A while back I took a look at one of the most underrated racing games released on the PlayStation 2, Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3. Released during the apex of the tuner scene craze, thanks to the likes of The Fast And Furious, Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 should have been a breakout success. Simply put, Genki didn’t quite have the reach that Electronic Arts or even Namco did at the time. Before Need For Speed Underground 2 and Street Racing Syndicate, Tokyo Xtreme Racer was the first “open world” racing game series although the racing was done exclusively on highways.
The player’s goal is to be the “best racer in Japan,” which includes conquering the Tokyo Metropolis as well as Nagoya and Osaka for the first and only time in series history. After the player defeats all of the teams from the first half, the second half begins. Enemies become tougher, rides more exotic, and races become more of an example of speed. Previous closed-off sections are now accessible, including Tokyo’s Wangan and Osaka’s Hanshin Expressway. At this point in the game, nothing is stopping the dominant street racer from taking over all of Japan.
Except if, of course, a driver in a Suzuki Wagon has anything to say about it. Whirlwind Fanfare is one of many lone drivers known as Wanderers and the only way to race against the final boss is to defeat every race from every city. When the game was released in America, the conversion rate from Japanese Yen to United States dollars was messed up in a spectacular attempt at “localization.” The ‘solution’ was to divide the value of Yen to Dollars by 100. Instead of beginning with 4,000,000 yen, you begin with 40,000 USD.
The problem with this is that the rest of the game wasn’t adjusted to fix this change. Some Wanderers refuse to show up unless the player amasses a certain number of Credit Points. Whirlwind Fanfare requires the player to earn a whopping 100 million credits which isn’t impossible to earn. There are more than enough rival racers to earn that much in the Japanese version.
Due to the conversion situation, the player will never earn that much to attack a hundred million credits as the game caps at 99,999,990. Ten credits short. This meant that the player could never spawn that final racer needed to attain 100% completion.
Over two decades later, modder Kinglink managed to fix Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 for the first time by adjusting the requirements needed to race Whirlwind Fanfare. Since the JPY to USD conversion was roughly divided by a hundred, the credit requirement for Fanfare was adjusted by roughly the same amount to match. Another driver, Exotic Butterfly, required an equally absurd amount of credits. Both drivers requirements are now as follows.
Exotic Butterfly - 20,000,000 > 200,000 CP appx
Whirlwind Fanfare - 100,000,000 > 1,000,000 CP appx
Now, I may not be a coder or a programmer, but fixing an unwinnable game by changing a value seems like such an easy solution that it’s incredible how such an oversight could be ignored. During that time I recall these games being known as “budget titles,” a stigma that I hear “indie games” get these days as well. These are games that may not have the same polish as “AAA titles” but they’re the most fun games I’ve ever played underneath the surface. The localization process never received the same love and care as the bigger budget titles, sure, but there was also no such thing as an “online patch.”
Online gaming hadn’t peaked enough yet to the point of distributing patches that easily fix these bugs. However, the PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii era did make fixing post-launch bugs like these far easier. I'm sure if this game was released in the following gen, there still wouldn't be much support. Now, thanks to modern-day modding, players can give these old games new life themselves. While Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 never sold millions of units, there remains a player base dedicated enough to fix a bug in a game that many had never seen the ending of.
Video game preservation is not just “backing up games for emulation,” but it’s the simple QoL changes that help fix notoriously “broken” games to become the best they deserve to be. I already recommended Tokyo Xtreme Racer 3 even for non-racing game fans and with this patch, anyone can now beat the game without the usage of third-party cheats.