JDM is a simple racer, but a love letter to Japanese car culture

I’ve been looking forward to a game called Screamer for a little while now. Out at the end of March 2026, it’s part racing game and part anime. It’s shaping up to be the first racing game in a long time that has a coherent and well-integrated story. In my search for something similar to tide me over, I stumbled upon JDM: Japanese Drift Master. It’s a smaller, more contained racer, but it successfully weaves in a story among its focus on Japanese car culture.

Purely as an open-world racing game, JDM is a little underwhelming. The map, which is a caricature of a Japanese city and its outskirts, is quite small. There’s a nice level of variety, taking you along winding mountain roads, massive highways, and quaint village streets, but it’s far from sprawling.

That world is well designed, though. The layout forces you to modify your driving style in different locations, forcing you to learn the game’s handling model quickly.

Thankfully, the focus on drifting takes the focus away from the world, forcing you to focus on each corner at a time. You don’t have to think about every event as point A to point B, making the world feel bigger as a result.

In the early chapters, JDM’s drift events are brilliant. Whether it’s delivering sushi with flair, trying to get more drift points than your opponent while staying as close to them as you can, or racking up points to impress your new girlfriend, your objectives are never as simple as they are in other racing games with a drifting aspect. There are standard races, time trials, and drag races too, but drifting is the focus, as you’d expect.

Drift handling is also very much on the casual, arcadey end of things. While your speed of approach and drift angle will impact the score you get, you don’t need to do much more than press a button and fling your car left or right. Like in any racer, it’ll take a few events to get used to how cars react to movements, but this isn’t a sim by any means. You won’t be fighting against your controller to keep four wheels pointing where you want them to be.

It’s JDM’s story, or at least the presentation of its story, that really makes it stand out, though. There aren’t any cutscenes; the over-the-top story is instead told through manga pages. The black and white comic pages look great and add some real personality to the game. It adds genuine stakes to the drift events by introducing bad guys, a romance story, a demanding boss to impress, and a friend you hang out with.

You need to win that drift event to send your nemesis off with his tail between his legs – you’re not just winning to earn money and progress.

It’s a cheesy story, but the manga style is a great way to tell a story in a racing game, which is always a hard medium to get a story to stick. Manga pages come before and after most events, taking just a few seconds of your time to read. You’re not given small amounts of plot every few races, with the dripfeed ensuring you actually care about what’s happening. The manga style isn’t invasive either, so you can focus on the action if you’d prefer.

It’s the mix of casual racing action, playful story, and the suite of unique event types that make JDM so much fun. No, it’s not Forza Horizon 6 levels of pretty, and it’s not as packed with content as Gran Turismo, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s a unique game, and it proves that stories can find a place in racing games, both big and small.