As far as typing games go there have been some odd tie-ins over the years to
say the least. But today's is one of the more obscure that I've been lucky enough
to discover: Initial D - Ryosuke Takahashi's Fastest Typing-theory, developed by
e-Frontier and published by SunSoft in the year 2000 for Windows and Macintosh
computers. As you might expect this was released exclusively in Japan, as was the
PlayStation 2 release from 2001 which seems to be a little more familiar to
fans of the series. Either way though as soon as I saw Initial D Teaches Typing
existed for the PC I felt the only responsible thing to do would be to
import a copy and show the world. Just look at this loud overcrowded box art!
"Don't miss it! Post your time attack scores online, enjoy non-stop eurobeat
background music, ahh!" And in case you somehow haven't picked up on it, this is based on
the Initial D series of manga and anime featuring characters, cars, and scenes
from late 90s episodes of said anime. Like that iconic panda white and black Toyota
AE86. Nice. While I've seen precious little of the shows themselves I've
seen more than a few PC boxes and this one has a rather decent interior. Packed
in here are several items, starting with this sheet providing the product license
agreement, a totally unnecessary but appreciated monochrome manual that
simply tells you to click on stuff and enjoy it, and the game itself on a classy
looking highly reflective CD-ROM. I always enjoy when companies don't go
with a full label like this, mmm. Once you have some Japanese language settings
enabled on your operating system Initial D Teaches Typing can be run directly
from the CD. As far as I can tell from the readme this is the intention as
there's no proper installation and it only saves some basic settings and high
scores on your hard drive. The main thing to make sure of is that a compatible
version of Macromedia Shockwave and Apple QuickTime are installed and you'll
be good to go. It also comes with these HTML files on the CD showing what the
e-Frontier and online leaderboards would have looked like at the time for
whatever reason. I guess as a teaser of sorts in case you didn't have
ability to get on the internet. I don't know, it's kind of neat in retrospect
though, seeing as the original pages are long gone from the server these days and
you'd have to look for other archives if you wanted to see these. So, Mavis Beacon's
Initial D begins with a wall of warnings saying how it's a work of fiction and
you should always drive safely in real life and be sure to maintain proper
keyboarding posture and that your keyboard's Japanese character mode should
be turned off while playing and ahh! Whatever man,
it's time to BREAK IN 2 THE NITE.
Yep, this is the menu of an Initial D game all right. And the options option is
a good place to start seeing is it lets you change between keyboard input types
and customize certain aspects of your Japanese keyboard, should you have one.
Although I'm playing this on a U.S. QWERTY keyboard so I was able to just
leave things on the default settings and didn't have any problems. There are also
three difficulty modes to choose from with the hardest on top and easiest on
the bottom. And lastly you can adjust the audio options in the event that you
somehow tire of the "eurobeat non-stop BGM... and everything else because it's all
or nothing when it comes to audio. Beginning a new game lets you choose
between two gameplay types with the first mode being a time attack battle
and the second being a [PRACTICE MOOOOODE]
Practice mode is a mode that allows for
practicing, practically speaking. There's a left hand practice, right hand practice,
and both hands practice allowing you to focus your abilities on certain parts of
the keyboard simultaneously or separately. But either way, this is what
you get here. [Japanese narrator explains things]
[practice mode commences, rather blandly]
Yeah all the practice mode provides is a static background and an array of paired
letters and numbers to press as quickly as possible. Considering the actual game
has you doing far more in terms of frantic fingertip floundering I didn't
find practicing here to be very helpful. So I'd recommend simply skipping that
and jumping right into the battle mode which is divided up into five stages, the
fifth of which is locked until you win against the others. So let's start with
the first battle against the FD3S, aka the third-generation Mazda RX-7.
Yep, this is the entirety of the rest of the game right here. The formula stays the same
no matter what you do: first anime happens, then it pauses and you have to type some stuff.
If you type quickly and accurately enough, more anime happens, rinse and repeat until
the race is over. Yay high score.
However straightforward the gameplay may be though, that’s not to say it’s entirely
without merit or effortless either. The fact that this is a game that mixes downhill drift
racing and a typing tutor is thoroughly unique inside of my own library of edutainment. Although
I suppose it’s not entirely unprecedented, seeing as the grandmother of typing tutors,
Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, featured a driving minigame in various releases ever since the
80s. But still, typing along to high-stakes downhill drift racing goes a step beyond.
Mario teaching typing is one thing,
zombies teaching typing is another, but JDM street racers teaching typing? That
is a whole 'nother level of awesome juxtaposition right there. And yes as
disparate as racing and typing are in reality, it works surprisingly well in
Initial D Keyboard Kapers™. There is a frenetic energy to both activities with
the speed and skill of driving a sports car matching the speed and skill of
accurately typing *just* loosely enough that it kind of works.
Although the illusion that your typing is actually directly affecting the race
is broken pretty quickly once you realize the background videos don't
actually change at all, even if you mess up horrendously and plaster the keyboard
in faulty presses. You can mess up a crapload, so long as you make it through
the race with at least a sliver of health left in your HP bar at the top
left of the screen, you'll succeed over your opponent. The replayability factor
here comes from your own self-imposed urge to attain a higher score by typing
quicker and more accurately. Otherwise you're stuck seeing the same exact
footage over and over with the only change occurring when you screw up so
much that you run out of health and get a vague crash scene.
[vague crash sound effects with echoey anime reverb]
Still, it remains a novel enough experience that I can certainly
recommend this, even if only for a single playthrough. And admittedly a part of
that appeal comes from the fact that I'm an English speaker who can't read a lick
of Japanese. So the mere word and character structure here trips me up
something fierce. Yeah these are Roman characters but they're not English, and
typically when I'm playing a typing game I'm reading English words. And many of
those I'm used to typing out in everyday typing scenarios, so when I see an
English word I see it as a shape and I can rapidly translate that to my fingers
due to muscle memory. But when it comes to these words and strings of
grammatical elements, man. My brain ain't used to this so it presents quite an
enjoyable but tricky challenge. Especially in the later levels where it
starts tossing you ridiculously long lines of text, numbers, and punctuation
with rapidly diminishing room for error. The final stage in particular was
brutally difficult even on the default difficulty setting. Part of this is, again,
due to the unique mix of characters that I'm not used to typing in this quick
succession. Another part of it is due to the small amount of screen real estate
leading to word wrap. And this means your eyes are constantly shifting around the
screen a bit to determine the next characters to type. I wish it had an
option to change around the graphical settings to run at a higher resolution
than 640x480 so maybe these stacked lines of text could be avoided. But
seeing as it was made in Macromedia Director it doesn't surprise me that
it's limited in this way. Regardless of potential resolution challenges though,
Initial D Fastest Typing-theory is still a darn fascinating game, even if the
actual gameplay is a bit... I mean you know, it's a typing tutor, it is what it is.
You don't even get much for beating the game, just some credits and the
chance to try again for a higher score to brag about online. At least it *has* an
ending, more than I can say for *some* edutainment games. And hey, the fact that
it exists in any form at all cracks me up, and how it later got a sequel under
the subtitle Second Stage cracks me up even more. As far as edutainment goes
Initial D Typing earns top marks from me. The premise is absurd,
the eurobeat is non-stop, and the gameplay is simple but effective in its
goals. I felt my skills in typing these particular phrases genuinely improving
the more I played. By the end, going back to the first
couple stages felt like an absolute breeze. So yeah while it might not be the
most commonplace game in the world of edutainment or even the most enjoyable
to replay repeatedly, it is one of the more amusingly silly ones that
unexpectedly ended up being one of the more effective in what it set out to
do. And in doing so actually ended up being a better game than the actual
Initial D racing game we got on the PC in North America back then. How did that
happen? So for that reason alone I say, "Initial D Typing: don't miss it!"
[NOT EUROBEAT MUSIC. DISLIKED, UNSUBSCRIBED]
And yeah my apologies for the reupload here, that was out of my hands and was thoroughly
annoying to deal with. But if you enjoyed the episode anyway then thank you very much.
I do edutainment episodes every April and other stuff
every Monday and Friday right here on LGR.
And as always, 見てくれてありがとう!