The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift (ファスト・アンド・フュリアス) Review

Do you like Tokyo Xtreme Racer (Shutokou Battle), and Initial D Arcade Stage? Well this game is for you!

About This Game
The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift (ファスト・アンド・フュリアス) is a open world racing game published by Bandai Namco, and developed by Eutechnyx. Despite being based on the film of the same name, its story is about the protagonist(you), after experiencing the first thrill of illegal street racing on the Tokyo Bay Aqualine, becomes a racer. You will race against opponents on the Expressway. Eventually racing in different touges in Japan.

The open world map consists of a fictional depiction of the Tokyo Metropolitan Expressway, including famous routes like the Wangan, and the Aqualine, and the time is always night. But you also have to weave through traffic, in order to become the fastest racer.

Car selection is plentiful, with a large pool of Japanese cars and a small amount of imports. You can choose many of the famous Japanese cars like the AE86s, NSXes, Toyota Chasers, and RX-7s. But for the US car lovers, you can drive a Mustang, a Challenger, or a Corvette too.

UI



You can freely choose any 1 of the 3 available GUIs available to display a variety of infomation such as g force, torque, and slope angle. Speedometer is only available is MPH unfortunately, as this game is a US/EU release only.

Customization


The game's car customization is very in-depth. Choose freely for grip or drift. Looking for some horsepower in your 86? Just swap in a Formula Atlantic 4A-GE, and a close-ratio gearbox, and you are ready to drift in the touge! Looking to drive on the wangan for a top-speed battle? Add turbos, racing slicks and a long-ratio gearbox now you are hitting 180MPH!


You can also change the external appearance of your car freely. Add bumpers, spoilers and side skirts without limits. If you are really going for it, full wide bodykits like the Han's VeilSide FD is available too. Not a ricer and don't like wide bodykits+undercar neons? You can add drift charms too.
One major aspect of external customization is limitless, vinyl designs. Just like Forza, you can add layers of vinyls and edit them freely, except that custom paint jobs and vinyls are completely free in this game. Let your imagination go wild! Add manufacturer logos to the side of your car or just go crazy with all the flame desigs. Or even put on some of the race crew stickers that you just gotten by defeating them and get a discount on other customization parts.
You can even create your very own INITIAL D Replica!


Game progress
You can progress your game by defeating various teams on the highway, and in the touge.
Look out for additional stories of your opponents, and you might see some charactors from F&F universe, and even parodies of famous fictional character. One great example is this certain 86 driver here:


You might also come across some real life characters, like "Chunky" Bai, who participated in the D1 series


Or even a real life wangan legend, like "Smokey" Nagata and his TOP SECRET V35


VERDICT: 8/10
Made for the PSP and the PS2, you can now play this game on even mobile with the use of emulators. The physics is fairly realistic, you can E-Brake, clutch kick, and do many other stuff, including spinning out of control if you drift into a bad angle.

The PS2 version is EXACTLY the same game with more optimized graphic effects. All features available on the PS2 is on the PSP too. However, PS2 have a harder difficulty level due to more dense traffic, and a bigger possibility of spining out when hitting the walls.

There is only one real downside to this game, which is the long loading times. On PSP UMD the loading can take up to 3x slower than Tekken 6 and Midnight Club LA Remix, and 7x slower than Initial D Street Stage. But no worries if you are on a emulator, you can skip it freely.

I recommend the US version of the game, because the EU version had some cars cut from the game

NOTE: If you play this game on a modded PSP from a ISO file, or you play it on a PSP emulator without enabling "Simulate UMD delays" in IO timing, traffic won't spawn! I have the original UMD game, and I strongly recommend it!

This post has been edited by Falbere on Dec 30 2014, 07:55 PM