Need for Speed's stories through its lineage have been... kinda mid. Very simple stories, villain's who are bad for the sake of being bad, and no character development. This can all be excused for most of NFS' history given the raw violence of the gameplay. Fast cars, tight roads, police chases. The story serves merely as a thin reason to push the player forward through the game. Nobody plays Need for Speed for a philosophically challenging character-based plot. The plot is "get in the car, go really fast, conquer the universe."
There are certainly bad ways to tell a simple story, though, and Need for Speed has done it a couple times. NFS: Undercover is known as one of the lamest entries in a series of video games with fairly lame stories, but what separates Undercover from the others is its delivery. The game plays itself with a straight face; you're an undercover cop tasked with entering the street racing scene as a means to infiltrate a gang smuggling cars illegally. It plays heavily off of the aesthetics of CSI: Miami and attempts a similar attitude, but without line delivery as charismatic as David Caruso's. The dialogue isn't even in meme-able So Bad It's Good territory like its inspiration. By contrast, NFS: Most Wanted 2005 is bubbling with ridiculous characters. Everybody is the type of mid-2000's fratboy edgelord you'd expect of the time, complete with tribal tattoos and a flimsy, abusive relationship with masculinity.
Modern Need For Speed games past the 2015 reboot tried to capture the same zeitgeist MW did twenty years ago, but all of them miss the mark. The dialogue is written with an obviously aged, out-of-touch view on the car scene, with minimal car knowledge to boot. One character turns the key on a Nissan with a 4-banger, hits the throttle and yells "Listen to that growl, man" as if it was a V8. A bunch of Alleged Gearheads say shit like "bust up that chassis, destroy those wheels, bang the limiter and shred those tires" like they're telling a fucking Dr. Seuss book to kids in a library. It was dated by three years before it even came out.
Not so for Unbound. It's 2022, and it's time to get with the times.
Spoilers beyond here.

NFS 2015 was the the first time in franchise history that I picked up a Need for Speed game, played it for ten minutes, said "yuck" and never touched again. I've played almost every entry in the NFS franchise from 97's Need For Speed II up to 2011's Need for Speed The Run. A couple entries I hadn't played only due to unavailability or lacking funds, but I imagine I'd at least be able to bear playing through what I'd missed. 2015 remains one of the only NFS games I refuse to touch with a ten foot pole, and the entries that followed didn't inspire a change of heart either.
My friend Aeroteq started streaming 2019's Need for Speed Heat, and I was starting to like what I saw. The handling style of your car could be slightly modified using a quick menu on the D-Pad while free-roaming, allowing you to adjust the steering sensitivity and aerodynamic grip of the car to your tastes on the fly. I gave it a shot, and I liked it. I didn't love it, i just liked it. The handling model was still built from the same janky baseline 2015 was made from, but it was at least improved enough to be palatable. The dialogue was also getting better. It wasn't perfect by any means, it still felt stilted or cringy in places, but it was easier this time around to suspend my disbelief and feel like I was interacting with real characters. It was the first time in years I was excited for what came next. After delays caused by a global plague, my excitement paid off.
Heat walked so Unbound could run.

When Unbound was announced I was immediately pulled in by its style. I was skeptical about its handling model, but the visual flair that leaked through Unbound's branding sucked me in deep. As EA released more teasers about the game, I only grew more excited. At a certain point, I leveled with myself.
"ProStreet is one of my favorite NFS games of all time, and it has terrible driving physics. If Unbound has enough pizzazz, I might finally be able to fall in love with a Need for Speed game again,"
It has enough pizzazz to fill a Pizza Hut.

The graphic design surrounding this game is fresh, the anime inspiration in the cel-shaded characters and tire smoke feels refreshing, the smoke and light trails emitting from the car enhance the sense of speed, and the dialogue.
The dialogue is finally good.
Conversations feel like genuine conversations between people, rather than people in a writer's room trying to write characters half their age. My immersion into Lakeshore doesn't get interrupted by a caricature of millennial or zoomer culture, it's just culture.
As I write this now, I've found the words I've been looking for to describe why I love this game's world so much. Every character is their own person with their own culture informed by their own experiences and nationalities. For over a century America has advertised itself as a "melting pot of culture," but this couldn't be less true in Lakeshore - Unbound's representation of Chicago. Every character has their own story written into their appearance. None of them "fit in," which ironically makes them fit together snug as an eggbug in a rug. There's no adherence to cultural norms or stereotypes, there's no homogeneity, there's no social hierarchy, there's no derision of The Other.
So, let's talk about Need For Speed's first transgender character, Justicia.

I know we all keep saying "representation matters," but sometimes the representation we get sucks. I don't want to see all the pain and cruelty that comes with being true to myself, I want to see joy and love that flows through that truthful living. Justicia is exactly that. She's one of the fastest drivers in the early- and mid-game. She drives a Nissan Z, a car I once drove for a one-make sim drifting series. Her Z has Noise Bomb stickerbombed all over the car - a decal asset that finds its way into NFS livery paintbooths all the way back from NFS ProStreet. The loud green and purple shouts "I love being me." Justicia admits she's trans pretty bluntly, but in as diverse a community as Lakeshore, I kind of see myself in that clumsy forwardness. If I lived in Saskatoon among all the other Saskatchewan queers, I'd probably be shouting "I'M A WOMAN NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS" from the rooftops.
I cried when I finished escorting Justicia to her safehouse on my first playthrough. It was a deeply cathartic "she just like me for real" moment. And the thing is, NFS would never have a chance writing a queer character properly before now. I'm alive in a time where my favorite franchise features a character who thinks about the world like me and feels emotions like me.
On my second playthrough... yeah ok she's way too forward about being transgender. but hey, we all gotta start somewhere. Having any representation in the mainstream car scene at all is a fucking rare sight. I'll take it where I get it. and it's not gonna change how I felt on that first playthrough when she openly, blatantly said she was trans.
Besides, as clumsy as it is, sometimes you have to make a character's identity obvious and completely unavoidable so even the total morons in the audience can understand what the deal is. The "Just Gal Pals" trope doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Coming up in Part Three: The Cel-Shading Controversy.




