Sega, turn the Radio up to ’11, please!

The Dreamcast, one of the most well-loved videogame consoles of all time, had a library full of fantastic, underrated titles. One of those games was 2000’s Jet Grind Radio, developed by Smilebit and published by Sega.

The game took place in a semi-futuristic version of Tokyo-to where different gangs of graffiti artists called “rudies” (who all ride around on high-tech magnetic rollerblades) are constantly fighting to protect their turf from their rival gangs while simultaneously dodging the police. The game is narrated by DJ Professor K who runs the pirate radio station Jet Set Radio.

You take control of a gang called the GGs, whose ranks increase as you complete challenges and impress other rudies and convince them to join you. Each character has different strengths and weaknesses which affect their health, skating speed, tricks they perform, and graffiti patterns.

Gameplay consisted of navigating different districts of Tokyo-to (Shibuya-cho, Benten-cho and Kagane-cho) and covering the graffiti of rival gangs with your own while avoiding the police (who don’t arrest you, they actually beat you up… the chief of police actually tries to shoot you!).

The game just oozes style. The first game to make use of cel-shading, Jet Grind Radio’s locales were full of life, color, and personality. Backed with an AMAZING soundtrack of catchy J-Pop, J-Rock, and J-Funk songs (and the American version was also one of the 1,000 games to feature “Dragula” by Rob Zombie, who I’ve come to learn is not ACTUALLY a zombie) and great customization options made it a hit at the time and a game people still speak highly of today.

The GGs still look awesome despite being designed over eleven years ago.

The cast of characters was pretty large, and each cast member had their own distinctive look, from Beat’s giant sunglasses and headphones to Combo’s giant gold “¥” necklace to Gum’s dress and helmet. The cast fits in well with the stylized backdrop, and as each one plays a bit differently, there’s sure to be one to fit your playing style.

The game was ahead of its time in many ways. Aside from the graphical style it pioneered and the overt Japanese pop culture flair, the game also made use of the Dreamcast’s online functionality, but not in the way you’d think. There was no multiplayer option; instead, you could go online and download any .jpg file into the game to use as a custom graffiti tag.

The game did receive a sequel, Jet Set Radio Future (the original game’s Japanese title was Jet Set Radio) for the original Xbox in 2002 after Sega left the hardware business, but it wasn’t as well received as its predecessor. I played it, and it was fun, but the “future” aspect really threw the whole thing off for me. It wasn’t as colorful, the characters were all redesigned to be futuristic, and the whole game was just missing a lot of the charm of Jet Grind Radio.

Beat, the “main” character of the game, has made cameos in Sega Superstars Tennis and Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, but aside from those appearances, Sega seems to have forgotten all about Jet Grind Radio and it’s a real shame. While Smilebit no longer exists (being restructured into Sega Sports Japan) they were still a Sega studio and thus Sega still owns the rights to the game.

More like this, in HD!

Now would be the perfect time to bring the franchise back, with open-world games being more and more common thanks to considerably more powerful gaming hardware. I can only imagine how breathtaking the world of Jet Grind Radio would look in HD with more vibrant colors, increased draw distance and larger locales.

Seeing as how Sega is just now starting to do things I’ve been asking for for years (a game with Sonic’s old design, Phantasy Star Online 2) I’ve got my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to revisit Tokyo-to soon, if not in a brand-new game then at least in an Xbox Live Arcade re-release. It’s been far too long since I’ve laced up my magnetic skates.