PlayStation Basement #65 - R: Rock'n Riders

This review was originally published on the Console Purist Facebook group on November 23rd, 2019.

Hello once again, and welcome back to the PlayStation Basement. PlayStation Basement is a weekly review of games for the original PlayStation that are somewhat obscure, unusual, or unknown. Games are rated Good, Bad, or Neutral to emphasis the review over just a number. Now, let’s go!

Yesterday was Go For a Ride Day, a day celebrating having fun via outdoor travel, so this week’s game follows suit. R: Rock’n Riders is a snowboarding game that was released only in Japan. The game was released in April of 1999 in two versions: a standard edition and a limited edition. The limited edition has its own special cover art along with art cards and an extra photo album disc. The limited edition emphasizes the celebrities that star in R: Rock’n Riders, contemporary J-rock and visual kei musicians transported into a future world oddly similar to Jet Set Radio, which was still a year away. The real-world musicians from bands like Media Youth, 808, PENICILLIN, and Bow Wow are recreated here as an outlaw rock band in a dystopian future where rock musick has been banned! Like a more lighthearted, animated version of the VHS b-movie shooter, Revolution X, before it, R: Rock’n Riders tasks you with bringing rock back to the people.

There are two very different cover art images for R: Rock’n Riders. The standard edition features the six band members of R in their cartoon designs sort of jamming but sort of snowboarding on a white, motion blur background of snow and ice. A target is placed over one of the characters, Chisato, as if he is about to be executed. The limited edition features the real musicians on a similar motion blur background, this one a blue and purple colored psychedelic wave. Instruments and snowboards are not viewable here, and the title is only displayed as R. The limited edition cover is more like a personal greeting, and there is no action going on. I think that the standard edition does a much better job at showing the actual game; the limited edition functions as more of a treat for fans.

Graphically, R: Rock’n Riders gets through but not without a few bumps. The in-game models don’t have the smooth animations you might hope for with these kind of stylized designs. There’s a lot of jaggedness. Colors can be garish sometimes too. On the other hand, the characters and levels all look very unique, and the animations are decent too. The FMVs of the real musicians jamming out interspersed with snowboarding scenes are directed well, and they include some animated bits too. Overall, the musick video stuff looks good, but I wish that R: Rock’n Riders had ended up with a cel-shaded art style for the main game.

So, I’ve never actually listened to any of these J-rock or visual kei bands other than in passing. This kind of symphonic pop-metal/rock doesn’t really appeal to me. I do like Japanese garage punk bands like Guitar Wolf and Teengenerate and city pop/jazz fusion artists like Tatsuro Yamashita, Toshiki Kadomatsu, and Casiopea. There are some other bands from Japan I enjoy too, but none of it is this style of musick. I was pleasantly surprised to find the musick in R: Rock’n Riders pretty great actually. Songs are similar but varied, and they are all very polished. The game has a nice effect too: the better you do, the more instruments are added to the song playing in the current stage. As you do better, the song becomes more complex, exploding with wild guitar solos, choral keyboards, and more. Doing poorly gives you some bass and drums, maybe. The game also has some musick videos and a weird mode where you can kind of construct your own songs with a high degree of oddness (you only get one instrumentalist or singer doing a lot of leads). The sound effects are decent with a good amount of voice-overs in addition to snowboard crashes and stuff like that. The voice sounds are a bit harsh at times. Overall the game sounds pretty good, though.

Nearing the finish, let’s touch base about the actual gameplay; it’s probably not exactly what you would expect. R: Rock’n Riders is a snowboarding game kind of like Cool Boarders. You ride your board down a mountain, make turns, do jumps, pull-off tricks, and move a little stiffly. You must make it to the end of the course before the time limit runs out, but there is another complication too: you also need to have a high enough score to succeed. While points can be accrued by performing tricks, you can gain many more by tagging the unplayable O-jiro when he appears in the level. Each time you tag him, you get an instrument and are awarded around 800 to 1,000 points. You usually need over 4,000 points to clear the stage. You can tell when you have enough points by the number of bars in the bottom left of the screen. If you finish the track with less than five, you’ll need to do it again. Each bar also represents a track in the song that plays for each level, so this is also how you get the song to be totally full as mentioned above. R: Rock’n Riders seems really tough and weird at first, but it’s easy to get the hang of it and have fun with some practice.

There are some complications with R: Rock’n Riders, but they’re not the biggest of issues. Doing tricks is kind of, well, tricky. You can only perform one trick per jump, and these tricks must be executed basically as you jump. If you don’t input a command soon enough, you’ll be doing an empty leap. The controls for tricks are also pretty limited; you don’t have the same kind of freedom to twist and turn as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Finally, the main mode is also pretty short, only four stages. There are some bonus modes available, though.

The two bonus modes are Music Room and Extra Game. Music Room is pretty weird. As mentioned above, you control one member of the band R and can produce various sound clips of musick or singing. Each member has different sonic effects to produce different musick, but it’s all pretty limited. It’s hard to make a song with one guy playing lead guitar alone or with only a singer. Maybe I’m missing something. The Extra Mode is unlocked after completing the main game with all four characters. It’s similar to ESPN Extreme Games/1Xtreme, a race on snowboards with a battling aspect. Racers in this mode have a health meter that can be depleted by attacks from opponents. It sounds pretty cool, and I plan on trying it soon. For now, we’ve reached the end of the road.

R: Rock’n Riders is a corny, fun arcade racing game. Even if you don’t have much knowledge of visual kei bands, the game will charm you with quirky designs, fast gameplay, and great musick. The different characters and different courses bring new challenges to get a hang of, especially the last level on concrete where a sharp turn leaves your racer face down on the road. The game is not a long ride, but I think that the journey of R: Rock’n Riders is worth it.

R: Rock’n Riders receives a Good.

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