I beat all three grand prix on Novice and that's as much as I can stomach of the game.
I'm so glad I bought this about 6 years ago when it was cheap. I really can't stand the courses. I can't stand combat racing, and this has a larger focus on that than the original (which is one of my favorite racing games). I can't stand the story mode (I made it 4 or 5 events in back when I bought it before getting sick of it), so I barely touched that -- I made it past the Goroh race, which ends up simply requiring you to avoid the boulders and then know how close to the finish you need to be to start repeatedly using your booster (there's really no racing skill needed in this race), and then didn't touch that aspect again. Plus, the music is so loud in comparison to the speech that I couldn't even make out what they were saying most of the time, so I had no clue what was actually going on. I also really dislike the music that plays during the races.
My biggest difficulty wasn't with the competition, it was avoiding falling off the course. And there are way too many places with no guard rail to do just that, or extremely long jumps to not make it across. At that point, the game might as well be a bunch of time trials where you just have to finish within certain times to determine what ranking you end up with.
In the end, it seems to me like the game is all about the gimmicks of big jumps and attacking your competitors than it is about actually racing. And that to me is an extremely un-fun experience.
