I've completed this game twice now (once on PC and another time on Series X backwards compatibility). First and foremost, it's easy to point out of course but Jet Set Radio absolutely OOZES style and personality. The character designs, the art style and visuals, the gameplay (to an extent), and ESPECIALLY the music. Mr Funky Man himself Hideki Naganuma convinced me full stop that he cannot put out a piece of bad music if he tried, pretty much every track in this game is a bop, but you likely already knew that already.
The more I think about it, it's hard to nail down what type of game JSR is. I guess it can be considered a platformer since you do a lot of platforming throughout the game, but it isn't entirely the main objective of what you do. You run around these dense boxed in arenas looking for areas to spray paint with quick time events, avoid police as they chase after reckless juvenile delinquents with guns helicopters and...tanks sweet mercy. You do this all within a time limit and are graded at the end of a stage. This format is very odd and unique but I think it works out well, it also helps that there's a map showcasing where certain graffiti tags you still have left. The police/military forces amp up the more graffiti you place down, meaning it's possible to try and strategize what areas you need to prioritize graffiti as to not run into the tougher enemies more frequently later on.
The movement overall though has me mixed. There are points where everything flows together well enough, you get a ton of speed off rails and wall riding, and when it clicks it clicks rather well. That said, when it DOESN'T (which can be frequent), then it's beyond frustrating. You have almost zero air control, turning is a struggle, trying to gain speed without walls or rails around is like pulling teeth, falling off of higher areas is very easy to do and getting back up to higher areas can often be a chore, and to make matters worse some stages just plain suck. Grind Square in general is just badly designed, confusingly laid out, not clear on how you're able to reach certain areas and if you fall off (which is very likely to happen), back to the elevator of shame you go.
There are a couple of extra gameplay styles to partake in aside from the main stages. There are gang fights, where you need to tag each of the 3 gang members 10 times to win, and this mode is genuinely abysmal. Tagging them is so finnicky in execution, sometimes it just doesn't work, and other times you tag them like 7 times in less than a second (and it can often be disorienting since the spray trigger is also mapped to the "reorient camera" trigger), but to top it off, the gang members are the exact same speed as you, meaning you can't outpace them and basically need to follow them to a point where they'll eventually stop and hope to spray them, but even THEN if you get too close to them they can actually damage you for...whatever reason, it's just a frustrating mess. There are also races against rivals to recruit them into your squad, and while on paper this doesn't sound too bad, the course itself is not really clear on where you need to go to win, nor is there a map to tell you where you need to go, so it all ends up being trial and error until you figure out the exact path to travel to.
The story though is so incredibly bizarre that I'm not really able to describe it in full. So there's this big government agency that hates the graffiti spraying punks for spraying graffiti, and when you battle other gang members they drop a piece of this record that when played can summon demons...or something? And then there's a flashback where one friend of a couple of gang members gets kidnapped (and we never hear from him again), and when the main big bad tries to play the record it turns out it was all a hoax and he was just mad with power...I think? To be honest stuff just sort of happened and I was just there to witness it happen
I was overall less frustrated and better equipped to tackle JSR again on my second playthrough, but I also think playing through it a second time made the fun parts a little less fun as a result. It's fine, super weird, but not really my thing.
The more I think about it, it's hard to nail down what type of game JSR is. I guess it can be considered a platformer since you do a lot of platforming throughout the game, but it isn't entirely the main objective of what you do. You run around these dense boxed in arenas looking for areas to spray paint with quick time events, avoid police as they chase after reckless juvenile delinquents with guns helicopters and...tanks sweet mercy. You do this all within a time limit and are graded at the end of a stage. This format is very odd and unique but I think it works out well, it also helps that there's a map showcasing where certain graffiti tags you still have left. The police/military forces amp up the more graffiti you place down, meaning it's possible to try and strategize what areas you need to prioritize graffiti as to not run into the tougher enemies more frequently later on.
The movement overall though has me mixed. There are points where everything flows together well enough, you get a ton of speed off rails and wall riding, and when it clicks it clicks rather well. That said, when it DOESN'T (which can be frequent), then it's beyond frustrating. You have almost zero air control, turning is a struggle, trying to gain speed without walls or rails around is like pulling teeth, falling off of higher areas is very easy to do and getting back up to higher areas can often be a chore, and to make matters worse some stages just plain suck. Grind Square in general is just badly designed, confusingly laid out, not clear on how you're able to reach certain areas and if you fall off (which is very likely to happen), back to the elevator of shame you go.
There are a couple of extra gameplay styles to partake in aside from the main stages. There are gang fights, where you need to tag each of the 3 gang members 10 times to win, and this mode is genuinely abysmal. Tagging them is so finnicky in execution, sometimes it just doesn't work, and other times you tag them like 7 times in less than a second (and it can often be disorienting since the spray trigger is also mapped to the "reorient camera" trigger), but to top it off, the gang members are the exact same speed as you, meaning you can't outpace them and basically need to follow them to a point where they'll eventually stop and hope to spray them, but even THEN if you get too close to them they can actually damage you for...whatever reason, it's just a frustrating mess. There are also races against rivals to recruit them into your squad, and while on paper this doesn't sound too bad, the course itself is not really clear on where you need to go to win, nor is there a map to tell you where you need to go, so it all ends up being trial and error until you figure out the exact path to travel to.
The story though is so incredibly bizarre that I'm not really able to describe it in full. So there's this big government agency that hates the graffiti spraying punks for spraying graffiti, and when you battle other gang members they drop a piece of this record that when played can summon demons...or something? And then there's a flashback where one friend of a couple of gang members gets kidnapped (and we never hear from him again), and when the main big bad tries to play the record it turns out it was all a hoax and he was just mad with power...I think? To be honest stuff just sort of happened and I was just there to witness it happen
I was overall less frustrated and better equipped to tackle JSR again on my second playthrough, but I also think playing through it a second time made the fun parts a little less fun as a result. It's fine, super weird, but not really my thing.