I got this game on a complete whim, I had never heard of it, I saw the box art, I saw a video of some gameplay, I thought it looked neat so I picked it up.

In a lot of ways this is almost a hidden gem. Visually it's an aesthetic treat, though the music is rarely more than serviceable. It's a skateboarding game where Earth has been invaded by aliens that can only be killed by skateboard tricks, a plot I'd expect from a game about a decade older. You spawn into a level, defeat a handful of aliens, a new area of the stage opens with a new handful of aliens; once all the aliens are defeated, the boss shows up and the entire level becomes the arena. With its several playable characters, unique controls, the way that levels progress, the secondary tutorial challenge mode, and a number of other factors like the setting and aesthetic, this feels less like a Jet Set Radio clone or even a spin on Tony Hawk, and moreso a completely unique take on skating that lands somewhere between Crazy Taxi and Katamari.

Before playing the game I had seen some comments online that the controls weren't particularly responsive, but I had expected that this would be the normal PS2-era flavor of jank that you would expect from a C-list extreme sports game. As soon as I cracked open the game's instruction manual I knew I was dead wrong. The game originally came with a Tech Deck-sized piece of plastic to attach to the PS2 controller's analog sticks. The entire game is meant to be played with just the sticks, L3, and R3, with the controller held sideways.

For the first few stages, the game's expectations in terms of time limit and trick execution are lenient enough that you could put up with the controls. Stage 4, Prison Island, takes a sharp turn that exposes virtually every fundamental flaw with the game.

Rail grinding had existed in every stage up until this point, but this is the first point in the game where it is explicitly required. Grinding in this game barely works. While the camera mostly acts the way that it would in Tony Hawk, i.e. staying right behind your skater, it hangs there a lot looser and while moving it drifts around, making it difficult to discern where in space you actually are, especially in midair. Most of the time when you try to grind you'll miss the rail entirely. The rest of the time you'll either slip off of it, or land on it as if it were normal ground.

This is also the first point in the game where landing combo tricks is explicitly required. Previous levels introduced enemies with larger health pools, but they could be ground down with a lot of individual tricks. Every enemy in the first sector of level 4 can only be damaged by combos. Combos here don't work like most other skating games, where the combo usually doesn't end until you touch the ground and revert back to regular movement. In Yanya, even if you do two tricks back-to-back in the air, they don't actually count as a combo unless you time them just right, and whether your timing is early or late will factor into what trick you actually do. Early tricks are the most desirable, but require you to spin (tilting the two analog sticks in opposite horizontal directions) and immediately, like, probably within 2 or 3 frames, do a different trick (by pressing L3 or R3). Everything about the combo system is unintuitive and unreliable.

This level also begins to put the absolute basics of the mechanics under stress. In games like Tony Hawk, you have a lot more buttons to work with, so each one can perform a consistent function. In Tony Hawk, the X button does an ollie, even if you're in midair; in fact, the game explicitly encourages you to wait until just after leaving the surface of a pipe to get maximum air for tricking. In Yanya, you only have two buttons, so they both have to pull double duty. The triangle button does a U-turn on the ground, and grab tricks in the air. The X button does an ollie on the ground, and flip tricks in midair. Before stage 4, the areas where the player is expected to jump are virtually always lined with ramps. In stage 4, the game starts to introduce more naturalistic environments that they expect you to traverse. The result is that you have these low-poly slopes where you're frequently leaving the ground in short bursts every time you pass over a seam in the level, you flip when you mean to ollie, and basic jumps become needlessly precise.

This is also the first level where running out of time is actually a meaningful threat. It's so weird how the "perfect run" was a self-imposed challenge in the original Tony Hawk games, and how so many games that took notes from them, including the modern remasters, make it a more explicit part of the experience. On the PS2 we see games like Yanya and Airblade give the player large levels that require complex tricks to complete, but unlike equivalent challenges in Tony Hawk they absolutely must be perfected in order to continue. It's a particular shame in the case of Yanya because not only are there more characters to unlock, every level apparently has a Celeste-esque "B-side" to play through. Airblade also hid a more traditional Tony Hawk-style arcade mode behind story mode completion, but Airblade's more fleshed-out world and more sophisticated controls made it worth unlocking. I don't think I can say the same for City Skater.

Did you know this was apparently made by Cave? What's up with that?

Impossible to even fool yourself into thinking this is good, it's a game built off a proprietary addon gimmick that makes it a little hilarious to emulate in Current Year with an Xbox One controller. I like the premise and character designs (Mei Fa's sports qipao is so cool and I'm gonna steal the look), but it's a pale imitation of Jet Set, just compare that soundtrack with this title's inane ten second loops. This one's for the Fingerskaters out there and you get the One+Half Stars you deserve.