Amidst one of the best years in recent memory to be a gamer, Team Reptile dropped one of the most stylish and impressive games to date. If you didn’t grow up playing Jet Set Radio or its sequel, you probably won’t get it, and that’s perfectly fine.
Bomb Rush Cyberfunk wears its Jet Set Radio inspiration on its sleeve. From the gorgeous cell shaded graphics, the bopping soundtrack (even including Jet Sets original composer Hideki Naganuma), and its gameplay; BRC is clearly trying to be a spiritual successor to JSR.
Sega’s greatest crime
Ask anyone who’s a fan of either Jet Set game about them and you will not only hear about how amazing these old games are, but how nothing has quite captured its style since. The first Jet Set Radio debuted on the ailing Dreamcast and while it did ok, it was still on the dreamcast. Sales and reviews where good enough though that Sega greenlit a sequel for the Microsoft Xbox called Jet Set Radio Future.
Jet Set Radio Future was the one I grew up with. It was a pack in title for a lot of Xbox’s. The pack in nature should already tell you a lot. It got great reviews and was well loved by fans but sold so little that Sega tried to improve sales by getting Microsoft to pack it in with the console for a few years. It helped a little bit but the game still wasn’t selling well.
Despite the rave reviews and rabid fan base, the series never made enough money to get another game. Leaving us with JSRF way back in 2002 and nothing else.
Due to never ending pressure from fans, Sega ported the original Jet Set Radio to then current consoles in 2012 and said a port of Future would hinge on sales of the original. It didn’t sell well.
The original game while amazing for its time, is very rough to go back to, especially if you played future first. So we never got a remaster of JSRF and the series has layed untouched ever since. Multiple studios have pitched sequels and reboots but Sega has always turned them down.
Back to Bomb Rush Cyberfunk
Growing up with JSRF and my desire since I was a little kid for another game like it, I was excited when the first trailer dropped for BRC all those years ago. I watched every teaser and waited with baited breath for the release date.
Now that it’s finally here I can say it’s one of the best games of this year purely for how well it tickled that nostalgia. It does so many things right and even improves a lot from the old games. I know I’m probably being blinded by nostalgia but I’ve waited for a game like this for close to 20 years, just let me have it!
The other game that defined my childhood that hasn’t been touched
My family was poor when I was a kid. We weren’t exactly starving but I wasn’t going to have a library of new games for my Xbox. Thankfully my grandpa had a side hustle of buying and selling old game consoles so he gave a Nintendo 64. One of the first games I popped into it from the box of games he gave me was The Legend of Zelda Majoras Mask. I had played it before on my step brothers N64 when he would come up to visit.
As a kid I was enamored with what felt like a very alive world that wouldn’t be topped for a long time. Many open world games of the time had characters that stood in place forever or at best stood there until their shop closed for the night. Thanks to its 3 day cycle and the gameplay built around it, every character has an exact schedule that they will follow for all 3 days. Their schedules varied but most characters did something different every day and some even had multiple routines each day. I never beat a dungeon but I loved walking around clock town, experiencing these people’s little lives, and even altering them in my poor attempts to beat the game. Maybe I should have started my own save instead of playing whoever’s save was on the cartridge, I’d probably have a clue on what to do then.
As I got older I fell more in love with the game for how much that simple 3 day cycle did for the game play. I had beaten Ocarina of Time multiple times on my 3DS by now and yet the game I never finished had more staying power in my mind. Ocarina of time may have been boundary breaking at the time but years of imitation and the series itself doing the same thing for years have made it feel far less unique. Majoras mask never had that problem because no one has dared to copy its Groundhog Day esque plot, not even its own franchise has ever touched the concept again.
Now with it on the Nintendo Switch, I swore I was finally going to beat it. While the controls don’t hold up well (especially on a regular switch controller), the gameplay and story still absolutely excel. The 3 day cycle never ceases to add stress to every action and it leads to a specific gameplay style where you try to accomplish as much as you can before your progress gets reset. There are people way smarter than me who have written entire essays on this games dark and impactful story you can find if you are interested, for this essay, I’m focusing entirely on its gameplay.
Unlike the Jet Set Radio games, Majoras mask sold well. It’s frequently in the debate for best Zelda game ever, best Nintendo 64 game, best adventure game, etc. and yet no one has remotely tried to copy it. A few games have come out over the years where time is part of the gameplay but none come close to the idea behind Majoras Mask. Trying to beat a game while piecing together equipment and story over a never ending cycle that resets everything but your knowledge of the game is ripe for the picking. Imagine the kind of gameplay you could do with that on anything remotely modern, the Nintendo 64 is absurdly weak by todays standards and it’s cartridges held so little that a picture from your phone might be bigger.
Why does no one want to resurrect these type of games?
It’s pretty simple really, game publishers want to play it safe. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk was the exception, an indie team so passionate about something that they spent years making it happen. There’s a reason we have a yearly FIFA, CoD, and Madden; they are safe.
What do I mean by safe? They are inoffensive and popular. If you liked the last one, this one is slightly better. Game publishers want a money printer and last years best selling game getting a sequel is the closest they have to one. Anything that isn’t guaranteed to print money is looked down upon, it’s why the last few years have felt boring. Publishers want low risk, high reward. The indie scene has been the exception but you can’t always trust a small team to make the next big thing. Most indie games never make a profit, let alone become a best seller. It feels like the tides are turning and definitely Larion Studios putting out 2 bestsellers in a row in a genre long thought to be dead helps.
Oh yeah, that game
Baldurs gate 3 is fantastic. As someone who enjoyed Divinity Original Sin 2, it is worthy of all the praise it has gotten, even if WotCs finger prints are all over it. The top down CRPG has long been considered to be dead outside of a few kickstarter darlings like Wasteland 3. And yet for weeks, it has topped the steam best sellers chart while being exclusive to Windows. This game was such a shock to normie publishers and game journalists that it has sparked a discussion about making everyone else look bad. The writing has been on the wall for this genre since Original Sin 2 but Baldurs Gate 3 has sold so well that everyone has to realize it by now.
While the few people I can point to that try and resurrect old genres can make a good game, none have quite hit the sales figures and mind share that Baldurs Gate 3 has had. There are many reasons for this games success but the thing that's pertinent to this article is that it’s genre and gameplay style have long been considered dead. While I still doubt Larian can unseat the largest AAA juggernauts this year, their latest creation was a shock to the system for everyone.
Not every game needs to break sales records
If one thing is certain, its that AAA games have been stagnant for a long time and many things we enjoyed as children are being left to rot. Not just the franchises, those have shelf lives, but the genres themselves have been dormant. When was the last time you saw an Extreme Sports game? One of the Tony Hawk games in the mid 2000s maybe?
Games like Bomb Rush Cyberpunk have shown that there is still an appetite for things long thought dead. While I’m sure that Team Reptile would love to have the kind of sales that Larian got from Baldurs Gate 3, they’ve more than made their money back and can go on to creating their next game. The industry was founded on imagination and dreams of creatives, not by corporate trend chasers. It’s time for more game devs to get inspired by my top game of the year, and ship a 2Gb game to a niche audience that are fans just like the devs. Games are a creative medium and we should be letting that creativity flow. Although if you try to make me play another 8 bit walking simulator with self insert characters, I will rip your fucking arms off.