One of the spooky things I’ve found about wandering around Tokyo is that everytime I’ve visited, I’ve kept dropping into parts of the city that felt haunted by the ghosts of a virtual city that Tokyo itself had inspired. As a Jet Set Radio fan, Tokyo-To is everywhere in Tokyo. I looked out of a hotel elevator one morning and saw Shibuya bus terminal, where I had spent so long skating and laying down tags. I remember stepping down into Harajuku one evening and the sensation of a close virtual space rippled past me. Walking in Tokyo Midtown I saw a highway rising up in front of me and I swore to myself that I knew where it lead. It was magic. It was also just really odd.
Bomb Rush CyberfunkPublisher: Team ReptileDeveloper: Team ReptilePlatform: Played on SwitchAvailability: Out now on PC and Switch> Headed to PlayStation and Xbox on 1st September.
And now here’s Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a spiritual sequel to Sega’s long-neglected series. And if Jet Set Radio was haunted by a real place, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is haunted by a virtual place that’s haunted by a real place. It goes deep. The first map I got onto this morning was a weird mix, to me, of Shibuya and Chuo Street. The base for my gang is deeply similar to the base for my old gang in Jet Set Radio Future. Everywhere I look, I feel like I’m looking through Bomb Rush Cyberfunk to the game that I know so well that inspired it so deeply, and to the city, dimly glimpsed, beyond that. None of this is unpleasant. It’s actually a singular feeling. It’s odd though. It’s been two decades since we got a new Jet Set Radio game to play and that’s been far too long. I was hoping that Bomb Rush Cyberfunk would be a good cover version. What I wasn’t expecting was for it to be so eerie – and I don’t mean that in a bad way.
We’ll have our review of the game once I’m back from my holidays, but for now I wanted to get down some quick thoughts based on a single morning of playing it. I like it, I reckon, though I also don’t know exactly what to make of it. I’m still at the stage where I’m looking through Jet Set Radio to see Bomb Rush and its city of New Amsterdam. Hopefully there will be a moment where that changes and I no longer see this all in terms of the similarities and the occasional difference. Towards the end of my play session today there was a sign that such a moment was coming.
Anyway, it’s good to be back, with a new crew and a new city but a similar mission: take over as much turf as you can by covering up enemy tags with your own. There are differences even here, mind: you’re dispatched on this mission because a mysterious baddy has severed your head and it’s been replaced with a robotic head, and in general I would say Bomb Rush is a little more openly violent than Jet Set ever was. And tagging! Tagging was always in flux in Jet Set. In the first game it was a set of stick controls. In the second it was merely a case of holding down the stick for a set amount of time, because that game never wanted to break the flow. In Bomb Rush it’s a blend. Time pauses, and you then have a series of points around the imaginary dial of a clock face to connect. Ping them together as glowing nodes dictate and you’ve put down a tag. Bingo.