YMMV / Tokyo Xtreme Racer

• Awesome Music: The entire franchise is loaded with great tracks, enough to now warrant its' own page.
• Breather Boss: The battles against Steel Heart, Dying Star and Grief Pluto in Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 are far easier than the ones against the other Thirteen Devils members that precede them or succeed them. This is, in part, due to their cars being set-up for the Wangan, rather than the C1 Loop or the New Belt Line; in spite of that, they will challenge the player in those areas, where they cannot use their cars' full power due to the constant twists and turns.
• Cheese Strategy:
  • Upgrades in Zero are unlocked by naturally progressing through the game and racking up miles on the car's odometer. Doing it is, naturally, time-consuming... if it wasn't for the existence of an exploit. Upon concluding a race, the player can leave the game sitting on the menu: because the game is entirely rendered in real time, the odometer continues to run on cutscenes and menus. It's entirely possible to unlock the best possible upgrades by keeping the game running all night long. Keep in mind, however, that there's a massive risk of ruining both the game's disk and the console through this exploit.
  • A similar exploit exists in 3, albeit much more difficult to pull off. Unlike Zero, the odometer does not run on the post-race menu anymore, but it's still possible to get it to run with the auto-pilot on: by removing the game disk right as the player selects "Free Run". Upon succesfully pulling it off, the game should only load the player's car and the road, and the auto-pilot will remain toggled on as long as the disk is not placed back in the console. It's the quickest way to rack up the miles to unlock the engine swap for your car, but like in Zero, you risk serious damage to your hardware by doing this. It also takes a lot longer to rack up the same amount of miles, further discouraging players from doing so.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • From TXR: Zero:
    • Curving Edge can be surprisingly frustrating to face in most circumstances. Although they are the first team of the C1 Outer Loop that the player faces, their cars have more power and better handling than their Inner Loop counterparts. They might as well be the hardest team the player faces during the first phase of the game.
    • True Slide, the second member of the Thirteen Devils the player will face. Getting to him requires beating four teams, which will no doubt include the aforementioned Curving Edge and SS Limited, and yet, he's disproportionally tougher than them all. His custom Fairlady Z32 has some of the best possible upgrades in the entire game at a point in the game where no other opponents even have a roll cage in their cars: as such, it becomes a triviality for him to gap players. Not even blocking, which at that point has proven to be somewhat reliable, works consistently on him. Gloomy Angel and Depraved Blade, the two members of the Thirteen Devils faced after him, are near-pushovers by mere comparison.
  • From the Drift series:
    • Time Attack Collision (TAC) and Cornering Artist Target (CAT) Battles, the latter of which has been described as "the essence of evil" on atleast one guide to Drift 2. The former are your typical beat-the-clock battles... with the SP bar of normal battles, which will drain drastically if you as much touch the walls. The latter, instead, require you to get a minimum of points through drifting per corner, no ifs or buts. If you're just one point off in any one single corner, you'll have to start all over again.
    • Drift 2 also puts the player up against The President. They're a two-car Lancer Evo team that appear towards the late game in Nikko Irohazaka. With aggressive driving, ideal gearing set-up for the course, and a mix of tarmac and off-road sections, they might be harder than the area's actual bosses.
• Disk One Nuke:
  • The Subaru Impreza 22B STi in the Drift subseries, usually unlocked as early as Haruna, and with a rather cheap price for players who can manage their money well. Its' 4WD makes it near-impervious to grip loss, and with upgrades, it can take a player through the rest of the game.
  • The Toyota Supra A70 in Import Tuner Challenge can be bought rather early on. With a relatively light body, good handling, and almost 300 HP in stock form, it is already a strong choice to carry the player until the mid-game. Once tuned to its' fullest extent, however, it can reach just shy of 900 HP, and with a far better power-to-weight ratio than other fully tuned cars. At that point, a player with an A70 can handily beat just about anyone on the Expressway. Including Jintei and UNKNOWN.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Rolling Guy, the all-AE86 team appearing as the first opponent the player faces in all mainline games. Their quirkiness, distinct appearance and philosophy lead them to being particularly appreciated and appearing in the Drift games, which only further cementified them as synonymous with the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series. To wit, they received a Shout-Out in Grand Theft Auto V, where that game's AE86 knock-off can be modified with a Rolling Guy-esque livery.
• Fanon: As a result of mixed-up international releases, there are several school of thoughts in the fandom regarding the correct timeline and what games are and aren't canon. The discrepancy is particularly noticeable between Japanese and Western fandoms, with the latter believing the order they got the games in to be right one, whilst the former rely more on in-game bios and Wild Mass Guessing.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • There is a major overlap between the series' fandom and Wangan Midnight's fandom. Both focus on Japanese highway racing, presenting it through the lens of an epic narrative, and not shying away from the dark truths of such worlds. Worth noting is that the first Wangan Midnight game and its Updated Re-release Wangan Midnight R are spinoffs of the TXR series, using the same Spirit Gauge mechanic and all.
  • There's a similar overlap between the series' fandom and Initial D's fandom too, thanks to the Drift games focusing on mountain pass racing. Moreso, the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series as a whole contains plenty of references and Shout-Outs to Initial D.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Uwe and Marc Gemballa made cameos in 3 as Wanderers, with their bios stating how Marc was working to step out of his father's shadow and establish his own legacy. Come 2010, Uwe would go missing and later be found murdered in South Africa, causing German authorities to seize Gemballa and oust the remaining family members from its ownership. Marc was thus forced to start an entirely different company as a result, completely disaffiliated from the one his father founded.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Upon beating "Foot Break" Tatsuya Marukawa in Touge Legends, he will leave a message on the BBS the following morning. In it, he wonders if he should stop racing until a new generation of the Honda NSX comes out. It would take eleven years until the NSX NC1 finally rolled off of the assembly line, after multiple start-and-stop attempts at development.
  • UNKNOWN's car in C1 Grand Prix is a new spin on his signature S30Z, having part of the former's front end grafted to a more contemporary Z33. The result was mixed. Fast forward to 2022, and Nissan would actually use the S30Z as a design base for the new RZ34, with far better results.
• It's Easy, So It Sucks!: One of the reasons why Import Tuner Challenge does not get as much love as the other games in the series. Due to Genki using a brand new game engine, driving feels extremely floaty, with understeer nothing but a memory from past entries, allowing the player to blindly take corners they shouldn't be able to take at those speeds and make it through unscathed. The AI is also far, far simpler than the ones from previous entries, with bumping, line blocking and slipstreams barely heard of. All this, and opponents' cars have far, far less power at their disposal than they had before until you hit the very last stretch of the game. The difference with the far, far more brutal Zero, which is considered the biggest gateway into the series, can be felt near immediately.
• More Popular Spin-Off: Arguably, the Drift sub-series as a whole gets more attention compared to the mainline games, in part because of the different subject — mountain pass racing — which is far more popular to an international audience thanks to Initial D's popularity. The keyword here is "arguably", as the opposite appears to be true in Japan, where the games featuring highway racing receive a lot more love than the others.
• Narm:
  • Another Heaven has a rather nightmarish, gothic imagery going on, down to its drivers' street name. What does Tatsuya Oze, former second-in-command of Double Mind and Another Heaven's leader, go by? Brown Satan. To be fair, it was his street name even back when he was in Double Mind... but still... kinda hard to find him threatening with that street name...
  • Likewise, the Biriken Club from Osaka. They are named and themed after the Billiken, a bizarre charm doll that is meant to represent "how things ought to be". Their inspiration was a fellow street racers that, reportedly, used to massage his feet for good luck before setting off on the highway, and they imitate him. Their logo are the Billiken's feet soles. The game still treats them as serious street racers, and expects the player to take them seriously as well.
  • The cutscenes in Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 try to give some context to the underlying storyline and try to paint highway battles in an epic light, but because of the mangled translation in international releases, what we get instead is some borderline glorious nonsense. "The instant you set foot, reason instantly flies out the window"? What?
• Narm Charm: Knife and Forks are a bistrot-themed team made up of a French-inspired restaurant's staff. Their name, logo, and especially street names — "Crimson Tablecloth" is scratching the tip of the iceberg — will incite laughter in quite a few players, and they're usually a bottom-tier team of the Tokyo expressway... but, partly because of these reasons, they have their undeniable charm. It helps that, unlike the Biriken Club listed above, they do not take themselves too seriously, which takes some of the edge off.
• Scrappy Weapon: Most retro and vintage cars are this, due to their disproportionate cost compared to their lackluster performance. Even when fully upgraded, they can barely keep up with mid-game teams, and have next to no chance against proper bosses. However, there are always a couple of Wanderers, most notably Gentle Rain, who require you to drive one in order to challenge them.
• That One Boss:
  • Nagoya's D3. The last mandatory opponents you'll face in the city, they're a three-member team, all driving thousand-horsepower A80 Supras. If Nagoya is the first city you end up tackling again in the second half of the game, you most likely will not have a powerful enough car to keep up, and if you actually do? You need to fight all three of them in a row, with no breaks to cool your engine and on tires that wear down the longer you try, a problem that they don't have. And you'll need to do it all over again if you don't manage it in one go.
  • Osaka's DARTS deserve a mention. Not their first four members, those being Mountain Kaneko, Fire Shinshiro, Woods Oishi, and Wind Kubota, who are fair fights at this point in the game, but the other five. Much like D3, Humanity Kawasaki, Earth Tadokoro, and Heaven Nagai need to be beaten sequentially without pausing or losing, else you'll need to restart from the beginning. Unlike the D3, they can't be cheesed because they'll only spawn in the high-speed sections of the Hanshin Expressway. Worse than the D3, they all drive Skyline GTRs, which lack D3's Supras' weaknesses. Upon defeating them, players will then immediately have to face Kami Kawajiri and his Ford GT, already one of the strongest bosses in the game by himself... and Nothingness Manabe, who will appear upon Kawajiri's SP bar being halfway drained, fully restoring it in the process and leaving players alone to beat both at the same time.
• That One Level:
  • The Wangan can be this, especially in the first two games. Because of its' shape — an enormous straight-line with a slight curve to it — races are reduced to a matter of who can reach the highest speed before their SP bar drains. Not helping matters is that it's a wide stretch of road, wider than the C1 Loop and the New Belt Line: even if someone manages to accelerate ahead, blocking is hardly a sustainable option. Every game from Zero onwards added tollbooths as the cherry on top: bottlenecks that are often occupied by traffic cars, capable of immediately ending a race should someone slam into them.
  • Dai-Ichi Irohazaka and Dai-Ni Irohazaka in the Drift series. The two courses are mostly hairpin after hairpin, with a very tight road that makes passing far more challenging that it has any right to be. Low-to-no visibility at night only compounds those issues, forcing the player to memorize the two of them. Touge Legends added long, randomized dirt sections that favour all-wheel-drive cars, making the Irohazaka passes worse.
  • Touge Legends bring us arguably the hardest stage in the entire series, Hokkaido. The last main course to be unlocked in the game, based off of the real-life rally course, it is almost entirely untarmacked, with the few tarmac sections present being short straights towards the very end. Because of how dirt roads work in Touge Legends, and because wall-riding causes far more speed loss than usual here, the player's choice in cars will be severely limited: FWD cars will fail to turn, whilst RWD cars will spin out at the first hard turn. AWD and 4WD vehicles are, thus, mandatory, with a very specific set-up to boot. Those unfamiliar with those cars, or who prefer other alternatives, will quickly find themselves going "back to school" and having to relearn everything they learned so far. Adding insult to injury is that unlike other remarkably hard courses, Hokkaido is mandatory to not just complete the game, but unlock a lot of side content spread across multiple courses and the post-game content.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Import Tuner Challenge made some pretty noticeable changes compared to previous games. Fans were not happy. For starters, between rising licensing costs, exclusivity contracts, and bans like Honda's, the car roster was thoroughly gutted, dropping from the 164 drivable cars of Zero to a measly 54, who were almost exclusively Japanese Domestic Market vehicles. Most glaringly, a good chunk of the map was removed, mostly leaving the Kanjo Loop and the New Belt Line untouched: this not only deprived players of fan-favourite areas, but caused a lot of historic teams, bosses and Wanderers belonging to the cut areas got the axe alongside them. The end result was arguably the worst-received game in the entire series.
• Unpopular Popular Character:
  • DARTS are looked down upon by other Osaka racers because of their sheer numbers and uncouth behaviour: whenever they roll up, they inevitably crowd the roads and bring any battle to a crawling halt. The fandom, meanwhile, absolutely adore them, even more than the Devas and the Zodiac. If other games have livery editors, there are very strong chances someone will have replicated Kami's Ford GT.
  • In a far smaller capacity, Highway Outlaw are downright despised by some of their fellow Tokyo racers for an untold number of reasons, be it because of their reckless driving, their unsportsmanlike tactics, their rude behaviour, or their refusal to accept defeat. They have a small, but noticeable following in the fandom.
• The Woobie: There are quite a few highway racers with sad stories behind them, but none encompass this more than the Wind Stars, who are, pretty much, Woobies: The Team. A failed rock star who had his dream shattered, a formerly-famous idol who was forced to quit due to sexual harrasment, a man who lost his brother to an incurable disease and now drives his car like a runaway train... in particular, team leader Kiyoshi Onizuka lost a friend in a car crash, and with him their former team. What makes it worse is that things do not get better for them: by the time of Import Tuner Challenge, the team's broken up, and its two most profilic members still prowl the Tokyo expressway, incapable of moving on.