Kandagawa Jet Girls Review

Kandagawa Jet Girls is based on the anime of the same name that ran for four months with 12 episodes and an ova. True to the anime, it is in Japanese with English subtitles, so be prepared to read. You play as high school students Rin Namiki and Misa Aio who are roommates attending Asakusa Girls’ High School together. They learn that they both love racing jet skis so they decide to work together as a team with Rin driving and Misa as the shooter. They compete against other high school teams to prove they are the best and they deserve to win the Kandagawa Cup.

To be honest, when I saw this title, I didn’t have high hopes. I expected a lot of high school drama, schoolgirl outfits and well-endowed teens riding jet skis with horrible controls. I’m happy to report I wasn’t totally right. Sure, there is still lots of cleavage, drama and schoolgirl outfits but driving the jet ski is great. The controls are all easy to use and there is so much you can do. You aren’t only racing in a straight line, you are drifting, performing tricks, picking up items and using them against your opponents; similar to in the Mario Kart series. The watermelon missile sounds like a crazy weapon that you would find in that game, maybe it can even stop a blue shell!

This game is full of things to customise, you not only get to choose the paint colours on your jet ski but you also get to choose what decals and where they will be placed on the machine. When you race you earn points to use as currency in the shop. There are a lot of different things you can buy like outfits, accessories, background music and even parts for your jet ski. The parts can increase the speed of your craft, the handling and even the acceleration but it will cost you. This store is expensive! The cheapest part cost about 20,000 points, which is a lot when you only have 29,850 to spend! You will have to do a lot of races to get all the points you need to really soup up your jet ski. Once you have your craft looking the way you want you can also decide what outfits your characters will be wearing and the colors of their hair. Want the school girl look? There is an option for that. Want a super tight wet suit on your character, you can do that too. Want Rin to have long purple hair with pink highlights? Sure, why not! The options are endless and as you race against other teams you unlock more outfit and accessory options.

The game looks beautiful, the animation is great and the voices are the ones that are on the show, so you won’t be disappointed if you have seen the anime before. If you haven’t seen it though, that’s fine, you won’t miss anything. The story mode of the game features a lot of talking. I didn’t mind it too much, but my kids just wanted the girls to shut up so they could race. Every character you come across in the story has an excuse to race, no matter how silly the reason. I guess it would get quite boring if you just had a normal tournament. Plus this way you get to learn more about the characters you are playing as. Rin is the super positive, always happy character who just wants to be friends with everyone, whereas Misa is the serious, grouchy type who just wants to get down to business. It feels like you are playing through one of the episodes of the anime where there is lots of filler you have to get through before you get back to the good part. If you aren’t a huge fan of anime like this, and just want action, this may drive you crazy.

There are multiple story arcs available to play. Once you finish the story of Rin and Misa, you can play as one of the other teams that you challenged. In total, there will be eight story arcs to play though, once you unlock them. If you don’t feel like playing the story you can play online or do some time trials to try to get the best lap and overall race time for each of the courses. I appreciate that when you are choosing which track to challenge the layout of the track is shown and it tells you how many corners there are. If you find taking corners cleanly hard, it might be best to practice here.

There is lots to like in Kandagawa Jet Girls, especially if you are a fan of high school sports type anime. Though, after a while, I was getting annoyed with the amount of dialogue. Plus the game wasn’t consistent when it would show my customised character during the animated story parts. Sometimes it would show Rin and Misa in their default costumes and other times they would suddenly have different colored hair that was way longer. If you aren’t planning on playing local multiplayer and you are able to play online there is definitely added value here.