Hello friends. This is a Let’s Play video of “JDM: Japanese Drift Master”. Discover Japan’s legendary car culture in JDM! Take on challenging mountain roads, visit Japanese legendary drifting spots in licensed JDM cars and immerse in the story about second chances told through manga pages. Explore an open world where every turn invites you to master the art of drift.
For anyone who grew up watching Initial D with their jaw on the floor, or who spent teenage nights modding Silvias in Need for Speed Underground 2, JDM: Japanese Drift Master finally delivers the game we’ve been mentally designing in our heads for two decades – an open-world, story-driven love letter to Japanese drift culture set across 250 kilometers of mountain touge passes, rural backroads, and neon-lit city streets. You play as Touma, a disgraced Polish racer who lands in the fictional prefecture of Guntama with nothing but a borrowed car and something to prove, and the story unfolds through gorgeous hand-drawn manga panels that give the whole experience a visual identity no other racer on the market can match. The drifting itself is where Gaming Factory poured their soul – whipping a rear-wheel-drive Nissan into a controlled slide, balancing angle and throttle with a Tony Hawk-style meter, kicking the clutch to tighten through hairpins while Eurobeat or J-hip-hop blasts through the radio – it’s the kind of white-knuckle, tire-shredding satisfaction that the genre has been starving for. Licensed Nissan, Honda, Subaru, and Mazda machines fill out a garage of iconic metal, each tunable from gear ratios and suspension geometry down to full body kit swaps and underglow, while dual driving models let you toggle between accessible arcade handling and a demanding simcade experience on the fly. It’s ambitious, occasionally rough around the edges in ways that betray its indie origins, but when you’re threading a perfect drift line down a misty mountain pass at 2AM with the windows down, JDM captures something that no racing game has even attempted in years.
Developer: Gaming Factory
Publisher: Gaming Factory, 4Divinity
Genre: Racing, Simulation, Sports, Casual, Drifting, Open World, Indie
Release Date: 21 May, 2025
Reviewed on: PC/Windows
Available on: PC/Windows, Xbox Series S|X, Playstation 5
Link: Steam
Review copy was provided.
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