3/5 ★ – Visionary_Gamer's review of Jet Set Radio Future.

I think I ruined my nostalgia for Jet Set Radio Future. I first played this on Christmas Day 2002, when a 10 year old me finally upgraded from the Nintendo 64 to Microsoft’s first entry in the console market, the original Xbox. JSRF came as part of the double disc with Sega GT 2002 (another game I played to death). JSRF’s visuals and art style haven’t aged a bit. It still looks tremendous with its cartoon funky abstract style. To say this was an early Xbox title, the levels were brilliantly detailed and large in scale. It has a certain uniqueness to it that makes it incomparable to other games. What hasn’t aged well is the clunky controls. JSRF is enjoyable when the level design lets your character move from rail to wall to rail in a smooth transition, but that rarely ever happened. I found myself all too often desperately trying to chain together the movement but the floaty slow nature of the jumps didn’t allow this. The inability to turn your character quickly also made traversal frustrating. And for a game that centres it’s core meaning around art and expression, you would have thought they’d make the graffiti tagging less annoying and flow breaking especially when grinding. It was nice to return to this flagship Xbox title and remind myself of the good old days, and I did get a good hit of nostalgia. But I did come away feeling a little let down from discovering that it wasn’t the game I thought it was when I was 10.