Tokyo Xtreme Racer
I live my life four tenths of a kilometer at a time.
“I need NOS!”
Like every hobby, every subculture, every obsession, car culture is kind of silly. It’s at its heart a boyish fascination with machines you look cool in, then push it, twist it, bop it, and make it go real fast, real loud, real hard. There’s a delicate balance to strike between nerdlinger obsession with specs and mechanical engineering, moronic machismo, flamboyant fashion, and real skill or talent at driving – and that balance is as rare as it is legendary. But while car culture, like all subcultures, is generally the same around the world, nowhere is it cooler than in Japan.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer is a racing game fixated on a very specific place and time in Japanese car culture – illegal street racing on the Tokyo expressways from the 1980s on. It’s got real locations, authentically silly racing handles, and officially licensed cars. Though it’s technically set in the modern day, with many modern cars in the roster, the style is all ‘90s… fitting, for a series that came out in the ‘90s, flourished on the Dreamcast in the ‘90s, and then mostly faded away shortly into the new millennium. Like the games that are now over 20 years old, you start as an unknown, fresh face on the local circuit, buying your first car and challenging racers until you can earn enough money and renown to become the best driver alive – by beating every single other person at least one time.
“I need NOS.”
You start out with only access to the C1 loop of Tokyo’s expressways open to you, and you can go clockwise… or counterclockwise. As you drive around and around, you’ll occasionally catch up to other racers cruising at the speed limit, flash your high beams at them, and challenge them to a rolling race. Winners are determined by who can pull ahead far enough, long enough, to deplete the other’s will to go on, represented by an HP bar that depletes on collision or while a certain distance behind the opposing racer. Lose, and you both drop back to cruise control, and you can try again or just move on. Win, and you get some cash, some skill points, more of both for your first victory against each named racer, and can cross them off your list.
Most of the rival racers are part of a team, who are usually running the same sort of car – beat every member, and their leader will appear, challenging you in turn. Defeating whole teams in this way draws out the actual bosses, who gate your progression. Boss cars are typically tuned far beyond your own abilities, and sometimes the cars they drive themselves are out of your depth, but you still need to find a way to best them, at least once, to unlock those cars and upgrades for yourself.
Perk points can be spent in a number of different trees – one manages what cars you can buy in stock condition, one unlocks various performance upgrades for purchase, one improves your ‘stats,’ i.e. how fast you win or lose races, and the last is full of various tertiary bonuses and effects. This is your first glimpse of the game’s bloat, as a lot of the perks are pretty minor increases to things like ‘how long your tires last’ and ‘how many meters behind a rival you can fall before taking damage’ but there’s a lot of really important perks too, shuffled in and sometimes arbitrarily gated or expensive.
Cars and parts mostly fall along linear progression of value for money, and the ultimate factor in most races, as you’d expect, is simply horsepower. Picking the car with near enough the most HP you are allowed at the time, dropping a more highly tuned engine in it, and improving that engine’s performance with the intake and exhaust upgrades are obvious priorities. But pretty quickly, especially if you’re sticking to one car per ‘chapter,’ you will hit the upper limits of your available power, and still be far behind what the bosses are cruising in. That’s when you’ll have to start getting your hands dirty. And yes, that means installing NOS.
“My car topped out at 220 kph this morning.”
Upgraded parts sometimes trade weight for effectiveness, but more often they’ll simultaneously help you shed weight, giving you a tiny bit of extra advantage… but nothing worth writing home about. Similarly, improved body stiffness, tire quality, and suspension can help you corner more effectively, stay stable while slaloming through traffic, and keep you precise enough to thread a gap without losing your speed. But none of that helps nearly enough, and eventually you’ll have to break down and manage your transmission. Upgrading your transmission doesn’t just make your gear shifts faster – it unlocks the ability to manually adjust your gear ratios, which, for the uninitiated, is the curve along which your car trades acceleration for top speed.
The easy thing is to crank everything over until you can hit your maximum possible top speed in your highest gear – but you’re probably going to get stuck sucking exhaust on your way up there, if you can even keep up with a real drag racer. The balance you pick matters a lot, especially on the more dynamic roads in and around the C1, where you’ll need to turn more often, apply brakes occasionally, and maneuver to avoid slower cars. Actually, there are a lot of things you can tweak with surprising granularity. Suspension stiffness, wheel camber, limited slip differential balance, brake strength, even custom torque balance for cars with four wheel drive. It’s a lot of shit thrown at you, and a lot of ways for you to make your car drive stupidly if you don’t know what you’re doing… and even if you do know what you’re doing, most of the time you’re just not going to like the new ride.
There’s a lot of other customization too, most of it purely cosmetic. You can swap out body panel parts, add spoilers, custom paint jobs, vinyl wraps, window stickers, new wheels, even obnoxious flashing puddle lights if you want to give yourself eye strain as you drive around. More vinyl and stickers become unlocked as you defeat team leaders and bosses, and you can even unlock whole pre-built boss cars at a premium, which can be fun if you’ve got more money than sense. Unfortunately, boss vehicles cannot be customized in any way, even adjusting the gear ratios, so you’re stuck at whatever build the boss themselves runs.
After the first chapter, the map gets expanded massively, with a long hooking loop to the south joined to the C1 with multiple crossovers, parking lots, and on-ramps for you to start your nightly run on. At any point you can return to your garage for the day, making adjustments and getting a free change of tires, while rival placements refresh. The on-ramps and parking spots count as entry points, and you can choose which route to start on each day.
You can also pull into a parking lot during a run, letting you pay for new tires, scare up a few rivals who don’t leave the lots unless challenged, and talk to NPCs for hints, background information, and tips on how to earn a race against the roaming optional minibosses, who all have some requirement before they’ll burn rubber with you, some more Byzantine than others. Amusingly, almost every NPC in the game is also a named rival, and as you chat with people in the lots, you’ll end up witnessing some multi-part storylines, some references and lore about the earlier games, and quite a few genuinely entertaining one-off conversations.
“Amateurs don’t use nitrous oxide!”
For the majority of the game, though, you’re spending most of your time just cruising, flooring the gas until you get to your next undefeated rival, hopefully making short work of them with a combination of horsepower and tactics, and moving on until there are no more blue arrows pointing your way in the next few miles. And, as you’d expect, it is pretty repetitive. Rivals, even whole teams kind of blur together, with the number of racer defeats required to unlock each boss inflating each chapter, and aside from the last couple hours worth, very few are going to be able to give you much of a challenge if you’re halfway capable and bringing a car of the correct level. Every time you encounter a ‘major’ opponent, you’re forced to watch their intro pan, then watch a separate intro pan for starting the race proper. And if you’re just barely underpowered and can’t quite pull ahead, it can be frustrating chasing one guy around and around as your tires go bald, trying to force him into a narrow overpass where the traffic will give you an opening.
There’s also zero risk – the complete lack of damage modeling means that rubbing rails, slamming into other cars, or even driving like a total sociopath, shoving rivals into traffic intentionally, is totally fine if that’s what gets you the dub, because all you lose out on is a marginal ‘perfect’ bonus for that race. That’s not entirely a bad thing – I found Tokyo Xtreme Racer a good wind-down game some nights, just pulling onto the Shuto and slapping down cars that stood no chance while I listened to something else, even my own music. But speaking of music, that’s where TXR really starts to fray at the seams, even if you’re taking it at its strengths.
“I seen the way you drive. You got a heavy foot. You’ll blow yourself to pieces.”
The music is fine, but there’s not nearly enough variety, and you’ll get nauseously sick of the normal battle track by about hour three, which is a real problem when that’s maybe ten percent of the game. The game’s roster of cars has expanded somewhat significantly since the start of early access, but it still feels pretty slim, especially if you only count cars with multiple model varieties once. The cars tree has a glut of NSXs, WRXs, and Skylines, and it reminded me of Ace Combat 7’s plane tree that had like five different F-15s to unlock separately. What makes it worse is that each car is ranked with a straightforward numeric Speed rating, and it just serves to push you into picking the one ‘best performance’ car of each unlocked tier. The gating of cars and upgrades is obnoxious enough that the developers just gave up and made it an option when the full release dropped. But if you’re playing ungated, you’ll almost certainly be smoking the opposition for the vast majority of the playtime, unless you really suck at driving, I guess.
The inconsistent challenge and arbitrary-feeling player progression comes to a head in the late game, when bosses are driving cars that are so much more powerful than yours that they will easily rip a 100 meter gap between you if you don’t immediately blast some NOS and pull ahead, swerving through traffic and doing everything you can to prevent them overtaking until you luck out and the AI finally slams into some shit. Then, other times, the AI will just bug out and drive into the back of a car or into a pillar on its own. Hey, a win’s a win.
Unfortunately, a few AIs also have ‘personalities’ programmed into them, which makes them drive like the same kind of little asshole you sometimes have to be, swerving around in front of you so you can’t overtake, forcing you into the back of a van, or doing an honest to God PIT maneuver on you. I wish I were exaggerating.
“I need one of these. One of the big ones. Actually, let’s make it two.”
One of the biggest features of the game is the ability to do full engine swaps – slamming a supercar V6 or even a hulking V10 into any chassis you want, tweaking the gears and brakes and balance so you can attempt sick drifts or just smash some low level marks in a hilariously overpowered AE86. Unfortunately, that feature is locked away in the perk menu, is gated, and even once you reach the point where you could buy it, you almost certainly never will, because it costs thousands of points. The only real way to play around with it is to beat the game’s story, then start NG+, which lets you keep all your cars, your racing names, and your cash, and refunds all your skill points. Since you still earn extra skill points for first victories, and those reset on NG+, you can immediately dump everything into unlocking engine swaps and have some fun trivially obliterating Rolling Guy or whatever… which you could also just do with the fucking LFA you bought to beat the endgame with.
TXR in general is in a kind of awkward place – it’s not really hardcore enough, either through the simulation or arcade angles, to really appeal to people who obsess over either type of racing games. But it’s also so unapproachable for people who, like, don’t know or care about the Japanese model names or engine codes for popular street race cars of the 90s and 2000s that it’s a little hard to sell to someone looking for a chillout game. For my part, I’d recommend it like this: it’s kind of like a JRPG where the battles are street races. It gets a little too hard for a casual fan, is a little too easy in general for a devotee, and suffers from a bit of bloat in a lot of its content, which is unfortunate, because it had most of a year in Early Access to flesh out more important things, but instead it seems like most of that time was spent getting rights to a few Hondas. Honestly, I expected more – at least a small map extension, more compelling model variety, weather effects, denser and more varied traffic, hell, I can think of a dozen things that could’ve been additional difficulty modifiers like the temp gauges are.
“I need it by tonight.”
I love Tokyo Xtreme Racer, though I know its flaws are many and its good points somewhat wasted on the majority of players. If it clicks with you just right, it’ll be a comfortable hang, cruising the streets under artificial light, occasionally livened up with a real threat. For a lot of people, it’s either going to be way too much or not quite enough, and mostly a headache either way. But that’s the reality of any sub-culture – to really embrace what you enjoy means becoming obnoxious and inscrutable to the general population. In that way, TXR is an outstanding celebration of its niche.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer can be purchased on Steam.