The anime itself receive a good critics, but this game receive bad critics from the fans because the the strange and confusing gameplay, at first the game will teach you how to drift manually, but when its come to the game, just accelerate and win easily. Initial D Mountain Vengeance is a video game that took the theme from the Japanese anime series Initial-D. Rather go for any of the NFS games, Need for Speed Underground was already released at that time and it was a tenfold better arcade game than Mountain Vengeance. Therefore, I'd advise against this game, partly because it doesn't deliver to Initial D followers as well as making as being a less than mediocre game on its own terms. For some reason, not even Initial D fans didn't see the game as belonging to the franchise because ot sported none of the entails of the other, games that had a long history of embedding all sort of references and nods to the series.
By 2004 there were arcade games as well as simulators that managed to offer a much more visually interesting facade as well as many more game modes and even more attractive other features. The game looks OK, though, for a 2004 game it really feels old and dated. That is why the game was almost unknown to Initial D aficionados, most of them being from the West anyway. It's a relatively recent (released in 2004) racer that wanted to exploit the Initial D franchise, only that it never really managed the transition from the arcades to the PCs that well. There's not much good to be said of this game.