JDM: Japanese Drift Master is a driving game where you play as the new guy in this small Japanese town and get dragged into the drifting and racing culture of the area. The story is told via comic book panels, which is just about the worst possible way to do it. I skipped all of it. It's hard to see and hard to read and screw all of that. Stories in racing games are pointless anyway. Thanks for wasting everyone's time. Like I said, I skipped it and have no clue what was actually going on but blasted through the events just fine.
Anyway, once you get into the actual gameplay more problems arise. First, the good news. This is a game focused on stylishly and beautifully drifting around corners, and it genuinely plays really well when you're drifting. There are arcade and sim control options, and the sim controls actually work a lot better and give you a lot more control, so that's what I recommend. Once you get used to it, the drifting feels incredibly good. The problem comes in the events you do where the CPU can score seemingly impossible amounts of points, which can be very frustrating. If you can keep the CPU cars in your vision, they mostly score normal points and you can beat them. If they get too far ahead of you, however, the game goes crazy and the CPU cars score like 30,000 more points than are even possible for you so you have to do the event over again. You can drive perfectly and still get massacred because the scoring is broken. But then you play the same event again and win easily. It's all very frustrating.
In addition to drifting events, there are also so-called grip racing events that are supposed to be more like normal racing. But it doesn't work because the brakes don't work at all and the cars absolutely DO NOT TURN unless you drift. The CPU cars don't have that problem, though, so while you're struggling to get around the corners your opponents are going faster than you in the corners because normal driving is faster than drifting - sorry, MythBusters proved it. You can still easily win the grip events by simply upgrading your car and just blowing them all away in the straights, but these events are never particularly fun regardless of what you do.
The story mode only takes about 5 hours to play through. There are some extra events you can do outside of the story, but there isn't much meat to the experience overall. There are couple dozen cars, with licensed Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, and Honda models along with unlicensed but you know what they are versions of Mitsubishi and Toyotas. Most JDM cars you really want will probably be here. They are all fully upgradeable and tunable and you can slap on whatever body kits and bumpers and whatever else to customize the look as well.
That all sounds good except for the fact the story mode regularly forces you to drive pre-set cars instead of your perfectly tuned and fully upgraded custom cars, and the story mode cars all absolutely suck. You struggle to pass events because the cars suck, which is frustrating because if they let you choose your own car you'd win everything easily. I guess it's a story thing, but having to drive a piece of junk instead of your own car isn't fun.
That's a running theme with JDM: Japanese Drift Master - there were way too many design decisions that just aren't fun. It's really a shame because when the game gets out of the way and lets you do what it's actually good at - smoothly and perfectly drifting around twisting Japanese mountain roads - it feels amazingly good. Most of the game is not that, though. I suppose there is fun to be had by just building whatever cars you want and drifting around the open world map, but for the $35 asking price you can get a similar experience in better overall packages from a number of other games.
I will say a couple of positive things. The music is generally pretty good with a surprisingly solid selection of JPOP and Japanese rock and metal and lots of other genres in between. The map is also pretty interesting. It's sort of claustrophobically small compared to some other open world racers, but the design is more realistic than most. The roads are stunningly narrow instead of just being wide racetracks, and it really feels like you're driving through little Japanese villages.
All in all, I just don't love JDM: Japanese Drift Master. The core drifting gameplay is arguably the best you'll find in the simcade genre, but the rest of the game surrounding it isn't that great. The story mode is stinky and the grip racing is atrocious. CarX Street or the Forza Horizon series or The Crew Motorfest are what I'd recommend instead.
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