Forward
In the early 1990s, as the Nintendo Entertainment System was on its way out to make way for 16-bit gaming, a game called River City Ransom came out for that dying console. It wasn't a big hit at the time, but subsequently it became a cult classic. And why not? The game's unique mix of beat-em-up and RPG elements meant that there was no other game like it...or so people outside of Japan thought. That all changed with the release of River City Tokyo Rumble, which we covered last time. But the series hadn't been all that able to capitalize on the original game's cult status to become an even bigger sensation, and I think part of the issue was that making any more beat-em-up/RPG hybrids diluted the uniqueness that had been River City's hallmark. With no one game in the series being able to rely on that uniqueness anymore, something else had to be done to surpass expectations and make newer entries a success, and ARC chose to go in deeper with the RPG side of the formula. As I said last time, though, it's tricky to get that right without bogging things down more than it's worth, and unfortunately River City Knights of Justice bogs down, hard.
At a Glance
The most immediately obvious sign that this game is going in deep with the RPG stuff is its setting. While (most of) the character sprites are still the blocky, chibi things we know from Super Dodgeball and River City Ransom, they've left the modern urban setting behind in favor of a generic fairy tale world, the likes of which most RPGs inhabit. As you trek across this medieval Europe-inspired world, you'll fight your fair share of humans but also ogres, ghosts, some rather unmenacing blobs and even the occasional dragon. You can still punch, kick and grapple, but you also get to equip a lot of swords, magical staves, potions and other fantasy RPG tropes, which have a variety of effects.
Welcome to River City--I Mean, Riverandia
We've moved the plot from a city to a whole country. Actually, maybe several countries, depending on how you define them. This being a generic fairy tale world somewhat modeled on medieval Europe, they're arguably fiefdoms.
Interestingly enough, unlike the other ARC-developed River City games, this one has been localized using character names that are based on the western localization of River City Ransom, but more...formal, maybe? So Kunio is now Alexander, Riki is now Reinhold, Hasebe is now Roxanas, etc. It's a strange choice, but maybe one that makes some sense in that this sort of fantasy is, again, loosely based on medieval Europe. Japanese-sounding names would detract from that fantasy, so I'm fine with the change.
However, this is not an overall well-written fantasy. It's toned down the bratty attitude that bugged me in last game I reviewed, and there's the occasional funny line, but much of the dialogue you read is strictly functional at best and a bunch of small-talk from bystanders at worst. To be fair, it's not like this isn't true of many medieval fantasy RPGs, but it'd be nice if this frequently silly series gave us better.
Either way, the expanded (maybe?) scope has changed how you navigate the world, and it takes some getting used to. You get what looks like a world map to choose your destination, some being towns, others dungeons, and some random spots of the countryside you can choose to visit. You might suspect this works akin to such maps in games like Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World, and Donkey Kong Country, with your character being the moving cursor that selects your destination and enters. This isn't so, however. Instead, after you select a destination, Alexander must move there from his current location, and he can get jumped on the way in potentially hostile areas of the map. This triggers fights in those locations, as if you'd gone in intentionally. Fortunately, you can flee the area and continue on your trip, and you can also stop your trip by pressing B. So don't make the same mistake I initially did with this game; don't try to get anywhere more than a few spaces away in one stretch--at least not until you've leveled your character up a lot. Speaking of which...
Lots and Lots of Loot
...except not really. While in many regards this game ups the RPG components, there's actually no leveling up this time around. Nor does food consumed in restaurants increase stats. Instead, this game's designers got way too enthusiastic about their new inventory system and decided to tie a lot of game mechanics to it, stats included. To power up your character, you obtain and equip items. There's a slot for gloves, a slot for shoes, (both of which increase your stats) and ten slots collectively dedicated to scrolls, rings and charms. Including scrolls lets you do special moves (one per-scroll), while rings and charms increase stats like the gloves and shoes. You can also boost your stats further with gems, which have the advantage of not taking up any slot, but are harder to get.
Then there is everything else...a lot of it. You'll visit lots of towns in this game, wherein you can buy many objects, and some are useful, such as potions, but others are as mundane as literal cardboard boxes, whose main purpose is to be used as macguffins in fetch-quests. There are also restaurants where you can go eat a wide variety of suitably medieval things (Monster Meat being my favorite) to restore hit points, mana points, or both, but it's actually all pointless because the towns also have inns that completely refill both, and cost less. I think this has to be an oversight on the developer's part; perhaps they didn't spend enough time analyzing every option, or perhaps they originally intended for these restaurant items to increase stats, only to leave them pointless as equipable items took over that role, but either way, their immediate obsolescence definitely lessens the narrative fun that this world should have. But worse is that a similar lack of planning also affects this game's vast arsenal of weapons, because when you get into battle, the game is unfortunately at its very clumsiest.
En Garde! Oops, I Slipped; Hold Up!
Right off the bat--no, make that club--there's one big inherent problem with making a River City game that's so heavily focused on the use of weapons, and that problem is that frankly, weapon use in this series has always kind of sucked. The moment you pick up a weapon in most River City games, the punch button that formerly could do a wide variety of attacks depending on context gets taken up with just one style of simply bonking foes with that unblockable and often unbreakable stick/pole/whatever, while kicks are also disabled as the kick button is used to throw the weapon. To be fair, some of the games do attempt to make the use of weapons a bit more nuanced with special moves that utilize them, and this is one of those games. Among others, you can get a scroll to do an attack where you jump into the air with a sword and slice through a whole bunch of enemies, and that's fun and cool. But it's still essentially a castle in quicksand, as basic melee weapon combat remains a clunky ordeal of both you and your allies mashing the punch button to bonk each other while neither of you can block the other. Yes; in an otherwise standard medieval fantasy world, where many people have swords and armor, nobody has ever thought of using a shield, nor turning a sword to block another sword.
There are magic weapons too, usually staffs. These can also bonk people like the melee weapons, but that isn't really the point; the point is to press the new "use" button to activate their special abilities. These abilities are often more powerful but consume mana, and in some cases, they can be pretty cool. Unfortunately, this combat is not all that well suited to them, either. Some magical abilities, such as becoming invisible or confusing your opponents, can be consistently useful, but as most of them rely on an "area of effect", they tend to be complicated by how everyone is constantly running around in this game and there isn't much aiming. You might shoot a bunch of fireballs only to miss enemies that move north or south out of the way, move north or south after them to line up another shot, and hope they don't move out of the way again. Despite that, the most frequently useless item I have found is the healing staff. It spawns magical circles on the ground, which can heal you and your teammates, but because they, like your enemies, almost never stand still, good luck getting them to stand in them long enough to heal. You can switch which of your team mates you control, but it's more awkward than anything else, as it tends to result in an abrupt shift around the screen during chaotic battles. (We'll come back to this mechanic, and with a vengeance.)
To make this already highly randomized mess more annoying, characters frequently drop their weapons. All of the weapons have two stats (plus some, mostly the magic ones, having special abilities), related to how much damage they do and how easy they are to hold onto. And with everyone tramping back and forth across the battlefield after each other, a dropped weapon is often less than a second away from being picked up by an opponent. Soon after battles end, the scene fades and you go back to the "level select" screen, meaning you might very well not retain a weapon you brought to the fight, so don't get too attached to it. (Incidentally, this fade out is also problematic because it prevents you from picking up all of the money your opponents drop.) Conversely, you have the ability to jack opponents' weapons and add them to your inventory, so it's possible you're better off not even bothering to buy weapons in stores. This is a good time to transition to the game's inventory system, which is also bad.
That Deserves Repeating: This Game's Inventory System is Really Bad
To go with this game's increased focus on weapons, it allows you to build up a huge inventory of them, as well as some other items like food and potions. From this you can create a mini-inventory of "favorites", which you can select on the fly during battle. It sounds convenient on paper, but in practice it's anything but.
Last review, I complained about how the ability to pause and consume healing items lets you cheese your way through the longer fights, and that with how absurdly much HP some bosses had, that was essentially the only viable solution. This game's designers seemed to share my complaint but swung way too far in the opposite direction. Now the favorites menu is the only thing that you can select items from during battles, meaning no stopping time to consume a bunch of healing items at once, and to be fair, this time none of the bosses are so inflated that I couldn't beat them without that cheat.
Unfortunately, the real-time selection is cumbersome, especially in the thick of battle. The only form of selection you get is one shoulder button to cycle left-to-right through the list, looping to the start when you pass the end. Is the item you need too far to the right to access it immediately? Tough, you just need to cycle through and hope it'll still be needed when you get there...assuming your character is still conscious, of course Did you cycle through too fast and pass the item you needed? Tough, you don't get a button to cycle leftwards because the other shoulder button is used to switch party members.
Now, that might be a reasonable sacrifice in many RPGs. In many RPGs, your party members tend to have very different, and mutually exclusive abilities, so switching between them may well be necessary to finish battles. But in this game, while different party members may play as different RPG archetypes like paladins and wizards, beneath it all a character's abilities are defined by what items that character has. Because HP and mana stats are determined by equipped gear, the special moves your character knows are determined by equipped scrolls, and most of the attacks you can do in any given battle are dictated by the items in that favorites menu, Alexander himself can just swap between serving any of those functions via that menu. So given there isn't any good reason to switch which character you're controlling, it would have been better had they not included that ability and instead used the other shoulder button to cycle through the favorites menu in another direction.
Yet even if you could do so in two directions, cycling through a menu still isn't the ideal way to fast-select items, and that brings us to the most truly inexcusable thing about this inventory system. Despite that this is a 3DS game and that the favorites menu is on the lower screen, there is no touch-select functionality! While the menu we got is really too small to work with anything but a stylus and it's not convenient to use a stylus and buttons at the same time, because the favorites menu is the only part of the inventory system you can actually use during battle, they could have omitted the rest and enlarged the slots on the favorites menu, making it easy to press with one's fingers. How nobody thought to do this sort of thing when it is not only a huge quality-of-life improvement, but present in pretty much any other DS and 3DS game, is almost mind-boggling.
Closing Thoughts
Last time on Summer of Beat-Em-Ups, I concluded that River City Tokyo Rumble was serviceable, a follow-up to River City Ransom that played a lot like that game, for both better and worse, which stumbled over its attempts to have more plot but didn't become totally unpalatable as a result. Knights of Justice expands on the formula, but for every step forward there are many more steps back. It's not fair to say this game's combat is never fun, but there's scarcely any point when it doesn't feel unpleasantly messy. What's particularly sad is that this game's big problems are all tied to its expansion into more RPG-like territory, which in theory seemed like a good fit. It's possible to imagine a River City game that puts a greater emphasis on items, and is better for it...but this isn't that game. Instead, this game's items are poorly balanced and poorly implemented, and that actively detracts from the gameplay. You're better off playing the original River City Ransom or playing any number of other fantasy RPGs.
But look on the bright side: Next time on Summer of Beat-Em-Ups, things get good!
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