JDM: Japanese Drift Master PC Review!

Japan, the birthplace and spiritual hub of the art of drifting and drift culture. The art of turning a purposeful loss of traction into a mastery of skill, gracefully sliding a car around all manner of corners. Famous motorcyclist-turned-racecar-driver Kunimitsu Takahashi was the foremost pioneer of this driving style. However, the more widely known Drift King, Keiichi Tsuchiya, took the technique from the track to the streets, captivating a nation—then subsequently inspiring racers and drivers alike all over the world, including the popular manga and later anime series Initial D.

Why do I make note of this? It is the core inspiration of JDM: Japanese Drift Master. In fact, the story of the game even plays out like a manga! At first glance, it might not seem like it has much going for it, but JDM is a solid drifting game. It’s a little cheesy, sure, but its charm quickly grew on me, and my initial prejudice vanished in a cloud of tyre smoke. The thrill of slicing between traffic on both sides of the road and screeching around tight bends satisfies a primal desire—one that can’t simply be fulfilled in the real world, at least not without significant danger or great personal financial cost. The adrenaline rush of racing corners, navigating tight, winding mountain and suburban roads, the sound of screaming tyres, and the thrill of seeing your score climb rapidly as you show the other racers who’s boss is second to none.

I mentioned that the story is cheesy but charming—and that holds true. It screams teen romance manga, mixed with rising and established racing talent who dabble in a pinch of the illegal racing scene on the side. Some lines, whether in the romance or in the antics of the childish antagonist, can come across as cringeworthy—sometimes notably so. But that’s also part of the charm. While one part of me cringes at the dialogue, another part can’t help but chuckle along with it. The manga’s art style is fantastically drawn, with a distinct difference from native Japanese manga styling, yet still familiar enough to feel like an authentic attempt at representation. And for those unaccustomed to manga, the game even helps by conveniently numbering the panels in reading order, following the traditional panel direction of true manga.

The game also features a generous roster of cars, almost all being fully licensed representations of their real-world counterparts. JDM balances Need for Speed-style arcade racing and customisation with a sizeable 250 kilometers of varying roads to drive—including a small number of dirt roads to whet the appetites of rally fans. It’s not as large as some of its Triple-A counterparts, but 250 km of open roads is still a sizable offering, especially when, at least initially, a lot of time is spent going sideways at low to mid speeds. The story isn’t small either, boasting around 10 hours of gameplay—more than some Triple-A titles can claim.

Gameplay

JDM is heavily inspired by Initial D and it shows, but that’s half the charm! Hot blooded, horny teens, drifting all manner of cars, through picturesque mountainous Japan country-side. What could be better?

As the game’s namesake implies, the core concept is going sideways—and looking stylish while doing so. How you manage that is entirely up to you. It takes plenty of cues from drift culture and Initial D, so much so that one of its game modes is a less-than-subtle nod to the latter’s premise.

The game features five different modes: Story, Drifting School, Sushi Delivery, Challenge Mode, and Underground Mode. Story, presented through manga-style slides, has you taking on various types of races as the narrative unfolds. But the main draw is the lucrative prize money and engaging manga-style progression. Sushi Delivery, a clear Initial D homage, tasks you with delivering sushi to one or more locations while maintaining the best possible style rank—ensuring the sushi arrives in prime condition. Drifting School serves as the tutorial, teaching everything from basic to advanced drifting, grip racing, and other events, each lesson progressively increasing in difficulty. Challenge Mode is exactly what it sounds like, offering the game’s only multiplayer-adjacent aspect (if it can be called that). The goal is to beat set challenges and earn coins based on performance, while also allowing you to compare your results with other players who have attempted the same challenge. Underground Mode lets you place bets on your performance against AI opponents in a range of challenges similar to those in Challenge Mode. However, if you fail to deliver, you lose the money you bet. It’s high-risk, high-reward gameplay that rewards confidence and skill in equal measure.

Outside of these modes, there’s Free Roam. While fast travel between garages is unlocked as you progress, free driving allows you to refine your technique and farm both driver and car levels. Oh, did I mention JDM includes RPG mechanics? As you drive, you earn experience for both your cars and driver level. The higher your level, the more cosmetic and mechanical parts you unlock. This aspect leans into Need for Speed’s customization system, allowing you to tweak body kits, spoilers, wheel rims, exhaust tips, and more to fit your style. There’s also a paint shop, where you can pick from a range of presets or anything on the color wheel. Want neon underglow? You can buy different colors and even adjust the animation speed.

The Good

At its best, JDM can be incredibly fun and addictive. Drifting isn’t a game mode I can say I’m particularly skilled at, but if you enjoy driving nice cars and watching your score climb higher, then you’ll definitely enjoy this game. I found myself enjoying free roam between missions just as much—if not more—than the actual game modes. It was here that I truly learned how to master the game’s core handling.

One feature I really liked was the drift angle meter—a simple curved meter at the bottom of the screen that appears when you initiate a drift. There’s a small white section, which counts as a drift but isn’t anything flashy—just enough to maintain drift chains without racking up big points. Then there’s the green section, where anything from “good angle” to “extreme angle” earns more points the further you push the drift. And then, of course, there’s the red zone—and red means bad. Go too extreme, and you’ll lose your score multiplier, even if you manage to save the drift itself. It’s a great way to test yourself, seeing just how close to the edge you can push for maximum points. Do you stick with easier, more manageable angles for consistent scoring? Or do you risk it all on every corner, chasing big angles and even bigger numbers?

The sushi delivery mode is a simple and effective way to earn capital, especially early in the game. While it can be a little repetitive, it’s still a fun diversion. Performance parts can also be tuned to adjust the handling of your cars, affecting how they respond across various game modes. I suspect veteran racing game fans will get the most out of this, while standard settings remain consistent and weighty enough to be relatively newbie-friendly. If I could improve anything, I’d like more cosmetic customization options—being able to adjust rim sizes would’ve been great. Each rim style comes with a fixed size and isn’t adjustable, which isn’t a deal-breaker but feels like a missed opportunity. More variety in rear wing styles would’ve also been nice, but perhaps I’m nitpicking.

I found myself enjoying many of the game modes, despite their repetitive nature. Something about JDM sparks a genuine joy in me. Perhaps it’s the solid roster of licensed cars, including some of my favorites. Perhaps it’s the thrill of driving these beautiful machines through a stunning fictional town inspired by Japanese mountain villages. But it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows…

The Bad

I know I just said the controls are pretty user-friendly, but there’s a caveat—they’re a little tricky to get the hang of right away. It took me a few tutorial lessons and some free roaming to get a decent grasp of them, but within my first hour of playing, I was already nailing some good angles. Navigating between activities is mostly fine, but occasionally, the navigation bugs out, pointing you in the wrong direction or taking you on an unnecessarily scenic route. It’s not a huge issue, but it can get frustrating when you realize halfway down the road that the game is leading you the completely wrong way.

On top of that, I strongly suspect that AI cars don’t actually move until you’re within some proximity trigger. The number of times I’ve been hurtling toward a new event—or already participating in one—only to find AI cars seemingly stationary until I catch up to them makes me wonder. The game may be utilizing some form of LOD (level of detail), where objects and their paths don’t fully load until you’re within a certain distance. This system is meant to reduce strain on PCs that may not meet the game’s system requirements.

Still on the topic of AI cars—I seriously think their tracking, pathfinding, or programming isn’t quite complete (or is just buggy). There have been multiple instances where cars have, seemingly deliberately, charged across multiple lanes of traffic, almost as if they were trying to make me crash—threatening my sushi deliveries in the process. Sometimes they crash into each other, and other times, they just glitch out of existence entirely. This inconsistency makes AI interactions feel unpredictable in the wrong way. JDM also has some severe difficulty spikes in odd places. For example, several drift challenges in the story require you to impress a character by beating a target score. The first issue with this is how the HUD presents the challenge—it makes it seem as though you can complete it with a lower-tier score and simply earn less money. But in reality, you must beat the target score, which leads to the difficulty spike I just mentioned.

Most of these late-game drift challenges take place in increasingly difficult areas of the map, packed with insane levels of traffic. Sometimes, you’ll encounter queues of cars on both sides of the road, leaving no opportunity to drift between them. And when you factor in the aforementioned tracking, pathfinding, and spawning issues, it gets worse. Too often, cars will appear from around a blind corner with absolutely zero reaction time. This makes the difficulty feel not just challenging but unbalanced—artificially aggravating for the sake of frustration. I haven’t rage-quit—or even come close to rage-quitting—in a long time. But one particular challenge? That one pushed me to the edge. Instead of testing my skills and pushing me to improve, I found myself relying on cheap tactics just to meet the bare minimum and clear the challenge. Rather than striving to see how good I could get, I just dreaded playing those particular story missions.

Graphics

The Good

This game is gorgeous—as long as you don’t stare too close. Where JDM truly shines is in its dynamic weather and day/night cycles, particularly in its lighting, shading, and reflections. These aspects are simply brilliant. Clouds appear thick and fluffy or dense and angry, depending on the weather. The sun casts a warm, golden glow over the landscape, with beams of light slicing through treetops and creating crisp, defined shadows on the road. Water reflections shimmer beautifully on lakes and puddles, bouncing light with an almost lifelike realism. Droplets of water pitter-patter against various surfaces—roads, cars, everything. Even the way shadows dance and sway across the road, despite no visible wind as you blast past at speed, is something special. I’ve seen current-gen Triple-A titles with far less attention to detail in these areas, and it really speaks volumes about the effort the team has put in.

The cars themselves are just as detailed—whether stock or customised, these beauties are as crucial as the setting itself. After all, they’re the one thing you’re guaranteed to be staring at at all times. Anything less than perfect just wouldn’t do. I especially appreciate the attention to detail in cosmetics, like the paint jobs and neon underglow customization. You can go for a simple preset or go wild, mixing colour wheel choices with different finishes—gloss, metallic, satin, matte—you name it. Every custom build feels unique, and the sheer amount of personalisation is impressive. Plus, there’s even planned work in the pipeline for decals and vinyls later on, which I’m seriously excited about.

I also love the attention to interior detail. It’s not often that a racing game allows you to customise the inside of a car—especially since, in most cases, you never even see the interior. Even in JDM, most of what you see is just the dashboard and steering wheel, with brief glimpses of the rest of the interior when drifting in interior camera mode. Not enough for casual players to care about interior fixtures, but definitely a dream for true car lovers. It’s a small, easily overlooked detail, but one that adds so much character—and I absolutely love it.

The Bad

Thankfully, there isn’t too much wrong here, but certain issues can stand out—especially to someone like me, a stickler for fine details.

Some textures have clearly received more attention than others, and the most glaring example is probably in the tuner shop. Areas like the garage and car yard show the most contrast between the best and worst aspects of JDM’s graphics. The playable car models are exquisite, expertly detailed—even down to their interiors. However, the cars in the background art have received far less attention. It’s not necessarily terrible, but it is immersion-breaking when the quality disparity is so obvious. This contrast extends to the overworld as well. While most textures are solid, and the lighting and reflections are superb, distant elements—like mountains and buildings—appear noticeably flat by comparison.

Gamers aren’t easily fooled—we know that even the best games use strategic angles to hide certain unfinished areas or flat backgrounds that create the illusion of depth. But JDM’s contrasts are a bit more egregious. Across various surfaces, both near and far, some areas lack the same level of polish as the aspects meant to grab your attention. And this contrast is probably my biggest grievance while playing.

It goes beyond other racing games, where crowds in the stands turn out to be simple, flat two-dimensional animation sprites upon closer inspection. In JDM, the discrepancy between the foreground and background quality is so apparent, it doesn’t even take a trained eye to notice. Thankfully, though, the beauty of the game’s key areas—and the sheer sense of speed

Audio

This is one category where I don’t think there’s a single bad thing I can say about the game.

Every car sounds unique, powerful, and full of character—even the cheaper cars at the beginning of the game. In fact, those might have the most charm of all. Hearing their little engines roar as I tear up the Japanese mountainside always puts a warm smile on my car enthusiast face. The ambient sound effects are equally impressive. The rustling of trees, the hum of wildlife, and the rush of the wind bring the world of JDM to life, making it feel lived in—not just by NPC drivers or the towns scattered throughout, but by nature itself.

But the soundtrack? That’s where the real magic happens—they went the extra mile here. You’re driving street cars, so it only makes sense that you have a tunable radio, right? Absolutely. And the game delivers by offering a variety of stations to choose from: J-Rock (Japanese rock), Phonk (a relatively new genre often featured in Instagram or TikTok reels), and, of course, a Eurobeat station—because no game inspired by Initial D would be complete without it. And they did not disappoint. There’s also hip-hop, pop, and EDM, proving that the team spared no effort in creating a diverse selection of genres. Some might consider it overboard, but for fans like me, these details make all the difference.

There’s nothing a JDM fan wants more than cruising the streets of a fictional Japanese mountain prefecture in a sweet Japanese ride—with Eurobeat blasting through the speakers, making them feel like their favorite Initial D characters straight out of the manga or anime. And then, of course, there’s the sound of screaming tyres

Final Thoughts?

JDM is a great game—whether you consider me biased because it’s a genre I’m passionate about or not is entirely up to you. The game does have glaring flaws—contrasting graphical layers, difficulty spikes that feel completely unnatural, buggy AI pathing, and a story so downright bad it can come across as legitimately cringeworthy. And then there’s the physics, which feel completely otherworldly at times.

One moment stands out: I was trying to impress a girl by beating a drift challenge with a score of 50k or more. The challenge itself was far easier than a previous one—one that had driven me mad and wasted over an hour of my time (the difficulty spike was so egregious I nearly rage quit the game). But then, mid-challenge, I collided with oncoming traffic on a tight mountain pass—flung skyward, over the cliff edge railing, with no possible way to return to the road. To make matters worse, I couldn’t even reset my car, as the feature seemed locked or removed from the challenge. (If this feature is only available in free roam, then honestly, that’s ridiculous.)

Under normal circumstances, I’d laugh and joke about goofy moments like this, but the event happened so soon after the previous frustrating challenge that I hadn’t fully recovered. It nearly broke me.

At its core, though, JDM is true to its heart—a game full of charm and fun. It knows its story is goofy, but that’s half the fun with a premise like this. Even Initial D featured characters who were arguably hornier than they needed to be—but that just made them more believable. They were late high school, early college students, with acne-scarred faces, raging libidos, and adrenaline-fueled egos. And while JDM’s characters might not be perfect, the real stars of the show are the cars, the setting, and the drifting.

At its best, JDM delivers challenging yet fair drift events that encourage boldness, reward weaving drifts through moderate traffic, and push players to dance on the knife’s edge of drift angles. It pairs this with a thumping soundtrack, making every player feel like a drift king, a legend, no matter their skill level.

That said, JDM lacks polish and content—it needs a final coat of paint to refine its physics engine and graphical design, plus extra content to fill the void left by missing elements. Decals, vinyls, more cars, more events—anything to give players more to chew on. The sandbox free roam is fun until your car reaches max level. After that, I found myself just warping to the nearest garage for the next event. Sushi Delivery is great for quick cash, but quickly becomes repetitive and exploitable. Underground Mode is a get-rich-quick scheme if you’re confident enough to take the risk, but not much more. And Challenge Mode feels lacking, since you’re only chasing the tail of an invisible opponent—one whose times may be way beyond your skill level. It’s hard to feel motivated when your competition doesn’t even feel real.

That being said, I can see myself playing a few extra hours here and there just because the drifting mechanics are fun, challenging but in a way you can still enjoy and both the setting and the cars are gorgeous to look at. As long as you don’t look too closely. If you’re a fan of Drifting, Japanese culture and the Japan landscape. Then you’ll love this game, no question.

Game Details

Game Genre – Racing, Simcade
Developers – Gaming Factory
Publishers – 4Divinity
Rating – General
Year of Release – 2025
Platforms – PC (Steam)
Mode(s) of Play – Single player, Multiplayer (Coming Soon)

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