It would be great if I could find more resources on what the
production of Jet Set Radio (known as Jet Grind Radio in the US because of a
legal dispute) was like inside the studios of Smilebit (of Panzer Dragoon
fame), because I’m positive it would have been one hell of a thing to see. On
its short-lived but very important release in the US in 2000, it was hailed as
one of the great, influential video games of late 90’s, early 2000’s lore, pioneering
the use of cel-shading graphics in video games and it’s really easy to see why.
I distinctly remember buying this game and thinking that I had never seen
anything like it; and, to its credit, I still haven’t. It has a cartoonish vibe
that flows surprisingly well with the spiky, distinctive character designs, the
sharp, angular backgrounds and buildings, the music. The absolutely mesmerizing
design choices and style were enough for me to overlook the few flaws this game
had.
 |
| The controls, though realistic, were trash sometimes. |
A word that comes to mind when trying to describe Jet Set
Radio is “eclectic”. Eclectic, according to Oxford Dictionaries, means “[a
person, object, or thing that] derives ideas, style, or taste from a broad and
diverse range of sources”. A diverse range of sources indeed! Jet Set Radio is
a platformer skater game made by a division of a big-name Japanese publisher
with influences derived from old school 80’s-90’s hip hop and J-pop made to
look appealing to both an American and European audience while keeping its
distinct Japanese sensibility. The end result is a game that, by all means,
should logically be cluttered and unfocused, putting its fingers in way too
many pies, but all of the influences and scattered elements come together and
create a product far more than the sum of its parts. It’s Tony Hawk meets Akira
meets American 90’s hip hop meets Sonic the Hedgehog, and it’s an absolutely
perfect world to set its characters and circumstances in. It’s got style,
finesse, a multicultural flair.
Ah, multicultural. Now that’s a good word to describe Jet
Set Radio, too. In fact, this game seems to have quite a lot to say about
culture. The primary conflict itself revolves around the efforts of the
Tokyo-to Police and Military to suppress the counterculture of the Rudies, who
express themselves and their culture by spraying graffiti everywhere. The
villain of the story is an evil business magnate who wants to spread
over-saturated, bland, homogenous entertainment and art. It’s a full-out
culture war. The game handles these themes with a cheesy, lighthearted air (the
villainous plot itself is really tongue-in-cheek), but it does make for some
pretty hefty stuff if you look at it a little deeper. The idea of cultural
suppression has been shown in media countless times before and after Jet Set
Radio. In The LEGO Movie, creativity is discouraged by Lord Business; everyone
needs to follow premade blueprints. In Footloose, pop music itself is banned.
The world in Fahrenheit 451 is one in which books and literature are outlawed /
burned to a crisp. The same circumstances are going on in Jet Set Radio, albeit
with a considerably less dramatic nature; while it doesn’t encourage the player
to go against the law, it also has more than a few things to say on the nature
of expression and artistry.
Keeping in with its multicultural yet structured feel is the
soundtrack itself, which pretty much everyone who played this game remembers
fondly. It’s a wide, wide array of original and licensed songs that manage to
both draw from a lot of sources (amongst them are J-pop, metal, funk, hip-hop,
trance, EDM, progressive rock) and manage to have a distinct, consistent sound.
It makes use of sampling, looping, a wide variety of instruments and people,
capturing the rhythm and movement of the streets and people perfectly; everyone
is a different, distinct person with their own personal stories and styles, but
we’re all basically the same. That, to me, is what the soundtrack is like.
Jet Set Radio is a jam-packed game full of ideas, themes, individual
grace notes that really shouldn’t come together but they do so almost
flawlessly, in a way that I think few forms of media manage to do successfully.
It’s handsome yet ragged, tough inside and out yet sensitive to kids, and even
its worst thematic or narrative missteps are due to its ambitious nature, which
is always a good thing to me. It’s rare to see something that truly stands out
in a wave of mediocrity, something absolutely creative and ingenious.
Mediocrity, after all, is what Jet Set Radio condemns. Freedom and the power of
imagination are truly incredible tools.
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