Description
The Zero Saga continues! Media Rings made one of the few (and most successful) niche drag racing sims. The series has spawned over a half dozen iterations over the period of over ten years (though the PS2 game has standard racing), but got its start on the PC Engine and PCE-CD. You'll either love its approach or hate it as racing is secondary to tuning and the simulation aspects involved. Most games featured a variety of codes or cheats to manage how quickly you get to the meat and potatoes of the game.
Released in 1997 for PlayStation and Saturn (as Type-R), Doozy is an evolution of the games before it. While it runs at a higher resolution than its predecessors and exceeds them in terms of sheer scope, I feel it still hasn't dethroned Z4CII in terms of overall ambiance. The game adds a ton of events but its biggest addition is the ability to woo a large variety of women that are main, hidden and side characters with a rather impressive number of endings (18 special endings alone with more "normal" and "bad" endings). Visually, the game is decent (almost everything is 2D which was part of its criticism... check out Saturn's "Code R" or "Wangan Trial Love" for a driving / dating sim with more significant 3D elements) with the many heroines donning a wide variety of looks through the game but the audio is a step down from the PCECD and Super Famicom games.
After RR and RR-Z, the setting returns overseas, taking place in America where the player travels to many of the areas present in Zero4 Champ II. As you can expect, there are a lot of stereotypes and misconceptions in the game about the West (and vice-versa) but also some culturally significant moments too. Unlike the protagonist in Z4C1&2, the hero of this work, Shinjo Kakeru (by default), doesn't undergo the same trials and tribulations of acclimating to the states (like going and learning English) and his personality is more one-dimensional and fairly typical of a hot-blooded shounen anime protagonist. The game starts when he inadvertently meets a skilled female motorcyclist named Natsuki who shares her dream of going to America to become a drag racing star and the hero, having no clear direction other than wanting to "run free", decides to follow suit. The game takes place over one year from April 1997 to September 1998 with the ultimate goal of becoming the best and a secondary goal of finder a tuner "partner" and building a relationship through celebrations, gifts and dating. The story structure is fairly loose as a result and while each girl has personality quirks, a lot of the core dialogue amongst them is near-identical outside of special events.
Dialogue is campy and doesn't take itself too seriously, but many elements of the dating portion are esoteric with invisible parameters (affection) and sometimes contradictory outcomes; you may take a girl on a date and the dialogue might suggest they had a decent time but the player may see no change or a negative change in their standing and vice-versa. Once you find outcomes that work, the game becomes an exercise in repetition as you will find yourself looping events to get the same outcomes to grind said invisible stats. Consequently, as having a good relationship with them is tied to how quickly they excel at tuning the various aspects of your vehicles, the integration of this feature feels like a lot of guesswork and more like a distraction rather than a feature that was realistically integrated into the game, which is unfortunate as there's some good scenes and dialogue overall and the sim aspects comprise most of what the game has to offer. There are near-perfect guides online for the game that help make this element of the game more enjoyable.
Besides the significant overhaul with the dating and tuning elements, gameplay is reminiscent to other titles. Most jobs or gigs the player undergoes to get cash are in the form of mini-games, such as fishing, moving boxes in warehouses, arm wrestling, gambling, etc., and take place over a single day or the whole week. One major "job" involves a fully-featured RPG mode where the player explores, gains levels, party members, changes job/class and more (evolved from ZZ/ZZ-R). Scheduling doesn't just impact you, but your partner as well; any spaces that show "Free" are days where they will accompany you if you go out to town, and you can trigger additional events or tiny bits of additional dialogue if they're around (many of these events also frustratingly have a "probability" of triggering). If you don't take them with you, they will work on car tuning instead - tuning effects are immediate as well (so if you have a race early in the week, you'll already reap the benefits).
Equipping parts and such is the same as past games, and you can buy and sell cars of varying performance. Driving consists of a straight line with emphasis on shifting and timing. This is a video of the game in action. Enjoy.
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