I’d played this game briefly on Switch Online a couple years back, but I never felt like I properly beat it. This is another pretty easily and cheaply found game around these parts, and with my recent kick on N64 racing games, it only made sense to track this one down and finally play it. I’ve only ever heard great things and that it’s a must-own classic on the console, so it was about time I got around to getting and playing it anyhow. It took me around 2 hours and 40 minutes to beat all three of the default difficulties of the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
As is the case with most racing games, there’s no real story to speak of here. There’s jet ski races to be done, and by gods, you’re here to do them! There are three difficulties of grand prix to try out with 6, 7, and 8 races to go through respectively. Those aren’t unique races for each one, mind you, as the hard and expert tracks just add one more track each to give the game a total of 8 tracks. 8 tracks is hardly the biggest number on the console, and it also makes for quite the brutal gauntlet for a grand prix format, but for such an early game and such a unique concept, it’s pretty easy to be happy with that amount of content.
This is especially true because I’ve also not been *entirely* honest with how many tracks there are. While it’s true that there are only 8 tracks to race on, they’re actually not identical between difficulties (even accounting for the mirror mode prix which is just expert difficulty tracks and AI but mirrored). While it’s true that the racers you’re pitted against are more skilled and ruthless opponents, the tracks themselves do change a bit from difficulty to difficulty. In some tracks, it’s a simple a change as a ramp being moved farther away to make a shortcut more difficult, and, in others, mines may be added where before there were none. However, the biggest change and one of the most unique aspects of how Wave Race 64 is designed is the buoy system.
Each race has a number of buoys scattered along the racetrack that dictate how you need to move through it. Yellow ones with big Ls on them need to be gone around on the left, and red ones with Rs naturally need to be gone around on the right. Your jet ski starts the race with a certain amount of power, and if you press A at the right moment, you’ll start with a higher amount. More power means more acceleration and top speed for your jet ski, so you always want all the power you can have. Taking the right way around a buoy increases your current power by 1 for a maximum of 5, but missing a single buoy drops you back down to minimum power.
Not only will you have a hard time keeping up when you’re slowed down that much, but missing 5 buoys over the course of a race will automatically disqualify you, so it pays to be careful beyond simple matters of speed. However, this means that you can also form strategies around which buoys are safe to potentially miss, and this is extra important for the harder versions of tracks. Buoy placement gets absolutely brutal on harder difficulties, and mastering how to turn properly to take them without falling off of your jet ski will be key to finding success against the tougher AI.
This game has an honestly amazing amount of depth and nuance for how early a 3D racing game it is on the hardware. They really go all out on making it feel like you’re racing on a jet ski, not in a car, and getting to grips with how this kind of racing works may take a while, but it’s super satisfying once you get it down. For starters, racing on a jet ski means you’re leaning on your craft to take sharp turns much like you would on a bike. Being delicate with how far to the side and how far back you tilt the joystick will be critical so you can take those hard turns without falling off of your craft. It’s not a game over if you fall, but it’s wasting precious seconds as you climb back on to get going again.
Then you have the titular waves of this race. While they’re not generated dynamically or randomized, just how jostled you can get by your opponents means that its difficult to know just how the waves will be at a particular time around a particular bit of track. This means that outright memorization of a track to race at it better is much trickier than it is in most other racing games, and learning to adapt on the fly to how the waves happen to be tossing you at any moment is the much safer strategy when you’re practicing to get better times on tracks.
Then you have the mere fact that you’re on a jet-powered watercraft and not a wheeled land vehicle. You don’t have any functional way to brake on a jet ski, so knowing when to let off the gas to slow down and turn more harshly (without falling off!) is what will save you on harsh turns rather than any brake button. Additionally, because they lack wheels or a rudder, jet skis turn by changing the direction of their propulsion. What that means for you is that letting off the gas to glide around a turn like you would in a car is impossible here, as turning is nearly impossible once you let off the gas. Add in more subtle mechanics like tapping B to ignore waves slightly more and pressing R to “glide” across water for sharp turns, and you’ve got a ton to master on these 8 tracks for the truly dedicated.
Things don’t stop there either. There are four different playable characters, and each of them has significantly different stats for how their bike handles. I chose Hayami, the all-rounder as my racer of choice, but that was largely because learning how to use any of the others was too difficult for me XP. This is very much a case where lacking the precision of the original N64 joystick (my controller has a hall effect replacement stick) was really hurting me, as it made tiny adjustments from neutral nearly impossible compared to how delicately I *needed* to be turning for characters with greater turning ability than what I was used to. You can also tweak the handling of each craft ever so slightly for each racer, but all these really amount to is micro adjustments to things like turning or drifting sacrificed for a tiny bit more top speed.
The game doesn’t have in-game credits anywhere, and I very nearly gave up trying to beat expert difficulty because it was just so difficult (and beating it on hard and normal was effectively beating it anyhow, at least for the purposes of a review like this). Part of this was down to just how tough the AI can be on harder difficulties. They don’t seem like they try to, but they can smash in to you mid-race and really ruin your time, so treating them with caution is important to good performance. That said, they can and will mess each other up too, and there was more than one important expert-mode race I only clinched victory in thanks to a last-second wipe out by the competition. It makes the AI feel far more like real racers rather than just perfect computers who exist simply to ruin your day, and it’s an aspect of the game’s challenge I really enjoyed.
Probably the hardest thing about the grand prix, however, is how they calculate your score. Scoring higher than the other racers doesn’t actually really matter. What allows you to progress to the next race is a game-enforced score quota, and if you don’t have enough points, you’ll be given a game over. It doesn’t matter how badly you’re thrashing the CPUs by in terms of points. If you haven’t hit that quota, you’ve gotta start over from the beginning, and that can just get so demoralizing and annoying. It makes the very well designed, fallible AI feel almost pointless when the actual structure of the game forces them to feel more like just obstacles here to ruin your day. No amount of competition against your fellow racers will help you to victory other than just placing higher in races, and that’s easily the aspect of this game’s design I care for the least with just how many races these grand prix have (especially with just how demoralizing it is to game over thanks to an unlucky wipeout out of nowhere caused by another racer on the 7th race of
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Aesthetically, the game is pretty incredible for the time. This is a very early N64 game, but the animations on the human models (from how they spin tricks in the trick modes to how they clamber up onto their jet skis when they fall) are really well done. The way the waves move and affect your craft is also very well communicated, and the art style holds up great as a result. The music accompanies it very well too. The same guy who did these tracks went on to do the Wii Sports music many years later, and it fits the action perfectly. All bundled together with the high energy announcer (a feature which I always love in a game like this), and you have a great soundtrack and sound design to go with your great graphics.
Verdict: Recommended. The main thing that keeps me from recommending this game any higher is just how awkward it can be to learn it. While “it’s like you’re really racing on a jet ski!” is one of the biggest one-word commendations I can give this game, it’s simultaneously its biggest fault. That combined with just how frustrating the scoring and win conditions on the grand prix can feel on harder difficulties can definitely sour the experience for someone hoping to just hop in and mess around without wanting to give a fair amount of time and effort to learning the game’s best practices (and the lack of a 4-player mode on such a 4-player-tastic console doesn’t exactly give this game any extra points either). That said, if you’re looking for a more novel and unconventional approach to a racing game, there’s a ton to dig into and enjoy here, and it’s no surprise to me that this game had and maintains the excellent reputation it does~.
