There was a brief period after playing the original Jet Grind Radio where I got into roller-blading. It was some monkey see, monkey do shit. Despite my trim build and regular exercise, I've never been particularly athletic, so sticking wheels under my feet was never a good idea. I remember skating by a neighbors house, their daughter was outside playing in the front lawn, and I recall thinking "kids are very impressionable, don't do any tricks, just skate by all safe-like." I immediately caught a crack in the sidewalk and was vaulted forward, crashed full-force into the cement, bruising several bones pretty badly in the process. The girl ran away crying. I never skated again.

I was unfortunately not part of the original Xbox's target market (my hands were too small to properly hold The Duke), so I missed out on a lot of great sixth gen games. One of those blind spots was Jet Set Radio Future, a game I always regretted not having a chance to play back in the day.

Less of a sequel and more a follow-up, JSRF retells the story of the first game, employing many of the same broad plot beats and themes. More rebellious and articulate in its purpose, Future pushes everything the first game set out to do forward, from its gameplay to its music, and most of all its spirit. Saying a game has "soul" is often met with a lot of eye-rolling, one of the many well-worn rhetorical arguments that people treat with little meaning. I find all this nitpicking about how people employ language in critique to be a bit silly, but none moreso than this, as the insistence for its disuse implies that games are so inherently passionless, so much a product, that they are incapable of expressing the spirit of those who create them. Not only does Jet Set Radio Future beat with Smielbit's signature funk, but it is also alive and buzzing with the spirit of hip hop culture, embodying its four major elements: MCing, rapping, break dancing, and graffiti.

Jet Set Radio - hosted by DJ Professor K - is more than a pirate station. It's revolutionary radio, a call to arms, inciting to action the youth of Tokyo-to to rebel against the sinister Rokkaku Group, which seeks to control speech and expression. Rokkaku's tactics are definably authoritarian, using a corrupt police force to exert their will through violence and manipulation. The rudies of Tokyo-to fight back by overwhelming Rukkaku's control through art - through tagging - and though Professor K spins the music that acts as a soundtrack to their rebellion, he also jockies knowledge. Knowledge of greed and oppression, making known the evils of the world and those who wish to do evil. Knowledge is itself the fifth element of hip hop, and arguably the most vital.

Tagging serves as one of the primary mechanics that ties player action directly to its hip hop roots. Graffiti is an art form, you're told this up front (before being warned not to actually vandalize anything as the Sega corporation really would prefer not to be held liable because you spray painted Sonic taking a fat rip off a bong on the side of the Whole Foods), and it is the rudies main weapon against Rokkaku's censorship. Blotting out consumerist propaganda, washing out the drab uniformity of police colors with your own mix of neons, taking out tanks and helicopters...

Late in the game, Rokkaku tries to turn the rudies tactics against them. Painting over their graffiti with their own hideous tags, even creating their own mechanical copies of you Beat and Yo-Yo to control them by proxy. It is in essence a representation of how corporate interests co-opt culture, and how they lose all sense of what makes that culture special in the process. It's not art, it's a product, it exists not for the sake of expression but for profit and power. You see Gouji Rokkaku in his weird modern art installation, playing his dour music while insisting it's the only thing the people of Tokyo-to will be listening to, the music of the "future," carefully curated by him alone. Paint that motherfucker up.

Even dance culture is well represented here, with each character having their own distinct style that harkens to specific subcultures and groups. When not grinding and tagging, characters sway to the rhythm, retro futurism dancing alongside the gothic, grunge, and punk. Most levels are designed in a way that is highly conducive to losing oneself in the flow of grinding, skating off walls, and flying through the air, and for as complex and large as many of them may be, exploration never feels like something that requires much thought or any effort beyond letting the level take you where it may. In this sense, break dancing, or "B-boying," feels present not just in the way the characters move while idling, but in how the game plays.

All of this is of course accompanied by some of the best music you've ever heard in any damn video game. Hideki Naganuma's score is an inseparable part of Jet Set Radio's identity, but alongside him are the likes of Richard Jacques, and artists such as Scapegoat Wax, Chibo Matto, and Guitar Vader. You need not look much further for Jet Set Radio Future's hip hop cred than The Latch Brothers, however, which was founded in part by Mike D of the Beastie Boys, and who contributed several songs to the game. I've written before that I have very little sense over what makes music good, and I struggle to articulate why certain songs and artists appeal to me, so I find it difficult to talk about Jet Set Radio Future's soundtrack without linking to specific examples that I think are strong indicators to its overall quality. Frankly, I shouldn't even be talking about music culture, but hey, this would be far from the first time I've dived into a subject I am wholly unqualified for.

Jet Set Radio Future is unfortunately not without its flaws. There's a couple levels that I think are actually fairly weak. Fortified Residential Zone is a primarily vertical level that tasks the player with disarming blue and red bombs, but most of the geometry looks very samey and the camera has a habit of locking into a more cinematic point of view on a couple rails which interferes with the timing of jumps necessary for progressing. Fall and you lose a bunch of progress. You're given half an hour before the bombs go off, and it's practically an admission that the level is not as intuitive to navigate as it ought to be. Highway Zero is also a fairly uninteresting level that is remarkably empty compared to others, and which feels a bit incomplete.

However, JSRF's greatest problem is its performance, which is downright dismal. It is constantly dropping frames, and it severely messes with the pace of the gameplay. To be fair, I played this on an Xbox 360 and I don't know if the poor performance is the result of wonky emulation or not. Maybe someone can clarify for me. In any case, Jet Set Radio Future is a game that desperately needs an HD remaster, or at the very least ought to be added to Xbox's growing backwards compatibility list. Original Xbox games (as far as I'm aware) do not get the frame boost treatment in the way other Xbox libraries do, but I'd have to imagine the Series X is a powerful enough system to allow JSRF to settle on a consistent 30fps, and I'll settle for that.

In Future's closing moments, DJ Professor K explains that greed and oppression can never "extinguish the yearning for freedom felt in the hearts of all mankind." The more authoritarians seek to control others, the stronger that desire for freedom becomes; but in times of peace, graffiti will remain to remind people of their passions.

Jet Set Radio Future is hip hop. Me? I'm rocking the four tenants of Weatherby: putting on skates, not putting on safety gear, catching air, and making landfall.

My bones hurt.