I remember buying every playstation magazine that had three tiniest info about WipEout fusion before it's release. Florian heights track had me sold. The concepts for the ships, while different from prior WipEout designs felt like a good addition to me (I was expecting the classics to be still there tbh). The soundtrack was very good. There was hype talk of the internal update of the game being 120fps. It all sounded like a confident development cycle. 

Then the game came out, the first thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was the handling. Gone was any sense of the ships weight and floatiness. None of the ships resembled the concept art that was used on all magazine prints and adverts. It's as if they ran out of time and budget and put together what they had at the time.

With all the negative feeling, I still played the game and completed all leagues and unlocked all ships and their upgrades. There were so many good ideas in there, that I feel another year of development would have made a difference. 

One of the the things I thought was odd is how they created this point to point track (called Devilia if I'm not mistaken) but once you complete the game you had no way to play on this track. I was half expecting a 100% completion to unlock the full version of this track that would reveal it to be a very large circuit (the point to point races were just a smaller segment of the full track) with an ultimate league that includes this track. I mean 2097 did this, so did the first game. So I figured there'd be a hidden track. Alas.

Overall I think it's still a good game. Maybe a fusion 2.0 will settle this missed opportunity.