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The thick black outlines and flat shading were the selling point, and they still are. Capcom built a racing game that looked like a Japanese tuning magazine rendered as a comic panel, complete with speed lines streaking off the bodywork and dust puffing out in hand-drawn bursts. In 2002, when every other driving game on the console was chasing photographic reflections and shiny asphalt, that was a genuinely strange decision, and it remains the reason anyone brings the game up.

Under the art, though, is a racer with a difficult relationship with its own audience. The handling is heavy and reluctant, with a grip model that punishes early throttle and barely signals where the limit is. Coming off Gran Turismo, players found the cars slid and snapped without the feedback that made those slides readable. It is learnable. It just asks for a lot of patience before it starts giving anything back, and the camera work and motion blur, gorgeous in replays, actively hide the information you need mid-corner.

The tuning side is where the enthusiasm shows. Real Japanese parts makers, deep visual customisation, decals and paint schemes you could build up over a career, and a garage culture that the presentation treated as the point rather than a menu chore. The game wanted you to care about your own car as an object, not just a lap time. That ambition extended to an online component on the Japanese release, one of the earlier attempts at network racing on the hardware, and one that never really found its footing outside Japan.

Capcom later returned with a revised version, adjusting the physics and trimming some of the rough edges, which tells you the studio knew the first attempt had missed. The odd thing is how little that fixed the reputation. By then the cel-shaded novelty had been absorbed as a curiosity and the racing crowd had moved on to games that drove better.

What survives is a piece of visual design that almost nothing since has copied properly. Load it up, pick a Silvia, and the screen looks like a page from a doujin tuning zine in motion. Then you hit the first hairpin and remember why the reviews were mixed. It is a game worth looking at for longer than it is worth playing, and there is something honest about that trade.