dramatic like the streets of tokyo toe were being taken over by the love shockers and poison jam and you know i said there's literally like a ghost record there's like some like oh yeah like like crazy record that everybody's trying to get that's been like broken up into it's it's so outlandish i did not care about this game story at all and it's and it very much feels like something they didn't care about a whole lot either it was like just enough to to make things uh fit together because you basically like yeah at the beginning chapter you're like oh i'm gonna go to the other graffiti gangs and you like out graffiti them and then each time you beat one it's like they dropped a piece of a record that then some random limo came by and picked it up and like all right then we make a detour to america where apparently this same mysterious limo drivers like kidnapped some american gang's friend and they never saw him again and now they're here to help us like fight fight these guys and then the third chapter is just like all these weirdo assassins from this rakaku group are everywhere now uh and then like one beat the final boss and it turns out that it's just a myth and the like magic artifact disc is just an indie album it it is as bizarre as it sounds really it's it's so weird and then like yeah i didn't really care much for this game story not not that it's bad right like there's nothing wrong with it it's just there's just so little to it that i i barely paid attention to it so it's pretty forgettable but it does its job as like a structure to get you to the next place to stuff and it's really just an excuse to have like some uh sort of i'm about to call them cinematics not really the right word but just sort of like cut scenes away where they can show off the art style a little bit have dj professor k get up there and like you know rock around it was all just in service of kind of showing off some of the style and i think in that way it works because yeah it's just like it's not something that i think on a narrative level you were supposed to find yourself overly invested in yeah i can't imagine anybody was like ah yes we've written you know a masterpiece here we've we've written expedition 33 right yeah and i think you know we'll compare it to future a little bit there's not really a whole lot going on with future story either it's a really similar thing where there's like oh there's like an oppressive conglomerate that's taken over everything and there's all these gangs that are both fighting back against that and each other uh and there's just no demon record and future that's really like the only difference um but future is actually a really interesting game to me because people will call it a requel because it almost just feels like they tried again right like it has a lot of the same characters but they're not in the same universe like they don't know each other you end up like re-recruiting these guys um they all look you know they'll have character redesigns all of the parts of the city you still have like benton show and this and that but it's like reimagining so future is a very interesting game to me because it kind of just feels like in an alternate universe jet set radio which is really apt in my mind because the game design itself sort of feels the same way it's like an alternate universe where they said you know what we really didn't pour enough resources into the game design controls last time we should pour more resources into that but it also kind of came at the cost of like in my mind almost everything else about the game but i just find that really interesting because it's like the the actual concept of the game is an alternate universe jet set radio and the actual development of the game and feel of the game feels like an alternate universe jet set radio that that is interesting to point out that way uh i don't know if i would agree as harshly as as you're putting it but like it feels like you're you're being a little harder on future than than maybe necessary but well not yet yeah not yet i'm not just wait i can't wait no i mean the story in future to me feels exactly the same as the story in the first one and neither of us have finished future for clarity's sake right i mean i guess something could something could get like more outlandish by the end i suppose but it it didn't really feel like it was heading that direction once i had more time in future than i did the first game and it only unlocked four characters i kind of figured this wasn't gonna go very well for me that's that's fair yeah these games are not narrative heavy they're not supposed to be uh and that's okay like it works fine you're supposed to play the game and enjoy the music and that's that's really what the game does well i'd argue well the music is done well the rest will give me a break give me a break well i'm going to get into that so for someone who hasn't played this game the main objective in the first game you're trying to tag a series of graffiti spots in these different stages within a time limit it's very inspired by tony hawk in that way it's like do a set of thing in a time limit in this like small area fairly confined stage i would say like they're not in the first game they definitely don't feel as open as the second game right and the whole time you're doing this you're contending with these like increasingly powerful police forces you know at first it shows up it's like a couple guys with a baton and some weird looking goober with a revolver by the end of the game it's like assassins on jetpacks and you're really like you're jumping around and you're grinding you're dashing you're trying to get to all these tags there's a couple different types of tags you have the kind of instant small tags that just happen really quickly and then you have ones that sort of become like a qte minigame i guess which you know was all the rage in 2000 there's a few different types of levels for the most part you're doing what i said there'll be a couple where you uh have to like recruit new members by copying their tricks or racing them i had a lot of fun with those in my mind there's not nearly enough of those uh there's also the tag levels where you have to tag all the members of the gang with the other games and other gangs i did not have fun with those and there's way too many of them for sure i think for me the core problem of this game and the reason that i think i had such a frustrating time with it is that the the controls of all of this stuff like like the actual concept of the game is fine like i think okay the tags are cool i don't mind the minigame i really like like you said the rival competitions where you're kind of following a path of like they're gonna do a trick you have to execute the same trick and like that's cool because it lets you focus in on doing neat things like it's like this is cool uh the problem is i just think the game controls like garbage that's just plain poppy poppy i think that's a bit over i feel like they're so floaty like like jumping you go like 800 feet into the air and like good luck landing on anything like landing on a rail to grab something and then you're like oh my god or making a jump can be very difficult because you just have no control over your character in the air so you leap off of a grind and it's like hope you've angled yourself exactly where you need to be and don't need to adjust at all because you're going to miss this rail if you did and for me that made a lot of even the fun parts of the game like the rival competitions where you're trying to follow this path really frustrating because i felt like the game wasn't allowing me to enjoy it and i was like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again i'm gonna have to do this again i'm gonna have to engage with that in a fun way you're definitely not alone i mean like if you if you read stuff online like you know i've been really into reading game facts forums from like 20 years ago for this game a lot of people have similar complaints i will say this though i think like they're they're not the best controls i think people just forget how everything felt like this in the year 2000 like because you have to remember a couple things one this game's console that it came out on there was no right analog stick right this is before that's a thing and even worse when jet set future comes out it's like oh my god i'm gonna have to do this again i'm gonna have to do this it's on xbox which has a right analog stick do you know what that stick doesn't do i'm assuming it doesn't control the fucking camera i mean it does this weird thing where it goes into like a first person mode and you can look around so i guess you can kind of like try to find the graffiti tag or whatever but that game came out a year after halo right right and and that is just like we have to remember that back then we had not as an we like i work in it uh the industry had not figured out that standardized camera setup like this just wasn't a thing yet which i think is really what makes a game like halo so impressive for really nailing that um but yeah it's so weird to me because now that's just you would never it doesn't matter the genre dude shooter disney dreamlike valley platformer the right stick swivels the camera around the character that's just like a rule like no video game doesn't do that now yeah we really have come to a place where like all controls are homogenous like it's just like and i think that's a good thing overall i i agree like very few games have weird out there control schemes which i think is good it lets you approach every game with kind of a similar playing field and it's but it's not even at least in the case of jet set radio for me is not even the camera all the time right the camera is not great you can definitely get like trapped in corners especially in like tight spots and just good luck figuring out like where you are what's happening but for me it i don't know i feel like i've played the older tony hawks even the original versions more recently than i you know than not like i've i've played the old 64 version within the last couple of years and that feels way better to me than playing jet set radio like the controls on that feel way more responsive it feels like they i think part of the problem and future does this better you you have to land like very precisely on your grinds to to go to them like future yeah you can kind of land a little bit off and it'll it'll it'll be it'll be it'll be it'll be it'll be it'll be it'll just move you into the grind like it'll auto adjust into the grind for for the original game it felt like you really had to be precise but the game didn't allow you to be precise because it just doesn't function that well at least for me it it's a very high skill floor at the end of the day like this is a game old enough to rent a car uh this game is older than several people probably listening to this right now and back then a lot of games were like this where they just kind of expected you to spend a lot of time figuring out their like idiosyncrasies and if you didn't then like go fuck yourself because you need to to come to progress to the next stage and i think you know again it's it's overall probably good that we figured out uh the quote unquote language of video games there are certain things that are more standardized now and it just allows you to like focus on learning the unique mechanics to a game and not having to worry about like relearning how to play or use a controller every single game you pick up there's a lot of things that do hold up about it i don't think the actual gameplay is one of them it was very frustrating for me i didn't love the tagging minigame thing and part of that is because i could not get the analog stick to work yeah i'm still not convinced your controller is just broken with all of your issues it's not broken for any other game but when i don't know what it was but i could not get the analog stick to respond to especially like the full circle ones like so out of curiosity were you trying to nail them like really quickly like three in a row or were you kind of doing one and waiting for it to like disappear and then do it again i don't know i don't know i don't know the next one i i mean i feel like i was waiting but maybe i wasn't waiting long enough i don't know like i tried a couple different ways like like at first i was trying to go very quickly because that felt like the right thing to do yeah uh but that wasn't working very well so then i tried to slow it down and be like very precise with my motions and it just still wasn't working right so i ended up having to do all the minigames on the d-pad which was fine like it worked fine it was just really weird so this game is trying to do something very deliberate and it sounds like it doesn't land with you and that's like totally fine um but it's it's really trying to like when you accelerate with the dash it's trying to simulate someone actually building up speed with inline skates right like you can kind of feel the speed pulsing with each uh like movement of the skate right like as he steps forward um and it's really all about maintaining momentum like you have to build it and it kind of rewards you for maintaining it and that is where i think a totally fair criticism of the qte tag comes into play because it's like all right cool i've built up all this momentum i'm in a groove i'm in a flow state and now i have to stop to spray this thing um well there were just a couple of moments where i felt like some of the tags too like there was one specific one that was driving me insane in one of the uh like u.s levels and there was a billboard and you could grind the rail on the billboard but it wasn't one that you could actually do it on your own like you could do it on your own like you could do it on your own like you could actually just spray like you had to do a qte on it so you couldn't grind the rail you had to step off of the rail to do the mini game and i was like why would like why would that be a design choice like that felt so frustrating to me because i'm in the flow i'm grinding on this i'm trying to hop off of this rail to like wall ride four other billion billboards but i have to stop at this one and like purposefully stand off of the rail so that i could do this like weird tagging mini game and stuff like that just it felt very like flow breaking for me there's more than a handful of like uh rails and jumps and tags in this game where you're kind of like wow all right um did this one did this one get played to us right like who thought this was a good idea it really does remind you how like back then they're just um i don't know what it was and maybe it's because it is more of like it was focused more on like trying to be some sort of piece of art as opposed to just like a product but like the idea of like a game that's like a game that's the attention to the the tightness of game design and game testing just wasn't wasn't what it is now i would say uh and and you know that there were definitely plenty of moments right to speak positively about the game like there is some there is some good level design in like pathing that'll take you from you know you're on a grind and then you can hop to wall ride a couple things and then get back onto another grind and like kind of keep yourself moving in momentum but not being able to tag some of those things was frustrating which is something i feel like future does a lot better uh personally but the the idea is there like you can see the idea of kind of flowing throughout the levels i just thought having to stop and tag all the things was was kind of frustrating especially whenever for me the police attacking you while you're in the middle of doing a tag is just infuriating like i know you like the friction of the police in this game but i just found it the most frustrating experience well if my controller wasn't doing the fucking tag inputs i'm sure i would have as well uh well but but i could do them on the d-pad it it was just that like i felt like you couldn't lead them away from the tags like effectively enough to get enough space to then complete the tag so it was like do half the tag get knocked out of the tag run around until you could get rid of them come back finish half the tag like i just felt like that was a really frustrating experience for me i i did enjoy that part but i do i do feel like there's a little bit of an identity crisis here because i do so it's like yeah okay you're getting chased by the police and you got to go do this tag and the camera's kind of spinning around at these angles while you're tagging so you can like you have this really cool view of like the police like running towards you and their little sound effects get like slowly louder and louder as they get closer to you and um but then all of that really just is at odds with the fact that you're with how uh the game expects you to like build your speed and hit rail to rail and really find a flow to that so it i i totally agree that like these things even when they're working do not seem to like mesh well with each other and this is something that i think uh future tries to address i i would agree i think all of the like all of the legacy sequels to this that we're going to talk about because we played a lot of games for this yes we did um i think they all had an emphasis on trying to fix some of these gameplay quirks that i didn't that like didn't stick with me particularly in this first game and not like they've designed it for me but it addresses all the things that i think i had frustrations with mechanically with this game i'm trying to think if there's anything else specific to this game i want to talk about before moving on to future because i do want to compare the gameplay to future because i think there's a lot of interesting things to talk about there maybe the last thing just being like the final boss in this game is weird uh it's like it's not so strange it's not particularly difficult you're like jumping across these a couple of rooftops to like spray these weird golden rhino they look like the um inflatable two mans at a car sale yes but they're golden rhinos and once you take those out you then have to go to the little spot where like the ceo of the rakaku group has been launching these rhinos at you from and you have to you just have to grind out this last little rail to tag something but it's on this like spinning platform and oh my god like i'm i'm glad i beat the main part of it in like two minutes because i needed the remaining seven to skate up this fucking rail it was so weird this is most disturbing it it was a really frustrating i thought like it was so weird because the way this works right is like you're on this like big spinning disc thing and you you have to jump onto the onto like external platforms and there's like a weird spinning like rotating block that you have to kind of like jump on as it's flipping a certain direction and i found that to be also infuriating like landing the jumps to to hop between these like floating i don't even know what they were right just big blocks in the sky yeah like those were also weird to land on for me but then the other two were just like grinds that were super easy to execute so it's like it's just a really strange thing that the the final boss was going for it definitely felt like one of those things was like we need to have a boss fight let's do a boss fight yeah like it's like you you don't though like but it definitely felt like in early 2000s like we need to include a boss fight here to to end the game on a boss fight you know how you have to do one more gang tag battle against poison jam and it's the only gang you have to do it against twice i at that point it's like all right just give me three rakaku guys to do a gang battle against i think i would have just preferred wherever the hell this is right and and man i didn't even get to talk about how bad the gang tag stuff was uh because it's it's awful like it is some of the worst stuff i've ever done and it's it's not i want to clarify that i i didn't find this game particularly challenging right like it's i just found it frustrating and the gang tags is a is a very specific one because i feel like you have to be so close to the gang member to tag them but if you get too close but if you get too close you're gonna get hit and it's like oh my god and then i had a really hard time like spamming the tag on them and i and i know that's kind of what you're supposed to do but like it felt like it was it was hard to sometimes spam that tag because i couldn't stay close long enough without getting hurt so like god that was just an infuriating like if you only had to tag them like two or three times it might have been fine but you had to tag them 10 each one 10 yeah it's weird too because when you do it the camera like shifts for a second like to you and then shifts back to them and you can just hold down the trigger and this and you can you can hit 10 pretty quickly when you want it down right but the camera just like has a complete seizure as you're doing that and it kind of makes you wonder like why why do they even have it do that why not just spray it cool there's no reason to flick the camera at me for a fourth of a second it's so bizarre it's so weird and and i found i found the dash was hard to it was hard for me to build speed i felt like i could never tell if i were dashing and it were actually building more speed if i had hit a speed cap like i felt like i was never clear on like am i actually even going faster and there were times when like i felt like i just could not catch up to the gang member like i was trying but i just i could not get to them like there's like a the dash doesn't have very good like feedback on it um so it's kind of hard to tell what it's doing basically what it is is like when you skate normally let's say you have a speed of five when you dash you pretty much immediately get up to speed seven but that's it like you can dash a lot you're never going to get past seven the way that you get more speed is like jumping onto rails and that is like it builds your momentum right so then you jump to another rail and you jump to another rail uh that being said the easiest way to tag these guys was to just get to the spots where they stop and wait out for you and then when they start moving uh dash jump behind them once and then hold l and you're at their exact speed for like three seconds and you can just take all 10 down just um awful game design these are the kind of things that i know because i've played this game six times so a lot of these things i get to and my muscle memory kicks in so it's not that bad but like even when this game came out i don't think anyone was over the moon about the gang battles because even though i love this game like those are the worst part i don't think there's any denying that the game yeah especially poison jam and the sewers which oh jet set and sewers apparently are the worst fucking combination of things yeah they should really just stop doing sewer levels it's not good if the third game comes out in their sewers i don't think it's like i can definitely see a lot of the vision here and i can see a lot of what they're going for and it's definitely unlike any other game of its time right like i or really ever like there's only been other games that have tried to emulate the style of jet set radio right yeah quite a few that there's nothing but there's nothing that's like oh yeah jet set radio is similar to this like the closest thing you can say is like tony hawk but it it is definitely trying to do something unique and i can appreciate it for that i just for me felt like a lot of those a lot of those things that i've been frustrated about the the execution just wasn't there for me yeah playing this game and it's old right i mean like i i get that it's if i had played it when i was you know this game came out when i was five so if i had played it and whatever i might have been a lot more into it or been like oh my god this is so cool like listen to this cool music and like what is this cool thing going on and i could have gotten over maybe a lot of these weird like idiosyncrasies that i didn't love about it i i want to talk about future now because future i think attempts to address some of these things and to me it's like mixed results there's a couple things that undoubtedly i think feel better right i think getting up to speed quickly just by moving and not having to do the weird dash is like a good decision it just feels way less frustrating to like fall over in this game because you can get right back up and back up to speed instead of like oh good god let me dash toward a rail and hope i hit it um and you also just don't fall over nearly as much yeah like because it doesn't it doesn't expect you to like because the first game was like you build this momentum and then once you're past a certain point you need to control it or or it'll be like real life you'll bust your ass right jet set radio future is just way more forgiving about that that whole thing yeah it feels very like a sandbox game in a lot of ways and that's one way that it does that i think it's just like here's your speed have fun like yeah it gets it gets rid of the time limits the stages are much more open um the grinding is the way it works is like well first off when you hit a rail you just like instantly have tons of speed uh to the point where like there are these telephone poles that you grind vertically and if you're just skating and bump into them you're suddenly soaring off into the sky um there's tricks that you can do like on the ground like you can do like on the rails to kind of uh increase your speed too that can be a lot of fun because you have to hit it in this very like rhythmic way and you can use both x and y and there are different kinds of tricks and y has a different rhythm than x and i think that's really cool uh trying to mix them is very challenging but um that increases speed and that feels good uh the map has been made like 3d and there's labels on it so it's a little more useful than the first game because the first game is the map game is utter garbage it's it's crazy because i don't i feel like the chapter one you don't even need the map because the stages are so small and then in chapter three they put like the stages that you've been doing separately all into one thing but the maps are still the individual area you're in and there's no indication like what's the exit to the other area so yeah the map the map is like utterly worthless in chapter three of the first game it's not it's not yeah it it's complete garbage to me i mean it does mark like where the tags are but it has no depth or verticality in the map so like it could be in any number of places in this general vicinity and like i felt more frustrated looking at the map than i than i did not looking at the map most of the time and in the first game doesn't have a ton of verticality it tends to basically have like each level has like a lower area and a higher area as opposed to um the sewers in future which are six stories like jesus christ um so it's usually not too bad but there's still times where you're trying to just figure out like how do i get up there and the map is not it's not how do i get up there it's not how do i get up there it's not how yeah and and you know kind of like you said the level design usually makes up for it you don't need it most of the time but like if you do get into a situation where you do need it it's like why even bother like is it it's the grind city level in the first game where you literally have to get on an elevator to get to the top that to me is kind of like yeah uh a failure of i don't say a failure of design there's nothing inherently wrong with that but it does it seems like the rest of the game is really about getting up high and then skating down and maintaining that momentum and finding out how to get up there and this level is just like take an elevator and and you have to take it like six times because there's so many tags and good luck falling if you fall like one time yeah like i think that's often considered other than the sewers the worst level of the first game that makes sense yeah um i i thought the level design in the first game was kind of mixed too like i didn't like there's some spots that are way too cramped uh in my opinion that they're just way too tight and it's like you can't get a lot of that momentum that you're trying to get because you're just having to like navigate really tight corridors that i didn't love um i think this i think future has a lot more open space that lets you kind of freely roam around the area a little more i feel like the first game those tight spaces always had a rail like the the stairways and the hallways dude there's so many hallways in future where there's nothing to grind on and i don't understand that that is that is definitely a flaw of future for sure i would agree there uh but let me round out the things future does well before i start talking trash about it um fair enough i do think that the increased verticality of the levels can be cool at times i really enjoyed the level right before the sewers the one the sewers connect to uh i enjoyed climbing up that 99th street for some reason confused me and i think it's just because they have the all these um rails in the sky that they're trying that you can kind of use through the level but they're they just zigzag across each other constantly and it's impossible to look at one and tell where you're gonna go when you get on it until you're on it and then in future dude good luck getting off of a rail once you've gotten on it oh my god you're going so fast and like if you try to jump off near where you are you just snap back onto the same rail you're on and then if you try to jump further away there's probably six more rails you're gonna run into i like i understand it can be frustrating to lose all your momentum in the first game but you're you're just gonna wait till you're at the end of the rail to get off and try again because you're not getting off that damn thing i would i would much rather do that than lose all my momentum and have to build it back up no but you're just soaring off for 20 seconds even though knowing you're not going to get where you're going and not being able to do anything about it until you just get to the end i'd rather be able to restart immediately i but i find that most of like 99th street is the one i literally played this morning before recording this because i was trying to a lot of the like zigzagging rails in 99th street because you just you could just make a circle and be like right back there like it i did the flag capture thing i can't remember if that's before or after yes i did the flag capture thing the that was a little frustrating at first but it's it's just kind of like you just have to you only need to really get two of them so yeah because they're nice and let the other ones all catch one right exactly i think that changes in the later battles i think they have one person catch three so you have to oh no no no no that's that that sounds awful then but thankfully i didn't get that far so i don't know how terrible that is uh because i just kind of like waited by the ones that i knew would pop up after the first one i was like all right we're just gonna get the first one and then we're just gonna kind of wait for the second two austin only likes this game more because he only had to play it for four hours yeah and that four hours was so much infinitely more enjoyable than the eight hours i put into the first game not even a little bit okay so so what i would say is like the things i feel like this game addressed are the fact that like the the the cornering and the getting on the rails and the getting up to speed way more forgiving way more accessible way more fluid right like i think that's just a truth um but it created its own problems right and in the sewers is where like so the instant grind speed and snapping was such a fucking monkey's paw situation in the sewer because you have these there's a lot of half pipes in the sewers and there's some big ones that are you know look just like like a tony hawk kind of half pipe but then there's these tiny ones they literally look like they were sewers and they're not sewers they're pipes cut in half right and i'm skating down one side of it because you know there's always like the rails at the top of the half pipe right i'm just trying to like get off and go the other way and i either what happens like i'm trying to barely jump off so i can land in the middle and i just end up back on the same rail over and over then i try to jump a little further to not end up on the same rail and i just end up on the other side of the pipe and i'm stuck in this fucking hallway dude for like seven minutes just trying to go the other direction and it's like when i somehow getting turned around because there's like these there's these platforms that you have to ramp off of but you can only get enough air if you do the hand plant to ramp transition thing which i found was like a little spotty at times and then these the camera you know is not any better than the first game so it's just constantly getting stuck in the ceiling as you're trying to do these things and then these these platforms are not like the edge of the next section of the pipe they hang over it so you can get caught underneath them oh my god dude like the sewers that was worse than anything from the first game to me like the the the little bit i played of the sewers i could definitely see where you where you would have those frustrations i didn't get super deep into the sewers before we started recording but i could definitely see where those frustrations would come up because i was already seeing some of it but at least this game gives you more tools to navigate those pipes like you can you can do the handstand which gives you more momentum to do the the jump to do the flips over the thing like those at least are things that you can do the first game doesn't give you anything like that it's just good luck landing on these rails like like i mean i won't even necessarily disagree with that but i think it's more than canceled out by the fact that the level complexity is just fucking bonkers so like what they're asking you to do in the sewers is absurd especially the section where it's like here is a 3d platformer maze where there's gaps where you have to jump you can't turn your camera you're on ice skates the entire time it was truly like my own personal hell it was like someone had designed a level that is everything i hate about video games together at once that's very nice thank you like i said i didn't get far enough into the sewers to experience that frustration yet so i could imagine that would be frustrating but i think overall future does not feel that way in in general like i think the tools that future gives you and the the forgiveness of it makes it a much more enjoyable gameplay experience for me i i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i will say there's definitely some flaws in other aspects of the game um that don't quite hold up to the original but gameplay wise i enjoyed every second of future much much more than the first game so like there's i'll say this there's a couple decisions i think make a lot of sense but then just cause other problems right so like they wanted to um like you really didn't like the qte tagging thing cool they totally got rid of that even the big tags are just a bunch of tiny tags together and there's a new mechanic called shuffle you sort of like create these sparks with your skates and slow down a little bit and that allows you to hit these really long tags in a row and then you can click the stick again and you just get back up to speed that feels great that feels good i think that is a legitimate like upgrade in the tagging of the first one right but then they take the police and when and when in my mind where they should have just probably gotten rid of them because i think that's the kind of the style this game was going for i think this game would have just been better without the police because instead what they do is they put you in these like instanced sectioned off battle arenas where you can't even tag in and you can't even tag in and you can't even tag in and you can't even tag anything like there will be tags there that you're trying to get for that level but you can't hit them because you have to like fight these police and there's not really any improved mechanics to do so there is the boost like you get the tin cans and you can do the boost and there will be certain enemies that can only be knocked over with that boost but otherwise it's like skate up into them jump so it knocks them over spray them while they're on the ground and just do this over and over and it's so uninteresting and i have no idea why like i get again i get the idea of like the police were kind of a problem in the first one they interrupted the flow of the game let's do something about that and it said what we'll do about that is interrupt the flow of the game even more but have them be their own separate thing that doesn't even connect with like the graffiti part that i don't that i don't understand at all that was a little weird i think it's executed a lot better in i think i only had two instances of of it that i can recall but like the sections with the tanks where you have to like grind on the tanks and like spray the tank and then the the dude would pop out and then you spray the dude and then like in the um in 99th street there was the the like spotlight things whatever that you have to grind up and spray like i thought those were were kind of an interesting compromise because it's like here's a here's a different mechanic to deal with a threat and it kind of does something different without doing the weird police fight thing because i did yeah i'll agree that i thought that was a little weird it's just like you're in a really tiny space and you just have to kind of go in circles and knock them down and you're like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die and spray them on the ground like it's not hard but it it just feels pointless like it just feels very like what what is the purpose of this of this activity that i am now doing yeah and i think you're completely right there i had kind of forgotten about the tanks um the tanks in the spotlights do legitimately feel like they were trying to go for something else that would have been unique and like fit in with some of the new control schemes and stuff more the little areas where they just throw 45 baton police i have no idea what they were thinking there it's and then like in each section you do like a boss one where there's like a guy where you have to like you have to fight him because he he has like more health so you have to knock him down like multiple times and spray him like that guy's weird like he's like the secret agent man and like he's supposed to be harder but like he's really not it's yeah i showed you that clip where i just skated up to the top of the building and like accidentally ran into him and i was like who is this and then i just sprayed him and i was like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die his entire health bar before he stood up and i was like what what are we doing yeah it's that that is a weird mechanic i'll definitely give you that that is not an improvement but that was too soft so yeah just to round out the gameplay section before we get into uh the art styles and whatnot to me this is a game that like undeniably has tighter controls and more responsive jumping and grinding but it just kind of came with the sacrifice of like literally everything else in the game to me i there's not that all of it's bad like i think some of it's i'll say this is probably as good as the first game but i just other than those couple uh design decisions with the controls i just really don't think there's a whole lot of improvements in this one i wouldn't like i don't think i could agree with that on the pure like enjoyment standpoint like i had so much more fun playing future but i didn't finish it so it's like how much fun did i really have yeah good point but but if i had to pick one of these two games to play through all of it again it would be future for sure my man it's gonna take you three times as long i don't even think i think you would quickly just go back to the first one i will never touch dead set radio again i promise i will never touch that game again i genuinely don't think anything in that game is as frustrating as the sewers i don't think you would have ever gotten past the sewers maybe that's true i didn't get far enough into the sewers to know but uh i found the first game just mechanically again there's a lot of good things in the first game about jet set radio i think that we're about to talk about but mechanically i found it just infuriating almost every time i played it i probably rage quit this game like three times just out of sheer frustration i can see that i've played it six times and i rage quit it at least three times this time for some reason i had um so much trouble with the very first tagging gang tagging mission the one where you're on um i want to say it's noise noise machines and there's just all the rails and that one uh upper area of that one and then you're on the other side of the level oh yeah i i failed like three times to do that meanwhile i got an achievement for beating poison jam in 30 seconds i don't know how i did this uh and i think i think the one i struggled the most with i mean poison jam is the one i obviously struggled the most with because the sewers are awful but like love shockers had a really was really frustrating for me for some reason like i found quite simple but i could never catch up to them i feel like i couldn't find their like pathing and like where they were going that one i think maybe just the level design was tricky but i i struggled so much with that one ironically so let's get into the art style of this game which i think is uh one half of its most like prominent part of its legacy right uh and we'd kind of mention cell shading and just for our purposes here we're really talking about it's like 3d models that are lit like a cartoon okay you have these thick black lines that outline everything and you have what are mostly flat of color shadows and lights tend to have these really sharp edges rather than being kind of like you know a gradient that slowly fades away that you'd see in you know most other art styles it's like no the the lights and shadows are just different colored blocks right overlaid on top of the other colored blocks um and this is a technique that i think ends up having a lot of influence in the industry right because what comes out right after this game the next few years you get sly cooper you get that shooter 13 i never played that was that on the wii i don't know what that is okay like i i remember seeing like previews and stuff for it so i i know what it looks like and i know it's cell shaded but i'd never played it the the name sounds like very vaguely familiar but i could not tell you okay then you have beautiful joe uh it's a great game yep and then wind waker which is probably like one of the more um i guess well-known examples of cell shading at that time right because everyone everyone knows zelda right when people say cell shading i think the thing they probably first think of is wind waker at the first thing i think of i think anyone who hadn't played jet set would probably think of wind waker yeah i mean right that makes sense right uh and then what i thought was interesting about this is like that those are true cell shaded games those are using the same techniques and the same like design philosophies in the late 2000s and early 2010s we get a few games that aren't actually doing those same things but are very clearly inspired by the style right so you have prince of persia from 2008 you have borderlands in 2009 and then you have telltale's walking dead in 2012 like these are really using more traditional animation styles and lighting and shadow effects but they are very clearly inspired by a cell shading type design i mean you can you can definitely just see that playing these games i must say you telling me that borderlands isn't technically cell shaded is like insane to me because it looks it looks like i would imagine like like that's cell shading to me right like same thing with like prince of persia like there's a lot more detail on those character models and i think that's the first thing you would notice if you compared it to wind waker is there's a lot less textures that are just totally flat and there's a lot more lines and details in it and i think that's ultimately what makes it like not the same techniques um gotcha but you yeah for sure like you could tell that these guys had all played wind waker or jet set or something and loved the style and that's why all these things kind of look like that but then you have the more recent versions of this that are actually true cell shading again but just with better technology right so we have hover bomb rush cyberpunk uh the lethal league fighting game did you ever play that i have not i've seen it though like i know i can envision it but i've not played it yeah it's a weird one too because there's like a ball so it's like a 2d fighter but there's a ball that you throw at each other it's almost like soccer like soccer inspired yeah it is very strange there's like there's like goals and stuff yeah i think it was reasonably popular i played it a few times i was like i will never get the hang of this i'm already not great at a normal fighting game you throw in like a soccer ball i have to manage it's over um and then probably the more recent one would be high fire rush i think that is also a true cell shaded game just in a um you know with better technology and everything so as you can see over the last 25 years this has been uh you know it's it's had its it's come and gone it's had its waves but this has been a style that has continued to i think appeal to people for the last two decades and i think that's because it it continues to endure like jet set radio looks really good yeah like for all of my complaints that i have with it i the the visuals are not one of them like it is so colorful it's so bright like it looks so good all the levels have like really interesting color schemes and patterns and like they're doing so much with this visual style and you can tell they poured a lot of their heart and soul into it and it looks so good and this was really a time where like we were starting to enter this era that i swear lasted like 20 years and thank god we're finally out of it where it's just like it was cool to not care and it was cool to be like nonchalant and all of our heroes and games were like silent bad boys and this kind of thing and everyone in this game is just like so unapologetically cool like at the character select screen they're just doing these dances that like would i don't know no one would probably ever want to do it like a high school party because they'd feel cringe or something but none of these characters give a fuck and then you pick them and they do like a whole new dance at the character select screen and uh you know every time you're fighting one of the gangs they're like dancing it's just like it's just a cool game and it's never embarrassed about itself and at any point it has no reason to be but i mean like it just it knew exactly what it wanted to be stylistically and it was really no surprise that i reading at the beginning in the documentary that this whole style they figured out before like anything else about the game yeah it it's definitely a very stylized vision like they had a clear vision and i think they they execute that part of it like perfectly it's the the aesthetic the like you said all the like break dancing and dance moves that are happening all the time and like the way the music kind of blends in with all of those things it is a very cool game it's very stylish like all of the the professor dj professor k shouting and you know jet set radio like all that all that stuff just feels so fun like it it's interesting because coming right off of fear like the things i liked about fear were a lot of it's like strong mechanics and i thought it was a really strong mechanical game and this one like the things i like about it are opposite and it's completely opposite like i loved i always got really excited to play jet set radio at first because you know you're booting up and you're just hearing jet set radio and all the like colorful environments you're like yeah this is going to be fun and then you know it never was for me but the style that they're going for is so unique and so like it is so clear vision you know yeah and dude some of the character designs are so cool uh they're really simple in a lot of ways you know we talked about big big shapes flat flat shapes with bright colors um but they all look really unique and some of these i swear like uh mew i'm pretty sure that character was just like illegal for the next 20 years i mean it's like bright turquoise and like pink stripes and like a mini a miniskirt you just wouldn't see anything like this in a video game for two more decades i mean the um just the unabashed way they used like bright colors and over-the-top designs and just took like random aspects of like tokyo teen fashion um it just creates some really really cool character designs i like it i like it yeah and and i think that's you know for as much as i like future that is one of the things that kind of they they regressed on for sure because a lot of the character designs are weird in future i don't like i don't want to harp on this too hard because it isn't as if like future is some sort of uh artistically lazy game or something it went into a very different direction that has happened not to like but god i feel like i feel like it just loses all of the cool art styles from the first game so first off i don't i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know what this is but it was like fallout 3 where everything just has this weird shade of green across like everything i don't know like do you know what i mean yeah i don't think i find it as dramatic as you you're laying it out here but i definitely know what you like everything just feels a little bit more dull yeah like the the first game pops so much like every color seems really sharp and bright and it like punches you in the face and in this game like even the brightest colors just feel like they're like two steps down from how bright they were in the original and i think part of that is the first game is like it's like 2000 streets of tokyo and new york right this game is like some weird sci-fi universe like upgrade kind of thing yeah it feels like you know we'll talk a little bit about about bomb rush in the future but it feels like bomb rush took a lot of inspiration from future with a lot of things um and part of that is like the first game is like the first game is like the first game is like the weird kind of like sci-fi aesthetic i love this note here that you have where it says every character looks like they made it with a robot made from the judsons which is just a psychotic thing to say but it's very accurate the stupid things on the side of his ears are straight out of the judsons dude i cannot stand the character designs they they look really stupid they do they do look really stupid there's a couple like i think the new yo-yo is kind of cool because he's kind of just like a big bright green blob in the first and they and they give them like a little more detail so there's maybe like one or two i think are good but like man i thought um the version of cube in this i didn't even unlock but i was going through videos and just looking at all the different characters um the cube in this one is so boring like she went from like um you know i kept joking like goth mommy alt girl from the 2000s to just like i only have a black shirt and need to get to work like it's just a totally different vibe i don't like it at all um graham actually looks really similar i feel like they just kind and put it into a new aesthetic that looks pretty decent but man i don't like gum's new outfit i don't like tab is not just a guy named corn and he looks ridiculous um i don't like beats uh beat looks weird beat looks like an alien like it's yeah i don't think it's bad but it definitely loses some of the um like the style that was in the original game it definitely feels less stylish it's like it loses some of that flair yeah without a doubt um and one of the things that i did forget to mention in the gameplay segment is i did like how future put a bunch of different stats for each character because there was only like three stats in the first game and it was hard to tell what two of them even did and the other one was just health so i did they're so poorly named yeah i did appreciate that in this one there's actually one called like cornering and acceleration and like graffiti and power and so it was it was just way easier to figure out like what they did and that's a cool aspect so all the characters end up feeling like they play a lot more differently than the first one where there's really probably only like three different characters in the first one ultimately when it came to like game feel um so that that's interesting but yeah i just totally total whiff on the um the character art in this one i think i i would agree i i don't think i disliked it as much as you did but it definitely does feel like a significant step down from the first one yeah and like you said there's just like a dullness to it it's and again it's not an ugly game like the graphics you know it being on the xbox instead of the dreamcast the graphics themselves have actually improved a little bit like they're a little sharper um yeah and it looks good in that regard but i just thought the art the art direction was kind of a miss for me and it's weird because i looked up and i thought are these maybe no it's the exact same art director and character designer so interesting i was i was actually about to ask that if um if they had changed like directors they they were just going for a different aesthetic and it didn't right it didn't land as well and i think another thing that doesn't land quite as well um is you know this game sounds right uh the first game is phenomenal and we're going to talk about it at length but i think jet set radio futures kind of takes a little bit of a step down as well it does so the first the first game just does this incredible thing with all the sampling and the mixing and it's and it's worth noting that like in the year 2005 there was a there was a court case out in the sixth circuit uh it's called bridgeport versus dimension films and the line that comes out of that court case was after 2005 it became much harder to do what naganuma did for this soundtrack here and i'm so glad that this game came out when it did because he just went crazy with the sampling and the chopping up things from not even other songs right like we were saying random sound effect like packages um sound effects from the game just all kinds of crazy things and jet set future it it has a few songs that do a similar thing but a lot of them just don't really seem as like creative to me um there's nothing like la revolu la la la revolu you know that's that's insane um but like there's also just a bunch of remixes of the first game and they're okay like i don't think any of them are bad but there's not a single remixed version of a first game song that i found better than just the the original version particularly because they always they already have a style that feels like kind of a remix song to begin with right like all of these games all these songs basically are like original remixes so to remix the remix it feels like too much in some spots for sure uh i i think the so both of these games license songs like just straight up yeah the the first one literally licenses dragula from uh rob zombie which was a choice it's awesome i i unironically love dragula that song is great it's so stupid but like it's supposed to be so stupid yeah slam in the back of i was playing that for my wife and she's like what what is a dragula and i was like you know i questioned for the ages surely i don't know that one knows we just know that we slam in the back of it right exactly you get it um but the i think the licensing in the second game is a little bit stronger like i like some of the license songs more in the second game there was that one really like punk rock almost ska song in the first one that i really like i can never remember them yeah that one like that one a lot um i'm totally with you here in the first game like you know you're talking about dragula like you're talking about like fine it's okay um about the city that one's kind of fun but the only the only real license track from the first game that i think is good good is improvise from jurassic five yeah that's a great one the rest are like fine meanwhile man there's like four or five banger license tracks in in future yeah um hello allison is great rocking the mic okay i have to ask you about uh do you remember and you might not because i think this song came out when i was in like second grade so you might have been like in utero but um it was this song by a band called crazy and it was like a one-hit wonder thing and it was like come my lady you're my butterfly yeah butterfly yeah okay yeah yeah that song is trash but it hello allison to me feels like that song but good it's like it has a lot of those same styles and like the record scratching and like i don't know what race these guys are but they sound like they're white dudes rapping and um but i just but for some reason it all just comes together so well in this song for me i love hello allison it is so good yeah no that's a great song i really like rocking the mic it sounds almost like a tribe called quest song almost like that's kind of the vibe i get from it um there's that punk rocky uh statement of intent yeah great one great one i i love a lot of the uh license tracks on this one but i'm with you that i think the originals in the first game like let mom sleep is such a good song i so it's actually kind of funny um over the last few years you know i've been with my wife we just got married but like we've been dating i don't know five six yeah a lot of times we're in the car we're singing stuff i just sing like the instrumental parts or i'll just make like the noises at times and she's always like that's weird like why do you do that and i was like i don't i don't know the answer to that question i'm sorry i'm just weird but after playing this game i think i know the answer to that question now instead i played so much of this fucking game when i was a kid that i got so used to just making noise because there's like a lot of these songs don't really have what you might call lyrics in the traditional way they have words right i don't know they have lyrics yeah i would agree with that so i'm just sitting there going like rock that rock that rock that rock that rock that rock that rock that rock that rock that shit homie like and she's like what are you like what are you doing like what so i'm like playing this in the car on the way to like the vet this morning and and she's just like what like you're just making noises i'm like no no no i'm singing you don't you still understand right no and you're right it's just such a unique sound like all of these songs are so you wouldn't hear this anywhere else like yeah and and i think i think it's great i haven't listened to it quite as much as you so i can't recall everything as sharply but i have listened to like outside of the game at least twice like all these songs through just to kind of hear them and hear them outside of the context of the game and the great part is like they still hold up even outside of the context of the game like they're enjoyable to listen to even outside of the game which is not something you can say about all video game music no and there's really high energy like there are no like there might be tracks that you just don't like or like sound of annoying but there's nothing there's never a boring track like in any of these games for sure like i didn't love the final bosh track the like grace and glory uh i don't like the way it starts i think it picks up and gets really cool but the way it just starts off like oh yeah it's it's a little weird but like nothing nothing in here is like bad even the like least even my like least favorite songs right are still like this is unique and interesting and cool to listen to yeah they're and most of these originals are done by hideki naganuma as we said there's a couple other ones in here so funnily enough or funnily enough interestingly enough there is a song called everybody jump around and is by a man named richard jock who would go on to do like five or six songs for mass effect one so i thought that was really cool because what a weird little weird connection for your interest it really is and it just kind of goes to show that games gone by it's like all roads lead back to mass effect in one way or another there was another group called toronto that did like one of the songs on there um oh there's also there's some licensed tracks from a group called guitar vader that like oh god i really want to like but their songs are so weird um they have one called magical girl that i kind of like uh but they have one called super brother which is just like super brother was not it for me man it has to be the longest bridge ever written and it's like the worst bridge ever written because i just got super brother it is that for like a minute and a half it's just like what is going on it's bizarre it's but but it's also unapologetically jet set you know like even even like the worst track in future okay all right let's relax i think you mean the best track in future okay so birthday cake uh by sebo mata right yes the first time i heard this song i was like what is happening how can i skip this song you like pull off your headphones thinking someone's car is like grinding gears or something like it is it is the most jarring like out there song but i will say that now that i've listened to it like 10 times playing this game it's kind of good it's weird because there's no like that is not the kind of song i would ever send to someone else and be like oh my god i'm not gonna like hey man this is a great song you should listen to this i would never say that but there's still something about it that i just love so much and it's and it's kind of like we've just been saying it's just it is so unapologetically itself and it fits in with all of the energy and attitude of this game like perfectly right i literally when i was looking up this song one of the first places i saw it was in like a crappy music subreddit and like everybody in the comments is like you mean amazing music and i imagine that it's just like the 10 people who play jet set radio future saying that listen if you don't love birthday cake you don't love jets that's the rules it's it's so but like all the music here is just so unique and it's so itself like go listen to the soundtracks even if you don't want to play these games just go pull up the soundtracks because it's so unique it's so like what this game is all about you know did you ever make end up making a list of like your top three faves uh yeah i think at least from the first one i think um let mom sleep sneak man and humming the bass line are the ones that kind of stood out the most humming the bass line i'm gonna put as the intro to this episode i think uh but it is the character select music and it is so awesome dude it's so awesome i love and that's that's what i think that was really making my wife be like what like what are you doing right now are you okay like are you having trouble breathing it's like no i'm just humming the bass line exactly i am doing as the song instructs i really love uh those first two you mentioned humming the bass line and let mom sleep are also some of my favorites i really like um what is it rocket on i believe uh rocket on is also high up there the viva la reva thing and there's something from a timothy leary where he's just like tune in turn on drop drop out it's so like my brother actually had that engraved on the back of his um not engraved like when you got ipods back in the day you could have like text written on the back and he actually had that line from that uh on it that's pretty cool yeah there's so many good songs in here man i like the richard jocks one a lot i like um i know this wasn't your favorite but i really like sweet soul brother because there's just so many cool synth moments in that where it's like uh i think instrumentally sweet soul brother is really good i just don't love the like sweet sweet soul brother yeah something about it just doesn't work for me but would you say that the music does not just turn you on it does not it does not so the voice does not the music might though the music is good um yeah it's it's interesting i would say those are probably my favorites though i didn't love grace and glory i didn't love sweet soul brother uh-huh electric toothbrush didn't stand out to me a ton i can't even like i'm looking at my list that i made i'm like i don't even remember that that's the one by that toronto group um okay okay that's the one that's like it's it's kind of cool but it doesn't have any of the things like interesting uh remixy style stuff that all of hideki's does naganuma sorry his last name he's yeah he must be addressed with respect he's not my friend he is an icon he is an icon exactly uh-huh yeah we we could talk about this for a long time um there's probably not a whole lot else to say other than just like oh my god go listen to this it's so good i do i do think it's interesting how um so naganuma he you know he does the soundtracks for these two games he ends up doing like sonic rush which was i don't know like 2006 or something but he's basically been adamant that he's like yeah i'm not really that involved with the game industry like i just i did a few tracks and i mostly just like to dj and do my own thing but he basically says you know i'm not said all these games that um want to be the spiritual sequels they always come up like please do a song for us please do a song for us so he was actually set to even do the soundtrack for streets of rage 4 but apparently there was like a scheduling conflict scene that i'm not doing it but he's got a song on hover he has a couple songs on bomb rush cyberpunk um so it it is really cool to me that like the legacy of this game is not just the music but it's like his music and it has followed him and people are like hey i want to make a jet set game i have to have naganuma in it like i don't have a choice you know he's as jet set as any other part of it and i think that's right that's really cool yeah he's definitely made uh like a name for himself in that realm like i like i said i mean i had a friend who like was inspired by these games and his own music and inspired by naganuma and his own music and that he created and it's like the style that he took here is very very cool so i guess we can we can kind of talk about some of those spiritual sequels now we've really mostly just been talking about the two jet set games here which you know was obviously the point of the episode but i think it would be remiss to not talk about some of the attempts to recreate this atmosphere and how like in some ways they're successful like i think they nail elements but there really hasn't been one that manages to kind of put the whole package together again um the first one that we tried to play was a game called hover uh its full name being almost too embarrassing to say out loud yeah but we have to it's it's hover revolt of gamers and it actually came out like right around the time of gamer gate and so i think that's just really unfortunate and usually now when you see it it's just called hover like even in listings on steam and stuff probably but the idea was that like there's some weird big brother corporation that's like outlawed video games and that's sort of like the and now you have to like i don't know leave your basement and skate on the streets to get video games back it's weird remember how we talked about how um jet set was like so effortlessly cool and didn't get into cringe realm i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know yeah like this is the kind of thing that it avoided it's very weird that premise is so cringe and you can tell they just there were some ways like you can spray graffiti on any wall but like there's not it's not really part of the game exactly and it just kind of seemed like it's there because they were like well jet set had it so i guess we have to um and then there's like you collect it you know it's a multiplayer thing so we were playing at co-op me you and our friend connor and it was like kind of fun to skate around with each other but you sort of just go all over and try to do these missions that were didn't really feel like they were um i didn't really feel much different than just doing the skating around right it was like a little more structured but barely and then you would collect these little tokens that you put in slots that increase your stats by like tiny percentages which is just listen i i there are certain contexts where that is my jam this is not one of them the action sports game is not where i'm trying to get a 1.5 increase to cornering like what what are we doing here yeah that one i i enjoyed the like hour and a half or whatever that we spent on it 67 minutes i looked on there we go perfect the 67 minutes that we spent on it i enjoyed i thought like mechanically it was pretty fun to just skate around but that is about the end of it like it was fun to skate around and the rest was just kind of like aimless flying around and you can definitely see like where the jet set influence comes in but it it definitely feels like it's trying to kind of do its own thing like open world multiplayer skating game like and we're going to take a little bit of influence from jet set and it just doesn't have any of the it's just not cool like i don't know what else to say it's it's it's really not at all now the other big one and this was one that was actually hyped up a lot before it came out and was really leaning into the kind of um spiritual sequel to jet set radio is a game called bomb rush cyber funk and i think even the name is like yeah we're trying we're trying to be just right like you can just feel it and it's just like it's yeah it it looks a lot like jet set radio it sounded a lot like at least from like you know early previews and stuff like sounded a lot like jet set radio it was like we are making jet set radio from for the modern day you know yeah and they really do i think nail the controls in that regard like it very much feels like a game that was made last year instead of 25 years ago you know it has all of the benefits of that um i do i do remember at one point i was playing future in this game and i was like these feel kind of aimless and then i played hover and i was like it's fair to call future or cyberpunk um or uh cyber rush um aimless anymore because good hover is the one that really really just felt like if you don't really love running up the walls and jumping to another rail there's nothing for you here um but bomb rush i think it's really interesting they they're trying to do a few different things with um you know continuing to build off of like what jet set future did to try to uh tweak some of those things that were kind of like letdowns in the first game right so one of the things they go for is that you can do in your whether you're on the ground on a rail in the air uh there's like a manual that you can connect things with there are um there's a boost uh that you get simply by build like you know we talked about the boost in future you collect in spray paint cans and then you can boost and this one you just kind of build a boost meter through doing tricks and that ends up feeling really cool there's like a double jump so there's a lot of little traversal tweaks that make navigating the levels i think a lot easier and a lot of fun and i found i found that the level design was a little tacky to me as futures um but it's also a little more open and expansive than the originals so i thought those worked together really well um my main complaint with the gameplay on this one is twofold it's that a they have three different traversal options you have skates skateboarding and a bmx bike and they do not feel any different at all i would have i would have really thought maybe like the controls might shift slightly like maybe to get speed on the bike you actually have to like pedal like i don't know if you ever played um there were so many clones of tony hawk in the 90s and 2000s that were other sports right and so they would be very similar to the controls that but they would have a little bit different like i remember the bmx game was like you know instead of holding x to get speed you tap it really fast like you were pedaling right so i was just expecting something like that dude it's nothing it's there's no difference between these three things at all i thought that was very weird it is a it is a strange choice i guess it's more of just like a do you want to be a cool skater bro do you want to be a cool you know cyclist bro like i guess they're just giving you an option of like aesthetic what you would want yeah um which yeah is a little weird but i think it for me made up for it and the fact that it just felt so good to play yeah sure like i i in future i thought like okay this is an improvement cyberpunk feels like a genuinely like good game like like they've actually finally nailed the controls right like they've they've they've tightened up the controls like you can manual in this one so you can kind of keep combo strings going longer than you could i i found comboing and like any sort of score mechanic in the first two games utterly pointless um i know you said there's some optional missions in the first game but that's that's truly all it is i i didn't play any of those maybe those would have been more fun i don't know um but probably not for you no i don't think so probably not for me probably not place your bets ladies and gentlemen but but to that point that's not that's not a little snarky and insult to your jet set radio it wasn't as much as a i thought scoring in things felt more consequential in bomb rush because there's actual like things built into the story where you have to outscore uh your opponents and stuff yeah the the other aspect so we talked about how in future they get rid of the tagging minigame and i think overall like this with their design philosophy this made sense in in bomb rush it's a little weird to me because i still think it's like it's good they didn't bring back a qte minigame for sure but they got rid of the tagging minigame tag and they're like oh this is what you're supposed to do so that's a little bit of a more um you know a little bit of a it's not too bad because you still like stay on the rail you're on or whatever right it's not like it resets your position but it really seems at odd with the at odds with the idea of like we don't want to disrupt that flow um the the sort of minigame tag that exists in this one though i really like because it's instead of it really being like a set of inputs you have to do or you fail or whatever, but you can set up a bunch of different graffiti tags and the combinations of lines that you put in, just pick which tag you spray on the wall. So it's sort of like trying to emulate, oh, you, you spray it a slightly different way for a different kind of tag. And I think it's cool. It's, it's like more customizable. It's certainly like less harsh than the one in the first game. I just, I just don't understand why the single tags in this game decide to like disrupt gameplay for like five whole seconds. That, that just to me makes very little sense. That never really, I think it never really bothered me because most of the time that you're doing the single tags, you're like on a rail or like mid jump or like mid wall ride or something. There's not a ton of them in, in this game. I feel like, um, there's like less tags. There's less tags overall. And I think that's because they're going for a little more like variety in gameplay. Like there's, there's like literal like boss fights, which was jarring, I think for both of us. Oh, that was weird. I don't know if you have to get off your skates. I don't know if you have to get off your skates. I don't know if you have to get off your skates and kick them, but I couldn't figure out how else to do it. So I'm just like doing these weird jumping spin kicks over and over trying to hit this lady in a jet pack. Like, yeah, I, I mean, you don't, I don't think you have to, like, I think you have to get off the skates in the sense that like, once you make contact with them, it automatically like forces you off of them. Cause I never like, I never like pressed LB to like put my, my stuff away. I would just, I would just trick at them, but I think it like takes you off of the skates automatically maybe. Um, yeah, it is weird. It's like the tricking mechanic and bomb rush. Like you can press, I think it's like any of the face buttons basically, or like three of the four of the face buttons to do tricks. But that also functions as basically like a fighting mechanic where you kick and punch the opponents, uh, the, the police, which was really weird. Uh, and not really a thing that I like loved about it. It's not bad, but it was like, is that necessary? I didn't find it as, as frustrating as I think you did. Cause like, I remember you like screaming about all the chains that they're like the chain turret things. God, that was, yeah. Like that didn't really bother me a ton. I don't think, but yeah, it's a different, it's definitely going for something a little bit different with the police. I don't know if it's any better than what either of the other games do. Maybe Jet Set 3 just won't have police. Maybe we'll have final. Well, Jet Set 3 might not exist. Sure. I guess we'll talk about that in a minute. Um, yeah, this, this whole game though, to me, like undoubtedly the controls feel good. Like there's, there's no argument about that. It just feels like it's a little too, like, it's like spreading stuff a little too thin though. And it's not quite as focused because it's, it's, it's giving you like a bunch of different things to do, but I don't really feel compelled to do hardly any of them. And there's also, um, it feels like halfway through they realized, uh, so it's worth mentioning, you don't have the spray cans and bomb rush, right? You just get to spray it. You don't have to collect them. Right. I think overall this is fine. This makes sense. They're trying not to disrupt the game. But then I think what they sort of realized is like, Oh God, the first two games would frequently use cans to like kind of breadcrumb the player in a certain areas. Like, Hey, hit this pole here. There's three little cans on it. And then you realize, Oh, this takes you up to this part of the level or Hey, there's like three cans going into this wall. Oh, that's because it's a fake wall. You can burst through. I think they sort of realized that they had like locked themselves out of that. So they created these little balls that give you boost instead. And they just sprinkled them all over the place instead. And that to me just felt weird. Cause it was like, no, I actually really liked building up the boost from the tricks. And then there's certain segmentation. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. You'll just hit a blob and get all your boost. And it's like, it's fine, I guess. But it just sort of seems like one of those things where they found themselves kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. And they're like, Oh God, we didn't think about what we were losing by taking away the cans. We had to come up with something else to replace that. And it's not a huge deal. Cause I don't even know if this game has many secret areas. I didn't get far enough to say that for sure, but it just results in you like always being able to boost and like always being able to move kind of, which I don't necessarily think is like a negative because you can kind of use it. You can use it as you want. You can use it very intermittently if you want, but like it keeps the flow going. If you can boost around corners and stuff. And like, I, I thought overall, like bomb rush was the most fun to play, but it's also one of those things where it's just like, maybe this just isn't my genre because I don't, I don't feel all that compelled to go back and play it either. Sometimes I feel like it's, it's like the original game understood that it wasn't Tony Hawk and it tried to do something else. And I was like, well, I don't know. I don't know. Maybe that works for you and maybe it doesn't, but it's like, they realize that. And I feel like every game after that is like, nah, we can be Tony Hawk and they can't. And, and that's how some of these feel to me sometimes. But yeah, I mean, it's like, I think this game is worth checking out if you liked any of the other Jet Set games for sure. Cause I think there's something here. I mean, I really did have a lot of fun the first couple hours I played it. And then, you know, there's this mechanic where when you're grinding, you can like lean on corners to get speed, which is kind of cool. So they give you, instead of it just being like Jet Set future where you touch a rail and you're like soaring off to the heavens, they actually like give you a couple moves to build that speed. And it feels really good in my mind. Yeah. Again, I think mechanically like Bomb Rush nails the feeling of the game. And that makes sense. I mean, it came out 20 years later. Like it makes sense that it, but like when you compare this to Hover, I know they're trying to be two different things, but like mechanically this feels so much better than Hover even. So like, I think Bomb Rush really nails the, the, the feel of the game. It's just kind of what it wants you to do with that feel where it's like, eh, maybe I'm not super interested. We also didn't mention that like the story of this game is like nonsensical. Like literally within the first five minutes, you are decapitated by like your former friend who you like the big three of like graffiti in this town or whatever. And then you're like decapitated by this man and you get like a robot head almost immediately in this. It's like, what is happening? I could barely keep myself from laughing as you were explaining that. I mean, cause it really is like, it seems like you, cause at the beginning you're with this other guy and you're kind of like seeking through this facility. So it feels really like action movie, like mission impossible kind of thing. And then suddenly like dude's head gets cut off and everything goes weird. Um, and yeah, you find out that you're part of the, your, your guy you were controlling was originally part of the big three, which was like a, uh, like you said, I don't know, a trio that somehow ruled the streets by being the best graffiti inline skate gang. And then, uh, one of them ends up like taking over and killing the other. And then now this guy loses his head and has a robot head. And now you're going, uh, you have to go battle this gang by scoring points in order to get information about how you can get your head back. And she's like, what? Like, I, I, I'm sorry. I think jet set radio, the original nails the story in the sense that they like, they do it exactly to the extent it needs to be done and they don't do it anymore. They don't understand what's going on here. Yeah. That's what I was about to say is like, it, it turns out. It turns out that doing no story for this kind of game is probably preferable to whatever bomb rush does. You literally like fight a leader of one of the gangs and his name is like the flesh Prince. Oh yeah. Which is just like, I literally put my note here. I was like, what the fuck is happening? And I can appreciate them trying to have like a sense of humor about it. You know, like, Oh, the fresh friends, the flesh friends. And then there's like this one group of girls that are literally like, I'm not going to battle a boy, come back with a girl for me to tell me to do this gang battle. And you're like, okay. So there's some moments where I think they're just trying to be funny. Whether or not it lands is up to you. I didn't care for a lot of it. And it's just, yeah, it's just, again, I think you're totally right about it. We're like, the controls feel great in this game. And I would, and I would recommend anyone check it out that like the first two games for that reason alone. I think you had mentioned at one point, like just turn the music off and put on the jet set radio soundtrack as you play. Yeah. Cause cause like the soundtrack isn't bad. And like, like we said, Naganuma did some of the soundtrack and like, it's fine, but nothing stands out to me about it. Like, I don't remember any of the bomb rush songs like at all. Yeah. There's a one Jack defunct that he, that Naganuma did. And I only really know that one cause I kept listening to it to cut it up for like some, some sound bites I want to put this episode, but yeah, playing the game itself that nothing really stood out. Um, but I would still recommend it. Um, and same with hover if for no other reason that I think it was $2 on steam last week. Yeah. Yeah. So if, if you get it for as cheap, I literally, we, we both owned it and didn't even know. We were like, Oh, we should look into hover. And it was like, Oh, well I already have that. So I guess we can play it. Uh, so you might, you might already own it if you buy humble bundles at any point. But I do think bomb rush, like even though it doesn't really hit all the same notes and I don't like it as much, it's still like, it's a solid game. It's definitely not a failure of a game. And if you find yourself like you enjoyed the jet set stuff and you don't want to go back to that and you just want more of it, this is probably the closest we're going to get. Um, and, and on that note, a couple of years ago, man, 2023, they made an announcement about another jet set radio and crazy taxi game. And I don't think we have heard anything about either of those since that announcement. I remember both of those announcements. Cause I remember everybody freaking out about new crazy taxi and new jet set. And I was like, I played crazy taxi, but I don't really care for a new one. And I was like, I've never played jet set. So whatever. But, uh, yeah, it's been like dead silent and you know, we say that, but like, I bet you the game awards this year, Jeff Keighley is going to be like further closing. Yeah. Announcement. Bam. New jet set radio. That would be awesome. Uh, because they, um, this is actually the 25th year anniversary of jet set radio. So people, when it was announced three years ago, two years ago, people were saying, Oh, you know what? They're going to have like a big announcement in 2025, like a release date, marketing this and that crickets, man. Um, still, still 45 days left of this year. So, and I mean, look, game awards hit us with Okami too last year. So true. True. I mean, sell shade sequel to a beloved game that had gone away. I mean, covered on games gone by all the signs are there. It could, it could be happening. I mean, you're welcome everyone. If we get jet set three, it's because of us and you're welcome. Yeah. Also, I just want to say, if we get jet set three of the game awards, like I called that shit right here, right now. There you go. We will, we will let the people know. Um, so just, just to kind of end this discussion, I do want to just kind of talk about the legacy of the game awards. The legacy of this game. And I know we have talked about it a lot already, but, uh, just to put some numbers in perspective, like I was looking, you know, I've been listening to this a lot on Spotify and YouTube. Um, humming the baseline has 5 million listens on Spotify. Uh, I don't think the track like Spotify didn't even launch in the U S until like 2012, I think. So the, you know, that's only 13 years of, and it's for a game that came out 25 years ago, 5 million listens. Like that's a lot, uh, funky dealer and the concept of love from future have 8 million a piece. The whole soundtrack on YouTube that someone just uploaded a few years ago has like 4 million for the whole thing. I mean, people love these songs and they're still listening to them. And I think that's just cause there's nothing else like it, you know? Yeah. Like there's just so little like it around and you can probably find it like in like house DJs and like, like kind of underground DJ things, probably something similar, but nothing quite like it that I've ever heard. So it's like, it really hits you with, um, something unique. And it, it lasts and people want to keep going back to it and we haven't gotten anything since. So this is all we got. And I, and I will say there was like a, there's another court case in 2016 that I kind of walked back at that 2005 thing a little bit, but I still feel like people are just scared to push it, especially after, God, what was it? The, um, the Pharrell Williams song, um, Blurred Lines. Remember that? They got that lawsuit with the Marvin Gaye sample. So I still think people are just like too scared to do that anymore. And it's really a shame cause it's like a whole era of music we'll probably never see again. Cause it's really only like the top, top, top artists can afford all the licensing for these things, but Hey, I'm, I'm glad we got it. For sure. For sure. The most important part of dance is music. So now let's listen to the music and identify the beats. And we talked about the cell shading, you know, games are still continuing to have a, a similar style to this. Um, even when, if, even if it isn't technically cell shading, you can just tell it's like derivative in some way or another of this, this jet set style, these things that are meant to look kind of, like a comic book, the bold lines and the bright flat colors. Um, I think it's such a cool style and I think it, it is just aged so well. You know, there's like, there's that whole era of like in 64 and PS one and PS two that like, unless the designers went for something really stylized, they just all look like shit now. Um, yes. And I mean, there's a lot of dream guys games like that too, for sure. But I think like the, the games that in those eras really tried to go for something more cartoony or just more stylized. And just have a kind of inspirations from like manga and anime or even American animation, like whatever it might be, just looks so much cooler than, you know, anything else you go to like back at that time. Like, like, I don't know, like the original resident evil, like good luck. There's nothing, nothing. Even the remake at this point that they reached on GameCube looks ugly as hell. You know, it's, uh, it's just really cool. I think that this, this style took off and I'm glad it did. For sure. I mean, the, so many games that have been inspired by it, like again, like looking at even things that aren't directly cel-shaded, anything that's taking the like cartoony, colorful, bright, vibrant, like you can trace back to things like Jet Set Radio. So I think it's definitely made a staple there in its, in its design and its artistic design choices, both musically and visually, like it is left an impression. And those are definitely the parts of the game that I enjoyed the most playing through it. And, you know, one thing, you know, I've just been doing so much research into this game, just watching so many things and I keep getting all these recommend, people are making video essays about Jet Set Radio every four months. There's a new one every few months, dude. Like people just have never wanted to stop talking about this game. And again, like it's almost entirely because of how cool it felt in the art and the music. No one is really sitting there. Like, in fact, all of these will have like, kind of like we did. There's like a 10 minute section where you're like, yeah, you know, gameplay, not always the best old 25 years. Anyway, on to. Right on to the parts that are good about the game. But there's just so much energy around this franchise. I think there always will be. And I do think that ultimately, that means like, Sega will feel compelled to do something they've put like, didn't they put beat and gum and like Sonic racers or something? You know, they've put Yeah, like, yeah, random little cameos. But we'll see, man, we can only hope. So lastly, but before we get out of here, I do want to talk about like, how you would recommend anyone approach this franchise. And I know what you're gonna say is vastly different than me. And that's fine. But I'll go first. Um, my mom would be like, if you've never played either of these games, despite the fact that like, you cannot find Jet Set Radio future, legitimately, in any way, you would have to buy an original Xbox and the game off eBay. I'm not going to sit here and say that you should pirate it. And I'm not going to tell you how to pirate it. But I am going to say that if you choose that route, it is probably not half as hard as you're thinking it is. So I'll just leave it at that. If you are scared by the way people talk about the controls, you can do that. You may be better off dropping into future first. I do think some amount of time spent in the original is worth it just for like, how awesome it is to hear Professor K, how awesome the art style is. If all you do is just cycle between characters at the select screen and then go play something else. That's worth it. There's just like, it just oozes style. It's so cool. And I know we've said that 10 times. There's at the end of the day, it's just the simplest way to say it. The game is just cool. As far as the other spiritual sequels, I think they're fine. You should check them out. They're probably affordable at the point. I think if you like bomb rush at all, there's plenty of content there, even though it didn't really vibe with us super hard. Like there's plenty of stuff to do, right? It's not it's not like a short game or a shallow game. But to me, just nothing comes close to the original and what it like the sort of whole package that it that it gives off. Yeah, I think for me, this genre is just maybe not my cup of tea. Like I tried all of these games. And I feel like I put enough to I read I beat jets at radio. And it is hard for me to recommend going to that one. I thought mechanically, it just felt really tough to get into. I would probably like I will probably not touch any of these games again. Unfortunately, if you're like super interested, and I just kind of want to see what it's about. jets at radio is probably cheap at this point on Steam. You could pick it up. I don't think you'll have a great time. But maybe it'll work better for you than it did for me, right? Like I don't want to say this is a flat out bad game. I just did not enjoy it much. If you really, really want to like try it out. bomb rush cyberfunk with the jets at radio soundtrack could be a good way to approach it, right? Like just mute the game audio because like none of the story shit matters. Mute the game audio throw on the jets at radio soundtrack might be a cool time. I just I don't think this is for me. And I wouldn't put my recommendation towards it necessarily. I feel like there's probably better games you could play. But if you're very curious about it, like there is something really unique about it. And stylistically, artistically, it is a kind of a one of a kind experience. So if you're really interested in that experience, sure, if it's cheap and on sale, pick it up, try it out. It's not gonna hurt. But it's just that's something I'll probably ever go back to. And I think that's totally fair. And I think even a lot of people who are big fans of the games kind of have a similar attitude where it's just like, I love those games, but they're kind of hard to go back to now, which is really just why I hope we get a third one so badly. Because I feel like approaching it from the modern era, and understanding what worked and what didn't, we could really get something special. Even though I would never expect the soundtrack to ever be as good. Yeah, I do think we can get something that like visually and gameplay wise could be something really cool. So I guess we'll just have to see. Well, that about wraps up our episode on Sega's one of a kind stylish act of youthful rebellion jet set radio. You can find this episode as well as all of our other episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcasting platform. And of course, you can find everything we do, including a Taylor Swift album review by me on our website, games gone by.com. Signing off for games gone by. I'm Adam. I'm Austin. And here's Hideki Naganuma playing this out with one last. Thanks for listening. Bye. Bye. Bye. And here's Hideki Naganuma playing this out with one last. And here's Hideki Naganuma playing this out with one last. Thanks for listening. And here's Hideki Naganuma playing this out with one last. Thanks for listening. No, no, no.