Jet Set Radio totally kicks ass.
Probably the most striking aspect of Jet Set Radio was its graphical presentation. Jet Set Radio was the first game to incorporate the revolutionary 'cel-shaded' graphics engine, an engine that allows developers to make 3D rendered characters appear as if a cartoonist had drawn them. Cel-shading graphics is something that many other games since, most famously The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, have also adopted. At release literally nothing looked quit like Jet Set Radio.
The games story follows a group of 'rudies', people who go around on in-line skates while spray painting things. The game starts out in the place Shibuya-cho and is introduced my Professor K – the disc jockey of the illegal radio station Jet Set Radio.
The whole plot of the game revolves around many gangs who are fighting to get their hands on the Demon Record. The main character of the game is Beat, a 17 year old kid who's ran away from home. He decided to start his own gang, called the GG's, after he kept getting kicked out of previous gangs. Soon Beat recruits new gang members, like Gum and Mew and must go around 'tagging' areas of Tokyo-to where the other gangs have previously tagged. But of course the GG's don't own the streets, and Captain Onishima, of the Tokyo police, is determined to take them down.
The game play of Jet Set Radio can be described of that of a 3D platformer, but it incorporates game play elements from other such games as Tony Hawks Pro Skater. When you play the game you'll access levels, and when you're in a level you'll have to go around the areas tagging where all the red arrows appear whilst fighting against the clock. If the clock runs to zero, you'll fail. You can just skate around some parts of each area, but you'll be required to grind rails and other things to reach some places. Also you can jump whilst grinding to get higher and better jumps.
But as well as fighting against the environments and mastering movement so that you can complete the levels faster you'll also be up against the police. Early in the game Captain Onishima and the police will enter levels and try to put a stop to your antics, but as you progress through the game the police will try to catch you by other means, such as sending in S.W.A.T teams or snipers. Also on some occasions you'll be up against rival gangs or corporations.
While each level mainly revolves around tagging, each of the four areas in the game available to you is designed differently and each looks great. Playing no two areas will fell the same despite doing relatively the same things in each.
The game has a great cast of characters to complement its great game play and visuals. You've got the afore mentioned Beat, and you've also got Gum and Mew, but at most your character roster will be consisted of a nice amount of characters. Each character has differing abilities and each is best used in different situations. For instance Beat is a good all-round character, but Combo is a powerful character with more health. As the game goes on you'll encounter 'rivals' and its beating these rivals that unlocks the new characters as they'll join you after you've conquered them. It's not got the most memorable cast of characters ever devised for a video game, but Jet Set Radio does well with what it's got.
Apart from the game having a stunning visual presentation the game also sounds absolutely fantastic down to it superb sound track. The game's soundtrack has songs ranging from genres such as hip-hop and funk to electric jazz and even heavy metal (in the NSTC version). The sound track varies of licensed tracks from Japanese artists and also compositions composed by Hideki Naganuma. In all honest I'm not a huge fan of funk, electric jazz or other styles of music generally like that, but the songs fit absolutely perfectly with the rebellious nature of the game.
If there can be any criticism I can hold against Jet Set Radio, it has to be its camera controls. Mostly the games camera is great, but sometimes it gets stuck behind you at the most annoying times. Pressing the 'L' trigger will centre the camera behind the character, but you don't have free control over it. As I said it is great most of the time, but when it gets stuck behind a character in a close-up space having more freedom over controlling it would have been very nice. Also in some situations the games frame rate drops when a lot of enemies appear on screen, but this isn't that often so can be forgiven.
Jet Set Radio is another shining example of why the Dreamcast deserves more recognition then it gets. During the Dreamcast years Sega's creative juices were flowing at their upmost best, and for these reasons games like Jet Set Radio totally kicked ass. I'd definitely recommend Jet Set Radio to any 3D platform fan or any fan of sports games such as Tony Hawks, Matt Hoffman or Skate.
Review by: James Widdowson
Score: 9.5/10