Jet Set Radio Future -Xbox- 4

May 10, 2023

I just finished Jet Set Radio Future for the original Xbox. I really wanted to like this game, but it was a big disappointment. The game starts off on a good foot by improving some of the frustrating bits of the original’s gameplay. They simplify the tagging by doing away with the extra button inputs that were very finicky before. And when you jump to grind on a rail, you instantly pick up speed. (I only played a little bit of the original Jet Grind Radio, but the controls turned me off right away. They are better here.)

However, the controls are where the improvements stop. JSRF is a boring, tedious, and frustrating game. Navigating the levels is often a pain. The platforming usually awful, and rarely decent. There should have been a button to reverse the direction you grind on rails. It would have helped a lot. (The four legged robot boss battle on top of the building with all the flights of stairs was particularly frustrating.) There are a lot of bottomless pits in the sky scraper level that thankfully only take a little bit of health away, but still suck in a game like this. The tricking and skating is also very limited. I wasn’t expecting Tony Hawk here, but this was really shallow. You just spray graffiti on a bunch of spots (and you need to check your map, which breaks the flow of the game), and chase after people to knock them down. Chapter five looked like it would mix up the gameplay a bit with the ball passing game, and all you did was grab the ball once and run around a simple track a couple times. The final boss battle had a tiny bit of interesting platforming, but the rest of the game didn’t do enough. The soundtrack also got extremely repetitive, too. I tried to like this game, I really did. The little bit I’ve played of the first one seems even more broken. I think people look back fondly on these games for the cel shaded graphics and art style, and those aspects are outstanding…but the actual gameplay sucks. I’m giving Jet Set Radio Future a 4 out of ten.