Friday, March 7, 2008

Free love was too tame for him...


I love Jet Set Radio Future, I own a copy of it, even though I don't own an Xbox. To me, it's one of the most well designed games ever and its a shame that Sega hasn't done more with the franchise. Although gameplay wise it can get a little samey, so many of the other components that make up that game are excellent. For a start, it's got one of the funkiest soundtracks I've ever heard for in a game.

Secondly, it was one of the first games to use cel-shading. The introduction of this graphical technique hasn't been the greatest advancement in videogames, and it also lead to some stupid genre redefintions (I've seen videogames reviews treat cel-shaded games as a seperate genre, which is retarded and only serves to strengthen the new videogames mantra that is "graphics over gameplay"), but here it's used well and in the right context. The cartoony graphics match the character designs and bright locations of Neo-Tokyo perfectly.

Thirdly, it has this awesome "The Warriors" style feeling, full of crazy stylized gangs and this "one gang against all" mentality. All the character designs feel interesting no matter how big their roles, from the narrator, DJ Professor K, to the Christopher Walken inspired police inspector. Everything in this game ties in to this same funk future theme.

The 2 characters in this are Gum and Beat, veterans from the first game, Jet Set Radio. It was drawn entirely digitally in Flash.

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