With Anonymous;Code being announced in 2015, rewritten at least six times, delayed even more, and released in 2022, it's honestly impressive that it came out as good as it did.

While I wouldn't say it's in my top three of the series, it was still a fun ride. The two lead characters are fun and the story is overall good, even if it doesn't fully explain some of its concepts and fails to fully realize its potential. A;C doesn't have a lot of the slice of life stuff that made the other entries so memorable, but then again I can also understand why they would cut them thanks to the games core gameplay mechanic.

In Anonymous;Code, both you and the main character Pollon share save slots. Pollon has the ability to "save" and "load" like he's in a video game. He'll make his own saves that you can't delete or save over and you have him reload his saves in order to get past problems. You can also have him reload at certain point to see optional dialogue and scenes.

I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it was to write around this concept. Going through half a dozen rewrites and seven years of development hell started making sense as I interacted with its narrative. This is why I think they've carved out a lot of the typical slice of life stuff and character routes from this game. Having the "Hacking Trigger" system in these moments would have Pollon create too many saves and it would be incredibly hard to keep track of.

While I won't spoil the main story, I will say I think the narrative started to fall apart a bit towards the end, partially because it starts to be crushed by the weight of its own concept. I was always interested exactly what "World Layers" would entail, but I think the overall reveal is a tad disappointing. Another thing I was hoping for was more connections to the rest of the series, but there's really not a lot of that. Due to there not being slice of life moments, a lot of the principal cast feel underdeveloped, which is a shame.

On a final note, the score by Takeshi Abo is fantastic as always. He's easily become one of my favorite game composers and this has some of his best stuff.

Overall a pretty fun time that could've been better, but I also see the trajectory of how it arrived to us. If you're a fan, it's definitely worth looking at especially with some of the stuff it adds to the greater lore of the series.

When it comes to these indie games directly inspired by dead franchises, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk almost feels like it's in a league of it's own. This game feels like some long lost sequel to Jet Set Radio Future that came out three years after it. It satisfied all of my expectations as a JSR fan.

BRC ditches a lot of what made Jet Set Radio tedious; you have infinite spray paint, health regen, selectable music, levels are big and open, and there's no jank platforming. It doesn't have some of the small and narrow levels that JSRF had, instead the larger levels all feel well designed (which I can't say about some other JSR inspired indie games >.>).

The gameplay has a greater combo focus, giving you the option to manual on the ground to extend them. You get three gameplay styles, BMX, inline skates, and skateboards, but they all pretty much feel the same save for some minor differences in grind speed and manuals.

BRC's soundtrack is fantastic. Of course the three tracks contributed by Hideki Naganuma are bangers, but all of the others are great too. Some of them did get kinda grating, but thankfully you can pick a song whenever from the phone menu.

It's not perfect, I think it could really use some quality of life features. Being able to track how many collectables you have, and turning off heat level, just to name a few. The map in this is just as bad as JSR and they really should give you a way to actually look at it and mark taxi poles and toilets. The phone menu is kinda clunky. But overall an amazing experience, I hope this team gets to make another at some point

EDIT: Thanks to a recent update on 10-19, they have now added map markers for toilets and taxi signs along with the option to shuffle music and see how many collectables you have left in an area meaning they've fixed the biggest problems I had with the game