It's new to me: Final Lap Twin
Namco took the same approach with Final Lap's home edition as they did with the console port of Pro Tennis: World Court.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
Namco, in the 80s, knew how to make a racing game. Pole Position, released to arcades in 1982, is arguably the most influential racing game ever, as it helped define what, exactly, a racing simulation game even was supposed to and could be. It had a sequel, Pole Position II, in 1983, but the original Pole Position kept arcade goers plenty happy for multiple years, as it was the top-grossing arcade title for ‘83 and ‘84 in the United States, and closer than you’d think in ‘85, as well. It made Formula One racing feel more real in a video game than it had ever felt before, and even over four decades and many, many updates to the formula later, you can see still how that was with ease if you know what came before Pole Position. Which is to say, nothing quite so refined or real.
Pole Position got just the one sequel, as Namco shifted gears to Final Lap in the latter half of the 80s. The first Final Lap released in 1987, and, since Namco had already defined what an F1 racer was supposed to feel like, the focus here was on changing what kind of game you could play with that feeling and structure in place. Final Lap could host eight players facing off against each simultaneously, which is the kind of thing you can do now with Bandai Namco’s arcade edition of Mario Kart as well as plenty of other arcade racers, but in 1987? Final Lap was the first to pull this sort of thing off, by linking up four two-player cabinets. It wasn’t as successful as Pole Position, but that’s a relative statement: it released in December of 1987, finished as the third-highest grossing arcade game in Japan in ‘88, the highest in ‘89, and second-highest among dedicated cabinets in 1990.
Pole Position received a number of ports in its day, but before the home console era had entered its Nintendo phase. So, it ended up on the various Atari platforms, both console and computer, as well as the Commodore 64, VIC-20, and Texas Instruments’ computer platforms. Final Lap, though, having released to arcades five years after the original Pole Position, was in a position to take advantage of the rebirth of the home console market. And it did so in two pretty different ways.
Final Lap released with that same name to the Famicom, and it’s a different experience than the arcade original for a number of reasons. For one, it was more powerful hardware than the Famicom was capable of reproducing outright. The Famicom hadn’t peaked in terms of what it was capable of at this relatively early stage in its lifespan, but the System 2 board played host to titles like The Legend of Valkyrie and Dragon Saber, neither of which Namco even bothered porting to the Famicom at all, and instead put them on the still not as powerful — but far more so than the Famicom — Turbografx-16 and PC Engine.
Second, though, is that the Famicom Final Lap featured some different tracks and car upgrades, which is the kind of the thing it makes more sense to implement at home than in the arcade. And, obviously, the eight-player simultaneous play is gone, with two-player split-screen a possibility instead. Not bad for your living room in 1987, by any means, but it’s clearly a different experience when the big hook of the game isn’t even logistically possible outside of arcades.
For the PC Engine (1989) and Turbografx-16 (1990) port, Namco went in a much different direction than with the Famicom one. Final Lap Twin isn’t even a port so much as just a brand new game with the Final Lap branding. The “Twin” likely stems from the fact that the game is always in split-screen mode, whether you’re playing multiplayer or not. Like its Famicom cousin, the gameplay is scaled down and a bit simpler, but this is made up for by its story mode: Final Lap Twin is a racing game, but it’s also a role-playing game.
Yes, Namco returned to the format they deployed earlier on the PC Engine and Turbografx, when Pro Tennis: World Court was ported from arcades to the PC Engine and rebranded as World Court Tennis. The tennis in that game was good in the home version, too, but the thing that made it memorable is that it was a hybrid sports and RPG title. In World Court Tennis, you’re attempting to defeat the Evil King of Tennis by roaming the countryside, taking on all comers in tennis matches that serve in place of battles against monsters, buying new equipment and upgrading yourself until you’re capable of facing off against the antagonist (of tennis). Final Lap Twin has basically the exact same setup, though, without the royalty.
In Final Lap Twin’s story mode, you’re the son of a famous F1 driver, and you’re determined to live up to that legacy. So, you take your dad’s old car, and… walk around the world? Yeah, you probably should have been driving a little truck towing the F1 car around, but logic like that would keep you from traveling through the woods and such, so let’s just let this go and admit that the weird decision was probably the easier one to implement for an RPG about a car released in 1989.
Regardless, other drivers will challenge you as you walk around, in random “battles” where you’ll face off in a one-on-one F1 race. There are a few different tracks you’ll race on, so you’ll get familiar with them and their twists and turns in a hurry, and that’s going to be necessary for you to make any progress whatsoever. You don’t get much margin for error in these races: one overly wide turn that cuts too much into your speed or pulls you off track is going to mean you’re likely to lose, especially if you don’t have any turbo boosts with which to catch up.
You defeat all of the local race champions before heading off to the finals against the world champion, whom you take on after finding all of the best upgrades for your car in a maze, as I’m sure is exactly what Max Verstappen had to go through before he was finally allowed to hoist that World Drivers’ Championship trophy. F1 racing is a lot like Pokémon, who knew?
It’s not easy to become champion. It can feel a little tedious at time, though, you do have the option of letting random “battles” race automatically, and you can earn an item that lets you warp back to any town you’ve already been to, which makes the fact you go back to your dad’s house in the starting town whenever you lose a race easier to handle. It’s a grind, though, which makes sense, given the time period and the relative lack of depth to the mode: you win races, you get new car parts, the new races become easier, but the competition also is tougher, which should all feel familiar to anyone who’s ever bought new armor in Dragon Quest then realized they didn’t actually have much of a choice in the matter.
Final Lap Twin’s story mode is more than just a fun distraction, however, as the idea of playing an RPG where you race cars is not one that’s been expanded upon a whole lot. Square got into it later on with Racing Lagoon on the Playstation, but only in Japan, and it hasn’t been revisited in any official capacity since. The Choro Q series has been marketed as a “Car-PG” for its blending of racing with RPG elements, but again, these are often Japan-only titles, and those aren’t being made anymore, either, and haven’t been for some time now. There’s room for this kind of experience in your heart, is what I’m getting at.
Becoming champion isn’t easy, but even playing the normal version of Final Lap Twin isn’t a breeze. It’s fun, and the mechanics are sound enough — Pole Position was replicated again and again for a reason, and Final Lap was the successor that found plenty of its own success — but it’s also one of the earliest racing games to feature rubberbanding. Which is great if you’ve fallen behind and need some time to catch up, but just know that you being in first is only going to make your competitors that much likelier to be right on top of you, waiting for the one misstep that’ll cost you a victory. With enough practice, you can fend it off to a degree, but the rubberbanding isn’t as finely tuned here as future racing games would make it, so it might feel overly aggressive if you’re used to more modern racers that utilize rubberbanding.
Just like there are better tennis games than World Court Tennis at this point, there are better F1 racers than Final Lap Twin. And yet, this is still fun to play in the present because you don’t have a whole lot of sports games that also work as a role-playing game. Including RPG-esque mechanics, sure, but an actual story mode where you go around Dragon Quest/Pokémon style “fighting” in “battles” to become the best in the world? I think not. It’s a hybrid model I’d love to see revisited — games like Inertial Drift put a significant emphasis on narrative and intertwine it with the racing gameplay, and something like Golf Story is a golf RPG, with emphasis on the role-playing bits, but a modern take on the kinds of games World Court Tennis and Final Lap Twin on would be more than welcome all these decades later, too, by Namco or otherwise.
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On the RPG modes in sports games, some of the Mario games have those. Like Mario Tennis Power Tour and Mario Tennis Aces for tennis, the former of which notably features mainly original characters. But Mario Kart has never had anything like that, the theme park ride might have the most narrative of any Mario Kart entry. And even then it's not quite an F1 racer.
It's interesting how some games can remain unique even decades later, while others feel familiar without playing them due to everything else taking from them. I appreciate how you've been pulling out games I didn't know about before.