So much style. Pretty awesome port especially considering it was built for DC however many years ago.
Jet Set Radio takes place in an alternate Tokyo; Tokyo-to. Tokyo-to is a city where hip-hop/grafitti is the dominant culture and rollerskates are the transportation method of choice, at least amongst the gangs in town. You play as various characters from a local gang known as the GGs. Gameplay is simple. You skate around the city, grinding and jumping, and spray graffiti at marked locations, to assert GGs presence in the streets or wipe out rival gangs.
Learning to skate in Jet Set Radio is kind of hard. Controlling your character isn't that intuitive, and accuracy in your movements is very important. There isn't that much lenience. If you screw up, you'll screw up. Sometimes it feels like your character has a mind of its own. Movement is definitely the weakest part of the game. After 8 hours it never felt quite right. It was a little too slow and not quite responsive enough. It's hard to tell whether this is deliberate development decision to keep the game more challenging (which it certainly did, in a good way even), or if I'm just complaining about nothing. It was hard not to compare it skateboarding games like THPS2, whose fluid arcade skating is pretty much unsurpassed in fun.
However, the slightly awkward movement didn't stop it from being ridiculously fun. Gameplay is varied and level design is consistently well thought out. There isn't a dull level in the game.
Graphically and artistically, Tokyo-to is represented beautifully. It is clear that meticulous effort was taken in designing the city, which feels very familiar if you've been to Tokyo, but way cooler. This port looks great on the PC. At 1920x1080 it looks awesome thanks to cel-shaded characters and a highly developed cartoon style. Coupled with a very cool, slightly obscure upbeat hip-hop soundtrack, you can get lost in the world for quite some time
The story is cohesive and narrated in an engaging way - through a pirate radio station, which the game itself is named after.
The other issue I had with this game was the slow interface. It was nice at first, but began to prove frustratingly slow. The most important feature I think it was missing is the ability to restart levels at any point. It wasn't uncommon for me to reach the point where I had to restart to succeed. This means exiting to the garage, selecting the stage you were at, selecting your character and reloading, a process which was rich in animations and loading new models etc.
Overall, awesome game. It would still be nice to see a new Jet Set game developed from scratch with modern graphics and sleeker controls, but I'm still glad I played this.