So I completely finished JSRF. We could joke about me being a glutton for punishment, but let's be real. I don't 100% games that I
hate.
If you read this thread from start to finish you probably noticed that I actually bitched about a lot of things in the first game. But the thing is, almost all of my problems with JSR are mechanical things that are rarely a huge deal and can just be worked around in some fashion, and they eventually either provide some satisfaction in mastering or at the very least just stop being an issue. The rival tagging stages are kinda dumb, but eventually you just get a feel for the range you can hit your opponents from, and they become smooth sailing in time. Half pipes are cumbersome but you just figure out when to jump and you don't get hung up on them anymore. Little things about the controls like simply turning around when stuck up against the wall can be perplexingly difficult, but that's not a problem anymore once you stop faceplanting against the wall and just avoid that type of situation entirely. And once you work around those rough edges and learn the finer points of how to play in general, you're left with a game that rewards you a lot for good tactics, dexterity, and reflexes, and it never really drops a beat from start to finish.
JSRF is the opposite in a lot of respects. Half pipes aren't useless anymore. The rival tagging missions don't seem to be as frustrating (hooray for lock-on, better range, and a manageable camera), and some of the other side missions they added are actually kind of fun: rarely amazing, but usually a good change of pace. Most of the bosses actually make use of grinding, something that was completely absent in JSR's only boss, and thus feel like a better fit for the game. Camera control is bound to its own individual button. You don't consume cans laying around on the ground if you're already at max capacity. Just lots and lots of little changes that make a lot of sense and are almost always for the better.
But for all the fine-tuning they made to the mechanics, and for all the gains in scope that they made with the size of the stages and the length of campaign, JSRF ended up losing an equal or greater amount in focus and purpose when compared to its predecessor. Like some others have mentioned, one of the best pervasive qualities of JSR is the constant feeling that your actions matter and have consequences, and that is one of the most engaging feelings you can get from a video game, whether it's derived from dexterity, strategy, competition, or narrative. It's also something that has been stripped from a lot of the different components of JSRF, and it kind of results in a feeling that this game is less than the sum of its parts.
The most obvious part of the game that gets hit by this is the way the police confront you in this game. In JSR, you have to eliminate your graffiti targets and maneuver around enemies simultaneously, with more reinforcements added as you clear more targets. This means that you're rewarded or punished appropriately for threat prioritization or the lack thereof, and learning the most efficient ways to traverse a level pays dividends when it comes to survival. None of this exists in JSRF. It doesn't matter which targets you clear first or last, other than saving you some time backtracking to hit one you missed. The police just stop you in your tracks at designated locations, and you have to drop everything else and dispose of them in each of these little makeshift arenas until you can get back to tagging. Strategic threat prioritization is gone, and there's not really much to these fights on their own to make up for it. Like I mentioned upthread, this is why manual graffiti motions were probably eliminated from JSRF. In JSR, they serve a clear purpose by forcing you to stop and focus on larger targets for longer stretches of time; that's the entire reason why clearing areas in reach of certain enemies at certain times is important. It would have been pointless to bring graffiti motions back for JSRF without changing the flow of the game in other respects because there are no real threats to ever interrupt you anyway.
The other parts of the game that take a major hit are the trick and scoring systems, and this manifests itself in several ways. On first impression, the ability to gain speed on a grind rail with appropriately timed tricks is a very nice addition. It contributes a lot toward making JSRF a much faster-paced and less sluggish-feeling game, but it also strips out whatever nuance there was in learning how to grind in JSR. In JSR, you really have to learn the virtues of normal jumps vs trick jumps and how to do either when the time and place calls for it, and it's something that often requires some thinking ahead and some quick reflexes when you need to correct your course of action. No matter how many times you may have practiced a loop, there are very few of them that can be done completely on autopilot in that game. Not so in Future; just tap that X button at a steady rhythm and you're right back at top speed.
Then there's the fact that combos in JSRF always reset whenever you touch a new rail. That video I linked in the OP with all those sample infinite grinds you can do in almost every stage in JSR? Completely pointless in JSRF. Every time you land on a new rail, your trick counter drops down to 0 and you start all over, so even though longer or more elaborate trick lines may be possible in Future, there's not really any incentive to bother trying them. One addition to Future that could have been kind of interesting is the fact that some rails have a higher base point value than others. This could have lent itself to a good risk/reward element by making more difficult trick lines worth more points, but ultimately this just dumbs things down even further. There are only 2 possible base values a rail can give in Future, so most point challenges boil down to just finding the longest or easiest bonus rail in the stage and grinding back and forth on it tapping Y at a regular pace until you run out of time. That's it.
Future falls short on these arcade-based metrics of its predecessor because it ostensibly provides an experience more akin to those of exploration and collectathon-based platformers instead, but even there I have to question some major design aspects of the game. Collectables in such a game should have a clear purpose from the outset and try to serve as markers for individual platforming objectives instead of being the objectives in and of themselves. Future kind of falls flat in both of those regards. I think you only need 40 of 140 total Graffiti Souls to progress in the story, you're only made aware of their importance after you're already well into the game, and they only come into play once. And clearing that bar of 40 souls amounts to no more than a simple item hunt, with everything you need already marked on your map from the start. As for the remaining two thirds of the collectibles? For those, you have to track down a secret tape item in each stage, which then gives you a list of trick challenges to complete in that stage, which in turn reveal a new soul to collect after clearing each of them. These challenges still aren't as tightly designed as JSR in general, but they do mark the major way in which Future actually demands some competency at learning and traversing the stages, and it breaks the monotony of the simple point A-to-B structure that most of the campaign consists of. And it's all tucked away in an entirely optional part of the game. I literally didn't learn how the scoring system actually worked at all until I was done with the 10-hour campaign, because until I sought out the Mystery Tapes there was absolutely no reason to bother.
The reward for clearing all of the street challenge tasks and collecting all of the graffiti souls are a handful of "test runs" on each stage in the mold of the bonus modes from the first game (Jet Graffiti, Jet Technique, Jet Rush, etc). And they're all ridiculously easy for end-game challenges. If you've gone through the work to unlock them, you shouldn't have to attempt any of them more than twice in order to Jet rank them. Their only real value is in unlocking extra characters... but at this point, the only value
those provide to you are additional options for the multiplayer games, and it's not like I'm going to be busting this out at a local session in the near future.
But for all the bitching over things both big and small, Future really does have its merits. I love the Skyscraper Area. For those watching my JSRF stream, you probably remember that I came
really close to throwing in the towel somewhere around the 5-hour mark, right as I first got to this stage. The whole game up to that point just felt like busywork: no real challenge, no consequence to anything, and no real impetus to keep going other than to keep checking graffiti markers off a list. And then, finally, the game gives you the first real stage where the supposed platforming focus actually comes into play and you have to pay attention to what you're doing. Climbing the huge central tower to reach the bonus rails for the street challenges was fun and had a sense of intimidation to it that no area in JSR really compares to, since the stages in that game are so much smaller. The skyscraper rollercoaster had a similar appeal to it.
And Kibogaoka Hill showed some awesome potential, if only it hadn't been constrained by the way Future handles combat. If it played like a JSR stage, in which you had to take out graffiti targets while dodging or eliminating respawning fighter jets the whole time, it could have been awesome. The whole game could have been awesome with that kind of structure. And that stage came close because it's the only one in which you aren't confined to a pitifully small makeshift arena when faced with an adversary; you have free reign of the entire stage at all times. But since you aren't allowed to do two things at once in this game, you just have to systematically dispose of each of the planes before you can do any tagging. Oh well.
So, that's JSRF. Lots of mechanical refinement, slightly distinct but equally appealing aesthetics, haphazardly assembled
game. I could think of several worse ways to spend $30 or 30 hours, but I can't say I really see myself pulling this game off the shelf again. It has its high points, but they're separated by a bit too much filler and a dreadfully monotonous opening half.
And man, is that opening demo a tease or what? My left nut for a sequel with JSR's focus, Future's scope, and 4-player co-op.
Postscript: I bought Mirror's Edge because of this thread. I have a lot on my backlog I want to get to first, though.