River City Rival Showdown: Summer of Beat-Em-Ups, Part 4

 

 

 

Forward

After a nice change of pace visiting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it's back to River City, possibly for quite a while.  In the first review I did for this section, I said that River City Tokyo Rumble left a lot to be desired, and that ARC's take on the River City series would get worse but then get better.  The worse game I spoke of was River City Knights of Justice, and the better game I spoke of was this one.  

Perhaps I should explain: I have no exact schedule for when I release these reviews, and though I have the order I release them in more-or-less planned out, it's not a clean process of "finish game 1 and then review it, finish game 2 and then review it", etc.  All of it instead has to fit into my schedule, be what it may, and so I actually had beaten two of the 3DS River City games and started playing the third before I wrote that first review.  

Having now had much more time with River City Rival Showdown, I mostly stand by my statement in that first review.  This is a beautiful, charming game with a commendably enhanced version of the gameplay style established in River City Ransom, and a lot of fun to play.  Incidentally, this game was developed somewhat concurrently with River City Ransom Underground, probably around the time that Conatus Creative was meeting with ARC System Works to negotiate the rights, and it seems quite possible that this game took inspiration from that one in its approach to graphics and controls.  If so, I approve of the changes.  If not, well, I still approve of them.

Unfortunately, there is also a more contentious addition to the formula that can drag the experience out, and this has largely worn out the game's welcome for me.

At a Glance

This game is of special note among games that continue the legacy of River City Ransom in that it's not actually a sequel to that game, but a remake.  Well, sort of.  Remakes of video games are, for better or worse, generally much more faithful to the originals than remakes of movies; for example, game remakes give you the same level layouts, bosses, and music compositions, but with better graphics and the music rearranged with higher-quality (and sometimes real live) instrumentation.  That's great and all, but it doesn't necessarily provide enough justification for people who own one version to buy another.  Yet this is a remake in more movie-like terms; it tells essentially the same story as River City Ransom, with the same characters (albeit now using their original Japanese names in this translation), and is the same genre of game, but the story beats are different (and variable), the map is more detailed and conducive to exploration, many characters have more depth due to the additional dialogue, the roleplaying game features are expanded with loads of NPCs you can talk to, and the beat-em-up gameplay is intact but expanded with (arguably) better controls, and special moves that are regulated by a power meter, but all new kinds of devastating and fun when done correctly.  Also, you're on a clock similar to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.  Bad guys are stirring up trouble and it's on you to root out their conspiracies, fighting them when necessary (ie, always), and if you haven't gotten some important things done after three days, they'll come attack you at Nekketsu High School instead.

Welcome to River City!  Please Consult Your Map...

 

The original River City Ransom was a non-linear game by beat-em-up standards, allowing and even requiring some backtracking, but it still started you at one school and mostly demanded you to mash your way east to another, where the final showdown lay.  This game goes full-RPG with a complete overhaul of the world and its orientation.  While some locations resemble those in River City Ransom, the layout of the city is quite different and leans heavily on a bottom-screen minimap to help you navigate to where you need to go, which varies a lot. This game maintains the bizarre but classic beat-em-up logic of your character only being able to face west or east, and thus, only attack in those directions, but you can still walk or run north and south in addition to those directions, and the game takes full advantage of this to let you go down streets headed in all four.  It's confusing at first, but after a few go-arounds familiarize you with the area it isn't hard to run anywhere in the city fairly quickly, and if you want to go even faster you can take a taxi.  That's all good, because you can't afford to waste time in this game.

As noted last section, you're on a time limit in a game that lasts three days plus a finale on the fourth.  Most of the game uses real-time, except you only experience 3:00 to 11:00 PM of each day, and if you choose to go to restaurants to heal yourself and boost your stats, you will pass it faster.  Finally, you also lose some time if you get knocked out, so try not to be.

Still, don't be too afraid to stop and admire the scenery, because surprisingly, this game is gorgeous.

Color Me Impressed

 

This game has quite a distinct art direction compared to past River City games, and the best way to describe it is vibrant.  While the colors on display aren't necessarily bright and flashy, there are so many colors that it's hard not to be visually stimulated.  It doesn't exactly look realistic; some of it almost seems crayon-like, but it still is incredibly detailed.

With how much more enthusiastic I am about this game than ARC's past Kunio games, it's only fair to start this review talking about Kunio himself.  The bad news is that he still has black hair, and the game's boxart still depicts him with brown hair.  However, if you take his in-game sprite as its own thing, Kunio looks pretty great here.  His sprite is still based on the one he had in the original Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, but he now wears a snappy red shirt beneath his school uniform, and the game goes wild giving him a lot of fun animations and facial animations.  Even in games limited to 8-bits, sprites in this chibi style have managed to have some hilarious expressions, and this one takes advantage of increased pixel count to take them even further.

The other characters fair just as well, or sometimes even better.  They are colorful, wear a wide variety of clothes, often have designs that fit well with their archetypes, and the game isn't even afraid to venture outside of the River City series' usual chibi bounds to depict characters of other ages and other body types.  The game goes to admirable lengths to convey its story by having characters be in different places depending on the time of day, and also what you do, which adds to the sense of this being a living, breathing world.

Yet even so, the most impressive thing about these visuals is surely River City itself.  Grungy urban environments feature so heavily in beat-em-ups that they almost start to feel like antagonists in themselves, but this game has a more positive attitude, embracing the urban jungle as an opportunity to create an animated matte painting.  Every perfect imperfection you would expect is here, such as cracks in the pavement, traffic warning signs, graffiti, and the occasional trash bags and cardboard boxes, and they coexist with the more purposeful trappings of city life such as trees, benches, and shiny storefronts to fill each site with color and intricate patterns, which draw your gaze in while never being so bright that they feel oppressively busy.  There's still plenty of people who jump you, but there's now more people that don't, and they complete the sense that this is overall just a very lived-in place.

Having heavily praised this game's visual storytelling, let's talk about its conventional storytelling, which as it turns out, is also quite good.

Beyond "Barf"

In Part One of this review series, I argued that there's a big risk in adding a big and detailed plot that to the sort of game that doesn't need one.  Dialogue and cutscenes inherently create breaks in the actual gameplay, and if they aren't entertaining in themselves, that will wear out their welcome in a hurry.  For the first time in this review series, I think a River City game really goes that extra mile needed to make this sort of deeper storytelling work.

For starters, this game provides a bit more context for why bunches of delinquents from various walks of life are inconveniently running around causing trouble at the same time some creeps from Reihou High have threatened you.  Turns out that Yamada, the psychic villain, can now use his powers for more than just levitating and hurling objects; now he can also warp people's minds and turn them into zombies.  They don't want your brains, but they do want to conquer Nekketsu High School; that's pretty much all they talk about, and as the school's main guardian, you're a target.  

That makes sense on at least a fantasy level, but it does threaten to homogenize the dialogue when a big part of the fun in this series is seeing what unique characters quip as they fight.  Fortunately, the game includes a fair amount of conventional gangs to balance this out.  Many of these still don't give much explanation for why they're attacking you, but it wouldn't be River City without that colorful cast of characters, and besides, some do give an excuse; not that any of them are good, but many are funny.  Also funny are the reactions these people elicit from Kunio, who fortunately is much more likable in this game than he was in Tokyo Rumble.  He's not much of a self-importantly macho buffoon here; rather in this game Kunio feels like the designated hero because by River City delinquent standards, he's relatively sane.  He always relishes a fight and is quite confident in his ability to win it, but he also can't help but be a bit befuddled by how weirdly trigger-happy so many of his peers are.  It's a somewhat similar sort of observational beat-em-up humor to what was done later in River City Girls, but unlike that game it never slides into tasteless nihilism that implies that even the protagonists of these games are necessarily bad people and that their lives are too petty to care about.  The well-written text and Kunio's great facial expressions work together to sell this sort of observational humor.

Even the bystanders have some reasonably decent dialogue.  Most of them remark on some things you can do and places you can go yourself, so at least initially, you will want to take a listen what they have to say.  For example, I spoke to a woman who mentioned that she was eager to go work out at a gym that would soon open in an upscale part of the city, so I went there myself, found the gym to be staffed from the Tiger Bros from Nekketsu Kakutou Densetsu, and learned that if I passed their challenge, I could earn special moves.  Not every bystander has something that "educational" to offer, and more than a few just converse about doing whatever they're doing or what they've noticed going on around the city.  But as unremarkable as it gets, this dialogue never really feels forced.  It does a good job at its primary purpose of making River City feel alive, and again, a lot of it is genuinely funny.  I do notice the occasional typo in the game's text, but it never reaches the lows of making it impossible to understand.

However, while I've said repeatedly that this game is funny, I do want to warn that this English script (and maybe the Japanese script, too, but who knows?) is very heavy on references to the era it was written in.  A major early plot point involves Kunio getting publicly shamed online, there are pretentious bro-types who ask him which of them has more "swagger", a girl gang leader whines that Kunio is oppressing her just for being a man and fighting back when they attacked him, a bystander mentions posting on a website called "Dumblr", a new gang member gets chastised as looking like a hipster for not pulling his bandana over his mouth, and more such things that were relevant in 2017, when this released.  Are they still relevant now, almost half a decade later?  Well, I still laughed at a lot of this game's script.  But your mileage may vary, and I could see this sort of humor really dating the game down the line.  There is, however, one factor in this game that makes this sort of trendy/trend-mocking dialogue quite forgivable: This is a game about uppity teenagers being uppity teenagers, in a series about uppity teenagers being uppity teenagers, and you'd expect much of what these people say to be frivolous and fleeting.  So while this sort of dialogue might be genuinely cringe-worthy if it appeared in a movie set hundreds of years ago or in a fairy tale world, or starring talking animals, in this game's context it feels less pandered and more authentic.

Finally, the Fighting!

Risking some ire but with good intentions, River City Rival Showdown has substantially overhauled the controls and gameplay compared to past River City games.  I said earlier that I suspected this game's developers were somewhat influenced by River City Ransom Underground's control scheme, because much like that game, this game tones down the excessive context-sensitivity that made past games' combat too button-mashy, in favor of giving old actions new buttons all their own to give you more ability to fight the way you choose. (Note: There is an option to use controls more like the original River City Ransom, but I never felt the desire to try it out, so right now I can't say how well that works.) The layout for punching and kicking remains unchanged, but it is no longer possible to jump by pressing both at once; jumping now is done exclusively with the designated button in the last two River City games I covered in this review series.  The last of the face buttons now inherits the grab action (both for weapons and enemies).  Instead of double-tapping a direction to run, you do that by holding the right shoulder button, and while that seems like it's not much of a necessary improvement, the left shoulder button provides an immense improvement by controlling blocking.  Gone are the days of just pressing the basic attack button and hoping the code knows when to punch and when to block, and I truly don't want to go back.  Holding both shoulder buttons while tapping something else will activate some special moves; assuming you've unlocked them, of course.

Speaking of special moves, this game also resembles River City Ransom Underground in that it adds a meter that special moves drain, meaning that unlike in the original River City Ransom and its initial sequels, unlocking special moves does not make more basic ones completely obsolete.  You now have to be judicious about when and how you use the special moves, as well as attending to recharging the meter to use them, which you do by damaging the enemies; the more damage, the more meter charge.  As compensation for what may seem like a nerf compared to past River City games, many of your special moves here are a lot more powerful, and I think it's a huge improvement...mostly.  

 

While the meter is a fine addition to the moves that rely on more complex button combinations, I often resent that it is also bound to those you can activate with a single button press.  The basic punch, kick, and melee weapon strike all have a rapid-fire version you can learn, and as with in past Kunio games made in this chibi style (though differing from some that aren't, like Kunio Tachi No Banka), when enabled they just replace the basic version.  Thus choosing to enable such upgraded versions of these attacks can backfire in situations where they drain special meter power that would be better used for more powerful specials still.  There is one way to alleviate this problem, though; wait until a bunch of enemies come up to Kunio overlapping each other, and then hit them all with whatever mach special you've got to earn far more special power than you spent.  I'm not sure this was an anticipated gameplay feature (though as I'll explain later, there's some reason to believe it was), but there's still a simple, "skinner box" sort of fun to baiting in enemies to farm for power.

And it all comes together in a combat style that is a lot of fun in general, and reasonably deep to boot. I did still find myself using some special moves a lot more than others, but it really does make a difference to know when to use them or not use them.  As with most River City games, you purchase special moves for the most part, but some you will earn at key events in the story.  Probably the best of those plot-earned moves is Turbo Stone Hands, which lets you charge through a whole crowd of enemies, but there is also a more clumsy but really fun move that sacrifices your current weapon/piece of trash to spawn a big laser beam to tear through all in its path.  Of course, the system for unlocking these moves will raise some questions, like "How did Kunio learn these moves?", and "If Kunio knew these moves, why couldn't he use them before at times they would have really come in handy?" and some may resent that you need to figure out the right path through the story to get them, but once they're unlocked, you retain them...and more on that later, because it's part of something really important to the game.

Overall this is a really fun refinement of River City Ransom's already fun but rather messy gameplay formula.  There are a lot of special moves to learn, and they will let players customize Kunio to fit with their own preferred play styles.  It's not perfect, though, and while exploring it to master all of its nuances can feel very rewarding, doing so will also make you aware of some major flaws.  As noted earlier, you can fill your special meter quickly by hitting a bunch of enemies at once, and with how much more devastating your special attacks can be than your regular attacks (we're talking like one hundred-something damage vs one damage, in extreme cases), this is almost an indispensable gameplay mechanic.  Because of the above, it is constantly easier to fight multiple enemies at once in this game than to fight one-on-one, and while that is ludicrously unrealistic, it would be just fine as gameplay if there weren't many one-on-one fights...but there are.  Those aren't the majority of fights, but they are essential fights to finish the game, and also some of what start as group encounters actually have one enemy much tougher than the rest, meaning you'll take most of them down, but then be left with the same old situation that plagues one-on-one fights in this game.  Entirely too many one-on-one fights in this game will at least initially boil down to you trying whatever you can to charge up your special meter so you can deck enemies with a suplex, drop kick, or other such really powerful specials, because your basic attacks simply won't do.  If you remember my review of River City Tokyo Rumble, you have probably already deduced you'll be cheesing your way through by consuming food in the pause menu.

There are also a few of what seem like coding oversights that increase the unbalanced feeling of this combat.  Not a lot of attention has been paid to making sure that every move has another move that can override it, and this leads to some of them, like headbutts and top spins, feeling pretty near unbeatable, reducing the fight down to you hoping they don't choose to do these moves when you're attacking them.  There are also issues with how the special meter works during grappling specials.  If you have enough power in the meter, you do the attack, but if you don't, you fumble the enemy and what power you do have in the meter is still consumed.  This sort of risk might increase challenge, but arguably not in a fair way, and while it doesn't ruin the experience, it's a definite example of what gamers call "adjusting to the game's crap factor".  You'll definitely learn to roll with it if you stick with this game, but that's partially because sticking with this game will probably occupy a lot of time, and that segues into the game's most innovative but likely also contentious feature.

Failing Upward

This game, once again, gives you only a limited time to thwart its villains.  On paper it lasts three days, plus however long the finale on the fourth day lasts, but as you only experience each day from 3 to 11 PM, in practice it's only 24 hours, give or take a few factors.  Going to restaurants and the sauna automatically consume time, meanwhile fights that take place in "events" will pause the timer, and you can unlock an item to slow it down.  Add in that some events can only be experienced at a certain time and place and some of those only on a certain day, plus the somewhat unbalanced combat system, and you have a game that isn't easy to win.  Chances are high that you will get the bad ending your first time, maybe even your first several times, so don't be ashamed to start on Beginner Difficulty, ignoring the game's statement that Intermediate is for people who have played River City games before.  

But this game's plot also loops like in the movie, Run, Lola, Run; after a failure you can start again from the top, but retaining your knowledge of this world and what's lurking within it, and because it's an RPG, you also retain your level, stats, and earned special moves.  So with you smarter and Kunio tougher, you get closer and closer to victory each time.  Theoretically Kunio might level up so high that there is no challenge left, but that is the worst case scenario and more likely the player's skill will play a big role in finally clearing the game faster.  This game provides both incentives to get better at it and opportunities to demonstrate that you have.  It's not like restarts from the beginning of a game to force replay and build muscle memory are new to games, in fact this philosophy used to be standard for many games, but with RPGs among the earliest adopters of save features, it's at least interesting to see that make something of a return here.  While this game does have a save feature and you can technically reload from right before a failure, since progress is to at least some degree tied to how high your character's level is, it's often more convenient to restart the whole quest from the start so you can power up more.  It might be one of the most unique innovations to the genre in recent memory, and it's surprising that this is the series that did it. 

Having said all of that, this style of game design has always been double-edged, and there's a reason it's all-but extinct.  Life is often complicated; things come up, homework is assigned, you might get a job that has abnormal hours, and even in your leisure time, you will probably have obligations outside of video games, and with all of that in mind, it's not fun to allocate some of your time to finishing a video game when you don't even know how much time it will take to finish.  Furthermore, while most players indeed get better at a game when forced to play it again and again, that offers no guarantee that they will enjoy it more, and chances are even high they'll grow to enjoy it less.

The above pertains to almost all video games, but in a game like this, it might be even worse.  To be fair, I did enjoy making breakthroughs and experiencing different variations of the story at first, and piecing together what was happening and learning how to set it to rights was also fun.  Unfortunately, it started to feel more like a chore once I learned that saving the day in this game isn't really about how many enemies you can defeat, but rather, learning what events you need to partake in to meet specific plot-relevant characters, triggering events and doing something in them to trigger more events, then repeating.  There's still a lot of fun fights when you play the game that way, along with the chance to visit some areas you wouldn't get to if you hadn't.  But the novelty does wear off as you keep blazing the same trail in hopes that this time, you're strong enough to reach the end.  Each time I finally defeated a boss that had given me trouble before, it gave me a big sense of accomplishment, but soon after, when I was too toughened up for these bosses to be challenging anymore, they just started to feel like chores.

Then there's the dialogue.  I said earlier that this game's generally well-written, even if much of its humor will likely become dated.  Had River City Tokyo Rumble featured writing this good, it would have been much more enjoyable.  Yet with so much forced repetition, even well-written dialogue becomes annoying to click through, as it surrounds all of the big plot-relevant events of this game.  The final big problem with this game is that it arguably has more forced repetition than it really needs because its difficulty is not well balanced.  Easy mode is much too easy, while Intermediate mode is much too difficult, despite higher difficulties being unlockable if you finish that one.  I have actually beaten this game's story mode on Easy, but not Intermediate, and perhaps I would have stopped trying, except there are more things that can be unlocked from doing so, such as an alternate story mode following Yamada.

So unfortunately, this game is very arguably a case of an interesting idea being more of a burden than an asset.  It definitely helps this game stand out, but I feel other aspects of it were more than good enough to do that, and so it's a shame that the forced repetition was there to turn those once-enjoyable things into busywork.

 

Oh right; there's actually another mode.

There is a game within this game, called Double Dragon Duel, sometimes shortened to "DDD".  They missed a great chance to make a joke about Kirby's nemesis but maybe they were worried about how lawsuit-happy Nintendo has gotten about its brands.  You'll quickly notice that instead of another beat-em-up, this is a tournament fighter, albeit a simple one.  A short though critical event in the Story Mode will involve playing one match of this game, but to experience more you need to load its own mode from the main menu.  

You likely would expect this to be set in the Double Dragon universe, but interestingly enough, the only Double Dragon characters the game features are Billy and Jimmy Lee, and the roster is otherwise made up of Kunio characters, many of whom feature in Story Mode, but in a bizarre twist, they use the names they had in the old English localization of River City Ransom.  The story (yes; there is one) of this mode involves all of the characters squaring off in Reiho Dojo, and its events may or may not reflect those of River City Rival Showdown's main story mode.  All of them have unique conversations together, and there are two characters you can unlock.

Much like the main story mode, this one is surprisingly well-written, and it's interesting to play a crossover between River City and Double Dragon, as little is done with that.  But this is simplified from the main mode's combat to the point that it won't likely serve as anything more than a quick distraction.  If you preferred special moves not having power meters, you might be happy that they don't in this mode, but this also increases imbalance between abilities and the characters who possess them, and since in this mode there is no leveling up or character customization, leaving everyone with just a few specials each, that tends to mean that every match is either boringly easy or frustratingly difficult.  One of the characters you can unlock is really overpowered, and the other one is even more-so.

Closing Thoughts

For previous entries in my Summer of Beat-Em-Ups series, I had a variety of thoughts but I generally knew where I stood on each game.  With River City Rival Showdown, my feelings are a lot more mixed, because on the one hand, there really are a lot of things I love about it.  The fighting is often a blast and surprisingly deep, the graphics are fabulous, the writing is funny, and even the time system is an interestingly fresh take at first.  On the other hand, though, it's hard to excuse just how much of my time it ate up, especially when a few tweaks to balance things out might have saved me a lot of it, and some sorts of gamers will definitely be irritated that a series that started with beat-em-ups is now staking its game progress on hunting down leads in a time limit.  I had intended to play and review several beat-em-ups this Summer, in addition to a number of other projects I have planned, and when I still hadn't beaten Intermediate mode on this one after River City Saga Three Kingdoms premiered, I decided enough was enough on Rival Showdown, at least for now.

Given that I said some of its graphics and gameplay reminded me a lot of River City Ransom Underground, in a good way, perhaps it is fitting that this game also resembles that one in another way; its virtues are buried in a pile of burdens that mean any recommendation of it must inevitably come with a warning or several.  The problems aren't really the same between the two games, but in both cases it's depressing that most of the problems have far less to do with bad programming and far more to do with some poor choices about how the game is structured.

And yet, it's impossible to dismiss a game that does so much right.  This was not the end of the Kunio series, it added a lot to the formula, other games continued to iterate on its additions, and for all of that it deserves far more credit than scorn, and to be examined by future Kunio developers.  Does it deserve to be played by every fan of the series?  Hardly, but if they're like me they'll all find at least a few things they love about this game if they do.