One of the most interesting paradigm shifts in gaming in 2019 is the lack of mid-tier AA titles. Every game now is a big budget AAA game or a smaller indy title. With the loss of mid-tier development certain genres have been harder than others. We’ve seen the death of licensed game from Marvel and other companies and what has intrigued me (and hurt me) most is the lack of smaller racing games.

While both of these genres have footholds in the mobile gaming space, they have all but disappeared on consoles. Racing games have hit a fascinating point. It’s basically Forza, Forza Horizon and Grid and Need for Speed constantly reinventing themselves to try and stay relevant. You have a few smaller licensed racing games that iterate yearly like F1, Nascar Heat, and some rally titles but those are getting harder to find too. Juxtapose this with the PS2 era where there were so many options for racing games. Enthusia Racing, TOCA racing, Gran Turismo was still relevant, Need for Speed had multiple concurrent titles like hot pursuit, Test Drive, Midnight Club, Ridge Racer, every licensed porperty you could imagine and so many more. They were mostly licensed with real cars (lots of low budget games had reals cars which isn’t the case now) and some had real tracks. It was a really fun genre that provided lots of different experiences for racing fans of different disciplines. Developers took more risks. Racing games today seemingly have to straddle a perfect line of being all things for everybody like Forza Horizon 4 or Forza 7. Simulation and realistic enough for car buffs but drive able enough for casual fans.

They need to have sim options and the best graphics. Lots of developers don’t really compete anymore. When other games stick their heads in the ring they get destroyed by reviewers and game journalist who lament the days when a Need for Speed release was a big deal. NFS: Heat is a really pretty game that plays well but it’s not Forza Horizon so it gets trashed. The comparison is valid because Need for Speed: Heat decided to be open world for some reason and doesn’t commit completely to being an arcade racer. Same with Grid this year….nobody noticed or cared when it released which is sad because the first Grid game was a big deal and the reboot seems solid. Wreckfest and the Dirt series hover around but they don’t make the impact outside of PC gaming like they would have 10 years ago. The sense I get is that if a company is going to pay for car licenses then they are going to play it safe. That’s not fun.

I say all this as I explore the Tokyo Xtreme Racing series. This game would not be made or brought back in today’s racing game environment. It’s too niche, it’s too obscure, it’s too Japanese. It’s wild because this game feels like “The Dark Souls” of driving games (forgive me for the comparison). Dark Souls and From software have created an environment where even Star Wars games are aping their obscure, niche aesthetic and adherence to difficulty and not making the most accessible game possible. Driving games have gone the opposite route. Tokyo Xtreme Racer is the peak of what racing use to be compared to where the are now.

Have you ever seen Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift? Objectively, the best and most important movie in the franchise, it frames a lot of what Tokyo Xtreme Racer is all about. You’re an outsider in a Japanese car driving the Tokyo streets looking for races, taking down gangs via beating them in races. The game is a dungeon crawler, a fighting game, a racing game, a tuning simulator, all rolled up into one of the most compelling driving experiences you can have. There are only a few cars, basically one track and then you drive. On paper the seems ridiculous, in practice it’s addictive. You buy your first car, go out onto the city corridor/high loop and look for rivals. Flash your headlights and you race. Once a race starts both cars have a life bar. As you fall behind, the life bar goes down. You win when your opponent’s life bar hits 0. You make money when you win. Upgrade your car, buy a new car, drive in circles and race people. Every rival you racer is in a team or gang. If you beat 5 people in a gang (for example) you’ll be challenged by their leader. Beat 2 leaders and a Boss challenges you. That’s the game. The music is Japanese dance music. The graphics are good. The track is rendered fantastically, the game runs smooth and fast and the cars look excellent. Every race takes place at night and the headlight effects are solid. Opponents AI is competitive and varied as well. They dodge traffic and try to stay in front. The driving skews arcade but it speaks a very specific and easy to understand language that makes adjusting and upgrading the car immediately noticeable and effective.

This game is a low budget, narrow game with a singular focus and scope to match. The game does everything it can to maximize it’s playability and replay value within that scope. It’s not a good driving game, but it’s consistent driving model with consistent physics. It’s more Ridge Racer than Gran Turismo. Games like this aren’t really made anymore, certainly not into a series. There are 2 games for Dreamcast, 4 for PS2 and 1 for GameBoy Advance and 1 for the Xbox 360. A middling series like this would never be able to carve out a series like this in today’s landscape. What makes this series so relevant even today is that is does things that modern games are always trying to do and that’s emergent gameplay moments and story telling.

For example, I am in my Nissan Silvia cruising through a dark tunnel and I flash my headlights at “Rolling Guy 5” to race him. He is driving an AE86. I take him down easily, and end up near a hard left turn between between a sedan and a fruit truck. Normally, when races finish you can just continue driving but this time out of nowhere the camera pans out and the leader of the Rolling Guy gang flashes his high beams at me. It’s early in the game so I know my car isn’t faster than this boss. The environment is my advantage because we are on a turn and Rolling Guy Leader is slowing down a lot for turns instead of drifting AND more significantly, we are between traffic. So the race starts and boom Rolling Guy leader rams into the back of the truck buying me time to pull away. I weave through traffic his life bar is going down quickly and I slam into an NPC car and Rolling Guy is catching up to me. I see him coming up in my rear view mirror and block him long enough to railroad him into the back of another car. I keep driving and win the race. A screen pops asking you if you want to go to the garage or keep driving. I choose keep driving and the cycle continues. It’s fantastic. No 2 races are the same and the game encourages to try racing people you lose to because you may just need to do the race in a segment of the track your car is better suited for. What’s amazing is the track is constantly changing, the competition is always an unknown. You battle and race at your own pace. It’s a magical feeling that I haven’t been able to replicate in anything else. That loop I described is the same in every main game in the series (the drift series is a 2 game that spin off that is a little bit different).

Tokyo Xtreme Racer wasn’t a huge seller but it sold well enough to warrant existing. It felt like a window into a subculture and world that is so unique. Japanese tuning culture is captivating and it’s sub cultures like touge racing and drifting have all filtered into US car culture in different ways. We see those influences in the early 2000’s movies and games. Tokyo Xtreme Racing was the Fast and Furious game we always wanted. It was the game that personified the low end Japanese tuner car culture that we fell in love with playing Gran Turismo. New racing games are obsessed with Super Cars and Hyper Cars that nobody can afford and that are really hard to drive. Tuning a Nissan Sylvia or a Honda S2K is where a lot of racing games peak in my opinion. My generation has an adoration for Japanese bubble era cars that seems boundless. That culture is hard to find in the gaming now. Toyota will barely appear in racing games these days, when the Supra used to be every bodies favorite car to buy early in Forza.

It’s weird to lament an era lost of games that could be…well not great but games aren’t just toys or simulations they are also artistic expressions and allow end users to participate in a vision. It’s why I loved the Armored Core series. It was hard and obtuse and not for everybody but it was unabashedly it’s own vision. Those games weren’t cookie cutter open world games. My biggest issue with the new Need for Speed game is that it’s open world and it doesn’t need to be. The world feels dead and the engine doesn’t handle processing the open world well. The game would have been fine with menus and racing segments. Tokyo Xtreme Racer never added tons of cities or hundreds of cars. There were other games for that. Now every game feels like the Assassin’s Creed version of the genre outside of the Dark Souls-like games and the constant rogue-like games. I miss games with AAA budgets that could be different. Check out the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series. Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 and Import Tuner Challenge are the best games to check out, if you don’t want to play them all. If you like one of the, you will absolutely enjoy the entire series. Happy Thanksgiving. Peace