It's new to me: Tokyo Highway Battle

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

The Tokyo Xtreme Racer series — as it’s known in North America — has been around for ages. It debuted with a couple of Japan-only Super Famicom games, in 1994 and 1995, titled Shutokou Battle '94 and Shutokou Battle 2, respectively, before moving to the 32-bit Playstation and Sega Saturn in 1996. There’s nothing wrong with the first two Shutokou Battle games, by any means, but it’s also clear about 10 seconds into playing Tokyo Highway Battle, as it was known in North America on the Playstation, that Genki’s ambition for a drift-focused street-racing game needed more than just Mode 7 tech to fulfill its ambitions. Consider that, as good as the original Super Mario Kart was, there’s very little of its DNA in the 3D entries in the series. They’re just entirely different games, due to entirely different technology that allowed for entirely different possibilities. Tokyo Highway Battle is the same way.

Curiously, it’s the publisher in Japan, Bullet-Proof Software, that gets credited on the title screen of the North American Playstation version of the game, along with the regional publisher, Jaleco. Genki’s name, despite being the studio behind the game, is nowhere to be found on that screen, and it’s Bullet-Proof Software’s logo that appears, along with Jaleco’s, before the title screen pops. Genki’s logo does appear on the Saturn edition of the game — released only in Japan — along with publisher Imagineer, and it shows up when you boot the Japanese version of the Playstation game, while the two companies share copyright credit at the bottom of the title screen in that edition. So, it just seems a little weird, is all, to not give Genki the international recognition they deserve in the North American release, even if it was Bullet-Proof Software’s devs who helped prep that edition of the game, along with publisher Jaleco.

In North America, the game is known as Tokyo Highway Battle, but in Japan, it’s Shutokou Battle ‘97: Tsuchiya Keiichi & Bandou Masaaki on the Saturn, and Shutokou Battle: Drift King on the Playstation. This can all be explained a lot more easily than you might think, with the three differing names. Tsuchiya Keiichi is the titular Drift King — he rose to prominence in Japanese racing for drifting even in races where drifting wasn’t considered the norm. He was the stunt coordinator (and a stuntman) on The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and worked as a consultant on the manga series, Initial D, the story of which revolves around a Japanese street racer. America had John Madden putting his name on and consulting with a series of football video games, and Japan had Keiichi doing the same for street racing games.

Bandoh Masaaki was, at the time, Keiichi’s racing team manager, and has his own role to play in these early games in the series. Whereas Keiichi is the Drift King, a title you want to take from him in the same way an aspiring young Pokémon trainer wants to become the regional champion, Bandoh is a mechanic. He gives you advice on tuning up your car to give yourself a better chance, and is the one actually doing the work on your vehicle(s) in between races. You buy the parts, his team installs them, and then you win. That’s the theory, anyway.

You start with just three cars to choose from, but defeating the initial rivals — they’re assigned to a specific track — will open up three more, as well as reveal the next wave of rivals, which are going to be far more difficult than that first batch. While there are just the three courses, with the new rivals populating the old haunts once you’ve unlocked them, they’re going to play much differently the second time around. And that’s because your car, at this point, will have to go much, much faster, with much more violent, consequential drifting, and with far fewer mistakes and traffic mishaps than you could get away with before. You might feel real confident in how finely-tuned your vehicle is after clearing out the first few rivals, one per track, but then you go up against this second wave and get left in the dust almost immediately. You’ve got work to do.

You buy new car parts — of which there are 60 to choose from — before races, using points. You start with a supply of points, but earn more from racing. Whether you win or lose, you’ll get more points, but (obviously) you get more for winning than you do for losing. One wrinkle that you want to be aware of, before investing too much into a starter car, is that the parts do not transfer from one vehicle to another. If you switch your vehicle in between races, you also lose whatever progress you’ve made with parts. Plan ahead, use the game’s practice mode to play around with the various cars, and figure out which one you want to start with, and which one you want to switch to. Then start buying what you need — but only as much as you need — with the first one, saving your points and the true investment for that second one.

You can modify the engine in a number of ways, you can change the transmission, you can alter the air flow to the engine, change the tires, the wheels, the brakes, remove excess parts to reduce weight, take the catalytic converter right out — hey, why not, street racing is already illegal, why not drive an illegal car while you do it — add electronics and nitrous and more. You can choose which parts to install, or you can have Bandoh automatically handle this by selecting a car built for high speed, one built for acceleration, or one for all-around performance. Each part has a description, which, if you know only a little about cars, should help you to figure out what it is they do and why you’d need them. If not, don’t worry: get everything unless it’s contradictory. You don’t need every kind of muffler, for instance, so just get the one you want to use, and you only need one kind of brake pad at a time, one kind of wheel, one kind of tire. But there are all kinds of modifications for parts you can buy, and it’s pretty clear, when there’s just the one of them, that it’s something you’re going to want to get to add on to your machine to make it go vroom with full efficiency.

It’s fitting that one of the second-wave rivals brags about buying the same car as Keiichi, but then when you defeat them complains about how he’s gone through five of them this month because they keep dying on him in these races. The car matters, yes, but it’s who’s behind the wheel of the car that makes the real difference in the end. A souped up car can get you far, but you’ll never go the distance without the skills to use that car for all it’s worth.

There might not be a ton of tracks to play, no, but you’re going to want to be playing these same ones over and over again to master their turns and quirks, anyway. The three tracks are modeled after actual stretches of Tokyo highways, and, since this is street racing, you’re going to have to deal with traffic. Driving 170 miles per hour in sixth gear to try to pass your rival sounds exhilarating all on its own, but add “weaving in between buses in two lanes of traffic during a drifting turn” to the mix, and you’re going to feel like you need a seatbelt for your couch, too, just for peace of mind.

The traffic is the one real flaw with Tokyo Highway Battle. Not its existence, no, but how it behaves. Which is to say, it ignores you completely, never reacting to your presence, and doing whatever it would have done whether you were there or not. Which is to say, on multiple occasions, I cursed a bus or an 18-wheeler for not using a goddamn turn signal when they switched lanes. It’s all my fault, really, but still. Signal!

A much bigger issue that isn’t just some pedantry used to disguise and excuse my own faults is that you ping pong around when you strike another vehicle or one strikes you. Which would be fine, except your rivals don’t take these collisions nearly as hard as you do, meaning, they have a built-in advantage on top of the other built-in advantage they have which basically requires that you race perfectly with no mistakes in a modern marvel of a machine in order to win. Just keep this in mind when you risk potential collisions, and you’ll mostly be fine. “Mostly,” because sometimes, the bus is right there on the turn, and there’s no way to avoid it if it’s decided that now is the time for it to start switching lanes, right into where you were trying to avoid its presence.

In the grand scheme of things this is just a little problem and annoyance that playing the race again will fix. And since you get points even when you lose, and are going to have to race these tracks multiple times in order to be able to afford the parts your car needs, it all kind of comes out in the wash. Still! It’s worth mentioning if you’re the kind of person who will get frustrated and quit a racing game if it feels like it’s unfair in any way. Tokyo Highway Battle is pretty unfair, or at least seems that way, at first. As you get used to the physics, and the courses, and start to improve your vehicle and see its gains, though, you realize it’s not actually unfair. Your car just stunk. Now, armed with experience and a sixth gear and improved air flow and special tires and knowledge of when to start your drifts, everything is fair, and all that’s left is the race.

Tokyo Highway Battle’s soundtrack rips. It sounds like someone decided that Ys and Ace Combat shouldn’t get to have all the fun to themselves, and that racing games could also have the kind of heavy rock music that compels you forward like in those series. Seriously, though, are you going to tell me you can’t picture bump-combatting a bunch of demons while this plays in the background?

The entire soundtrack doesn’t sound just like that, no, as there’s quite a bit of variety to it. Songs aren’t tied to one track or another, either, so you just get to go through almost an hour of music even though there are just a handful of tracks, with a different song playing every time you start a race. The full soundtrack is very much worth your time:

Tokyo Xtreme Racer’s scope has grown tremendously since this initial 3D outing in the series. While there are just the few tracks and little more than a handful of rivals standing in the way of your ultimate goal of the Drift King, in the brand new Tokyo Xtreme Racer that’s currently in early access on Steam as of January, 2025, there are already over 200 rivals to challenge. And that figure will certainly grow: Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero, released for the Playstation 2 in 2001, featured over 400 rivals, as well as 165 cars. Like with Tokyo Highway Battle, those cars are unlicensed, but certainly resemble real vehicles enough that, if you know them, you’ll be able to recognize what’s what. Unlike Tokyo Highway Battle, the entire gameplay structure has changed, but that’s a story for another day.

The Saturn and Playstation editions of Tokyo Highway Battle, language (and name) aside, are mostly the same. There are some minor visual differences, though. The Playstation edition uses some fog to hide architecture pop-in, for instance, which is a little more rampant the faster you go in your car. The Saturn game runs at a slightly higher resolution, but since both games utilize the same 2D assets, it results in a little warping on the PSX edition of the game due to stretching. The example Sega Retro gave in their analysis of the two games was that the speed gauge on the Playstation version of Tokyo Highway Battle is oval-shaped, while on the Saturn, it’s a perfect circle. Like I said, minor visual differences. The core games are the same.

The real difference is in the FMVs — since people outside of Japan didn’t necessarily know who Keiichi was, his filmed scenes where he talks racing (or you not being ready to take him on after a loss to a lesser rival) were cut from the international release. Luckily, the Saturn edition of the game has been unofficially translated, meaning, the higher-resolution version of the game that you can play on a better controller that also includes all of these FMVs is in English as of 2022. Since I love me some smack talk from an FMV-based rival in a street racing game, you already know which one I spent more time with.

Regardless of the what, you’re going to have to emulate Tokyo Highway Battle (or Shutokou Battle ‘97, whichever) in the present, since they aren’t available anywhere else unless you’ve still got original hardware and a desire to browse the secondary market. The Playstation edition is reasonably priced, but the Saturn one requires patching to play in English. Regardless of the how or what, though, you should give it a whirl. It might not be considered a classic by the masses in the vein of R4: Ridge Racer Type 4 or Gran Turismo, but the sickos convinced me to go down this road, and I regret nothing outside of the new obsession I can already feel myself developing from Genki’s first go at 3D Drift King.

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