The racing genre has seen a modern renaissance due to the success of the Forza Horizon series, with both simulation and arcade racers shifting to an open-world style reminiscent of that series.

I love both genres, and mixing awesome driving with tons of collectibles and little events or distractions dotted about a huge open area makes

open-world racing games incredible
.

When I saw JDM: Japanese Drift Master pull up to the scene with a very clear Initial D inspiration, that made me all the more excited, as playing out awesome drifting sequences to Eurobeat sounds like a dream.

On top of that great first impression, it promises great Simcade controls that should feel like the best of both worlds, and that it will control great, whether you’re on keyboard, controller, or a full racing setup with a wheel.

With missions, a full-on manga integrated into the game to tell the entire story, and some great music backing it all, it felt like it should be a surefire hit that checks all the boxes.

I’ve conducted this JDM review on my PC with my controller, and I’ll be analyzing how well it balances its open world alongside the mission structure it has, with a sprinkling of technical difficulties.

Clutched Up

The game offers you two styles: simcade controls and arcade. Right off the bat, the simcade controls felt awful. The automatic drifting felt gross, turning never worked, and it felt like a horrible compromise between.

When running with arcade controls, the drifting feels pretty great, overall handling is satisfying, and it doesn’t feel anywhere near as unintuitive.

I get the feeling this game was only made with people who have hundreds of hours in racing games in mind, as all the car tuning is manual with very little explanation, which is completely fine if not for everything else.

This expert focus is contrasted by the fact that the entire game is built around drifting, with all the quests and objectives usually requiring some level of drifting skill. While drifting feels satisfying, it doesn’t feel like it props the entire game up.

Perhaps that’s because I prefer the arcade controls, but I’d honestly prefer a game built around the arcade controls, instead of expecting me not to take the option that allows me to flick the stick left and right for free points.

At the very least, I’d enjoy more variety. Practically, the only thing to do outside the story in Japanese Drift Master is the various speed traps dotted about the place, alongside some admittedly

very cool car customization
.

The world is technically open, but you can rarely ever go off-road. Most fences and objects are indestructible and stop your car in its tracks, and it feels like there’s no reason to go exploring the majority of the map.

With a janky minimap and a route feature that doesn’t work half the time, it makes this game deceptively linear, despite the fact that it holds its cool landscapes and beautiful locations above your head, almost as a taunt.

Second Gear

The JDM campaign is essentially a bunch of small missions strung together in succession, all of them asking you to get a ton of drift points in a limited time frame, alongside a secondary objective, and they’re just okay.

The main issue with these missions is that they’re either frustrating, easy, or both. I’ll use the “Training or Challenge” mission as an example, where your objective is to stay close to another car while gaining more drifting points.

This mission becomes incredibly frustrating because you aren’t allowed to pass the other car, and you need to gain more points, meaning 90% of the gameplay here is drifting directly behind it for the best multiplier.

It doesn’t feel like I’m accomplishing anything outside the few times you have to get first, because it usually only wants you to care about drifting, which becomes boring as a main objective instead of an optional skill expression.

Going for speed is fun, and the missions that are primarily speed-based are genuinely great, and feel far better than drag races or standard races in most other open-world racing titles, but they’re less than half the game.

Dare I say it, but I think if the game were a more standard racing game focused on, y’know, going fast and being better than the other drivers, with the drifting being secondary, it would have felt far more satisfying.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy drifting, but I think it feels far more satisfying in a game like Forza Horizon, where it’s a small bit of skill expression that gives you points, or even Mario Kart, where it’s simplistic but a core part of the game.

The game simply gets boring often. I found it only frustrating whenever it attempted to be challenging, as the challenge always ended up solved the same way, and I simply wish there was far more depth here.

Blinding Lights

I believe the aesthetics of JDM missed the mark about as hard as possible. They go for a photorealistic, somewhat bland, and washed-out aesthetic, rather than going all in on the anime-style appeal that the rest of the game tries to convey.

Imagine this game with the stylish, hand-drawn or cel-shaded effects of NFS: Unbound, or even as a fully cel-shaded style that commits entirely to being incredibly colorful and stylish, instead of what it is now.

On top of this, I’m unsure of why, but everything always looks grainy no matter what. I’ve adjusted antialiasing, and I can’t turn resolution upscaling off, but setting both of these to high still doesn’t make it better.

It makes further away details harder to make out on top of the weirdly low LOD, and it all makes for a mash of unpleasant, grainy soup where nothing stands out to me, aside from some of the UI.

The menus and some of the in-game visuals are really well stylized, but then there are UI elements and popups that look really quite generic, both of them clashing with the style the rest of the game goes for.

It feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. I think aiming for a far more simplistic style would have done wonders, as every good element contrasts with the underpolished and generic elements, and that graininess makes it hard to look at.

Check List

The story is rather weird, not due to the content itself, because it’s about as typical a tale as you’d expect from any racing-based manga, but because it feels incredibly disconnected from the rest of the game.

The characters in-game don’t talk or have any voice of their own, so you’re just supposed to read the manga and let that motivate you. It works fine, but it just doesn’t give me the same drive it would if they felt more connected.

Letting Touma have some voice acting and a few lines he says while you’re driving would do wonders for bridging the gap between gameplay and reading material, but at least the story itself is well-written.

It’s rather simplistic: a racer from Poland moving to Japan after having his license suspended in Europe, with shenanigans ensuing and many races against cocky opponents occurring, all of which feels rather satisfying.

Get The Satellite

The soundtrack of JDM is likely what you’d expect of most modern racing games: a selection of existing songs from varying genres thrown onto several in-game radio stations, and it’s generally pretty good.

It may be a nitpick, but the intro set expectations for the Initial D-inspired Eurobeat. Once you’re in-game, though, the radio defaults to music akin to the backing track of a TikTok thirst trap, and that’s just not anywhere near my vibe.

Every other radio station had far better music on offer, though, and once you get told to switch stations, I threw on the Eurobeat radio and never went back, as it’s the exact vibe I wanted from this game.

The rest of your auditory experience is exactly as expected, if a little generic and underwhelming. There isn’t much impact or oomph to anything you do, and while it’s completely serviceable, it’s not impressive.

Under The Hood

I don’t always feel the need to write an entire section in a review solely dedicated to the performance and technical details of a game, but JDM warrants the discussion, as it may be the most underbaked game I’ve ever reviewed.

To start, my computer has a Ryzen 5 5600X and a Radeon RX 6600, which means I can play most games at High or Ultra at a consistent 1080p 60 FPS, but JDM still manages to drop frames and freeze for seconds at a time.

This is on medium settings, and if I bring those settings higher, it gets even worse. I

gave it a shot on my Steam Deck
, which usually gets special treatment and runs better than comparable hardware, but it still sucked in unique ways.

At low, it manages an inconsistent average of 40 FPS, and anything above that struggles to break 30. On top of that, I messed with the resolution once, and now the game refuses to ever display at the correct resolution ever again.

These issues alone would be bad enough, especially combined with the slow loading times. What’s even worse, however, are the frequent softlocks on the warning during the opening, and messy settings.

The options menu is all over the place, didn’t allow me to select controller input on PC, didn’t function half the time on Steam Deck, and buries settings in menus that don’t make any sense to me whatsoever.

It’s a sign the game was either rushed out the door far too quickly to optimize and deliver a good product, or a level of incompetence and lack of testing led to the entire thing being incredibly user-unfriendly.

These problems could easily be patched and ironed out, but the fact is, I was given this game in this state to review it, and reviewing it reveals it’s a buggy, barely functional mess just a few days before release.

Finish Line

Overall, JDM got better as it went on, but that didn’t stop the majority of the game from feeling boring or frustrating often, especially in missions that expect you to have tuned your car a specific way, and force constant restarting.

I think this game would be at least 10% more bearable if the restarts were quick, but the loading screens rival Sonic 06 in frequency and length, which makes the whole affair feel like a frustratingly slow trek through it all.

I really wanted to love JDM, and I’m sure that people with a full racing sim setup who love manga and drifting will get a big kick out of it, but especially due to its terribly janky nature and lack of polish, it’s not an easy recommendation.

If you came to this game expecting to feel like you’re playing a racing anime with awesome visuals, riveting races, and a big world that feels fun to explore, JDM provides only disappointment in all of those aspects.

Closing Thoughts

JDM: Japanese Drift Master provides a very linear open world experience that only becomes fun after a few hours, and even then, will continue to provide missions that are either frustratingly specific or boringly easy. It may appeal to the hardcore racing game enthusiasts with a full racing sim setup, but for people who play these games on a controller and sit down to have a fun time, this game will feel mind-numbing at times. It has moments that shine through, and the arcade controls feel pretty satisfying, but it doesn’t make for a great game.