I have spun out on wet tarmac again and I am furious with myself. JDM: Japanese Drift Master requires a different mentality to most other racing games. Drifting around a corner is not the side gimmick that you’ll do a few times during races. Drifting is the race. In this self-described “simcade” game, you’ve got to slide around the bendy roads of sunny (and rainy) Japan while delivering sushi and chasing boy racers for style points. It all adds up to some remarkably weighty speedfreakery that is bitingly frustrating when I’m bad at it, and rumblingly compelling when I’m good at it.
First, let’s get some housekeeping out of the way. JDM stands for “Japanese Domestic Market” referring to vehicles built and sold in Japan, but the same acronym has also come to be used as a shorthand for cars made in Japan and sold overseas. Search “JDM” on used car websites and you’ll likely spot some handsomely boxy beasts. Of course, this means that the full title of the racing game in question is technically: “Japanese Domestic Market: Japanese Drift Master”. This is stupid. But then, a few things about the game are.
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The story, for one, is a dopey fish-out-of-water tale about a European fella called Tomasz, who has revved his way to Japan and begins to compete in the local drifting scene. It’s delivered via the flippable pages of a manga, to be read in traditional right-to-left format. It’s a clumsy story, shoe-hornedly delivered in the exact way racing game stories often are. Imagine reading a black-and-white comic version of Fast And Furious: Tokyo Drift but without the Marshall Mathers lookalike. The women boob along boobily and the rival hits his girlfriend, just so you know he’s a bad’un.
But put down these pages and you’re faced with an ambitious little driveabout. There’s an open world map that slowly fills with events and challenges as you dither through the story. Some are straightforward “grip” races, in which drifting isn’t actually a big part. Others want you to hold a drift for as long as possible to accrue thousands of points for a bronze, silver, or gold ranking. Other missions include delivering sushi “in style” which means flying down the rural roads of a fictional Japanese prefecture while not crashing and wrecking all the perfectly arranged nigiri. There are drag races, where you’ll warm up your tires beforehand by spinning them, and roadside speed cameras that snap your highest speed – setting a record while getting a record.
So there’s variety, but the most eye-catching are races in which you’ve got to beat other computer-controlled opponents while at the same time gathering an admirable amount of style points by drifting. You need to finish first and take every corner like angry Bowser in Mario Kart. Drifting is so core to the game, that you are basically forced to do it at every single corner. As an arcade racer rube, this can cause some initial hand-to-eye reluctance. My thumbs want to just brake and slow for a bend, but do that and you’ll find the cars here steer at low speeds with agonising stiffness. The game is not for turning. You learn to drift, or you lose.
The game tries to help you out. There’s an on-screen diagram that appears on your HUD while drifting, to show the balance of your car. A needle swings left or right into a green zone to show the perfect drifting position. If it veers into the red zone you’ll spin out. Wet weather makes this more likely, and in the rain your car can feel completely different. I struggled a lot while trying to perfect my turns and obey the whims of the guiding needle. I drifted into barriers. I ruined stacks of maki rolls. I suffered flashbacks of trying to clear the training car park in Driver for PS1.
But I eventually learned when to ignore the on-screen guide. It feels easier to attune yourself to drifting when you simply look at your car’s movements directly and learn to intuit the pressure of your thumbs. UI can do a lot, but sometimes it can’t beat balls-basic hand-to-eye intuition.
Once you start to get a feel for how the game really wants you to drive, the tire-smoking flow can be mildly intoxicating. Nailing bend after bend the whole way across the map to the next objective is satisfying in the same way as managing to go a whole race in Burnout without once hitting a wall and turning your hatchback into minced metal. On the other hand, messing up a turn towards the end of a race can be a hellish frustration. And that’s mostly down to the game’s unforgiving approach to rewarding points.
Getting a good score relies on you maintaining a drift for as long as possible – in this way, you build a big multiplier. The game’s tutorials do not make a big deal of this fact, but it is a huge reason you will fail any given challenge. It’s at the core of the game. Spinning out cuts your multiplier off completely, and ending too early loses out on big points. So you’ve got to stretch those drifts to breaking point, then level out sensibly once you’re satisfied. If you can’t manage that, gathering the requisite points to beat opponents is an uphill battle. It’s kinda the same principle as landing “perfect” after a huge combo in OlliOlli games. You only get a fraction of the points if you don’t nail that final moment. But unlike those skating games, restarts in JDM are not frictionless and quick. Restarting an event when you’ve messed up includes a loading screen by necessity, and that makes resentment curdle when you’re trying to perform a perfect run.
Oh, the cars. Damn, that’s what a bunch of you probably care about. Yes, there are a neat range of fully licensed Japanese cars from the past few decades, including a 1988 Honda Civic, a Nissan Skyline from 1971, and an early 2000s Subaru Impreza. Basically any car you could feasibly see Paul Walker looking focused in. The devs have also promised new cars with every update, the first of which is planned for three months from now.
The parts shop too lets you fiddle with a surprising amount of motorbits. Lower the suspension, upgrade the brake pads, swap out the gearbox for a gearbox with a cooler name and an accompanying stats boost. Loads of stuff. There’s also a tuning screen where you can get disgustingly precise with tire pressure, wheel alignment, and adjustable gearbox ratios. Don’t look at me, I don’t know what any of the accompanying numbers mean. They probably make you go zoom-zoom.
Cosmetically, you can make your car look as hideously Fast and/or Furious as you like, with bumpers, spoilers, wheel rims, and wing mirrors. The paint shop lets you attach strobing multicoloured lights to the underside of your ride (what is a car if not a kind of RGB-decorated PC case?) And you can alter the interior with new steering wheels, gear sticks, and seats. A lot of these parts are locked behind getting a better “reputation level”, which basically means completing chapters and side quests to boost XP. I didn’t reach the end of what was available in my playtime, and there’s more coming in future updates.
There are some potholes, sure. That story is borderline insufferable, tutorials don’t do a great job of explaining things, and there’s some bugginess. I only got a fraction of the cash I was supposed to earn from some missions, for example, which made it difficult to progress up that ladder of nice vehicles. But even so, I’m left with the impression of a racing game punching far above its weight and landing an impressive number of blows. If I knew more about drifting as a motorhobby, I might say something big and powerful like “this is the definitive game of a racing subculture!” But I’ll let some other bumpernerd put that label on it. I wouldn’t want to upset all the fans of Night-Runners or Togue Shakai. Regardless of where it fits in its racing niche, JDM may not yet be fully tuned, but it has rolled out of the garage in fine form.