Forward
A funny thing happened on a way to this entry. The game that made me want to do this series of articles, River City Girls 2, was scheduled for release in late Summer, hence it seemed like a good finale to a Summer of Beat-Em-Ups. Then, however, it was delayed, though likely not for too much longer, as Wayforward is sharing plenty of information to build hype. Still, River City Girls 2 will not make it out by the end of Summer 2022, and coincidentally, neither will this blog. As such, River City Saga: Three Kingdoms will be the final entry...and honestly, I'm relieved. It turns out that when you play just one sort of video game for months on end, you tend to get bored of it, especially when it's a genre of games that in themselves can be quite repetitive. I won't let my thinning patience with it all influence my opinion of this game, but that is the big reason I delayed so long in getting this article out; I had to take breaks. Also, does anyone even read these? Maybe, and if I was actually doing this as a career, I would have toughed it out and gotten these out sooner, but I'm not so I allow wiggle room.
Still, I try to finish what I start, and so even if it's a day or so after Summer, let's take it to the streets one last time, until River City Girls 2 finally waddles out.
At a Glance
While this plays a lot like River City games you've already experienced, it transplants it into the world of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a Chinese novel loosely based on a true story, so with Kunio and co assuming the roles of various historical/literary figures, we essentially get an artistic license taken with an artistic license taken with Chinese history. This all prompts me to issue a disclosure; I have very little familiarity with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so I can't tell you how faithful of a retelling this is--and couldn't even begin to tell you how historically accurate that makes it. I can recall reading another review that says it kind of rushes through the novel's plot and only goes a certain amount of chapters in, so I figured I would repeat that here, but otherwise I can only rate the story this game tells as its own thing. Also, because I have quite a bit more familiarity with River City, I'm going to call everyone in this story by the names of those characters playing as the ROTTK characters, which will save me the time of having to look up reminders of whom they're actually supposed to represent.
Welcome to River City! Just Kidding; It's China
So if the above section didn't make it clear enough, this game takes a break from the paved modern streets of River City to visit ancient China. Or at least, the version of ancient China featured in operas and Kung Fu movies. That means that this game features probably the largest area of navigable terrain yet in a River City game, with multiple towns you can visit and at least one area representing the countryside between each. I wish I could say that was a good thing, but travel through an organic nation with lots of curvy roads and rivers when your character's controllable movement is limited to just four basic directions, will inevitably feel fudged a lot of the time. I found myself frequently pausing to check the map of China shortly after I entered a new area to make sure I had entered the right area, and frequently I found that I needed to go back, because I had taken the wrong exit, quite literally. Sometimes exiting a town through the gateway at the east edge won't take you down a road that looks like it heads east from that town, and you might have to try another exit to the north or south. At least you get some limited fast-travel options, but as predicted you do need to go to the locations manually first.
Well, at least it looks pretty.
Finally, Brown Hair!
With my main critique of ARC's past Kunio games being that too many characters lacked color, being stuck with 8-bit limitations even when this prevented them from looking like their official character art, I am overjoyed that this game, in the process of giving these characters ancient Chinese makeovers, also gives them flamboyantly colored anime hair that is closer to their official art and looks right at home next to the equally colorful Chinese landscapes and festooned towns. While this game utilizes the now common ARC Kunio motif of flat sprites in an otherwise 3D environment with mostly 3D props, everything has a consistent enough color scheme that the art styles never clash. All in all, it is fair to say that the color is by far the best thing about this game's graphics. They also have clearly done a fair amount of work to dress everyone in the theme's attire, while keeping them recognizable.
As charming as the character sprites are, though, they inevitably get overshadowed by the true stars of this game's graphics, the portraits that represent these characters during the game's many conversation. These large, vibrantly colored and high-definition renditions of River City's iconic characters are some of the best illustrations I've ever seen of them, and most characters get several to represent the different emotions they'll be showing in the game. Expressions are as big and hyperbolic as you'd expect from an anime-styled series and some, mostly those by Godai, are downright hilarious. So while ARC finally has the colors down really well, these images make me wish for a game whose animated character sprites have the same quality as these images, and such is certainly possible to make in the modern era.
One thing that separates this game's graphics a little bit from those of many of the other retro-styled beat-em-ups released lately, is that this one is not hiding that it's running in a 3D engine. There is an actual camera viewing the action head-on with the depth effects you'd realistically get from viewing a scene, meaning that as characters move further north they look smaller, while as they move further south they look bigger. That's not a bad thing; it's just pretty noticeable at a time when most games of this sort make an effort to look older than they are.
If I had any bad thing to mention about this game's graphics, it would simply be how homogeneous they are. As appealing as the game's vibrant and colorful depiction of ancient China is initially, it isn't really shooting to do any more than that, many towns blend together in your memory because they follow similar art styles, and these are pretty much the stock motifs of ancient China that you'd get from pretty much any other depiction from the era of mass-media. Which brings us to the music, which also goes all-in on the theme.
Chime, Gong, Chime Chime Etc.
Once Upon A Time in China
As stated before, I am very unfamiliar with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so I can't really review this game's plot as an adaptation, only as its own entity.
We open up with China in the midst of The Yellow Turban Rebellion, as Kunio and his closest friends (at least in this story), Goda and Godai, after fleeing a corrupt officer, decide to form a volunteer militia to crack down on the rebels, and help people with a variety of tasks while they're at it. There's the occasional amusing joke here, but unfortunately this isn't the best first impression because the Yellow Turbans are quite uninteresting antagonists on almost all levels. We don't get much insight into their ideology, their sprites are basic, and they don't put up much of a challenging fight. Because I wasn't given much reason to care about these events, the many conversations that happen to describe them also aren't very interesting.
I'm wondering if some people just gave up on the game in those early moments, but that would be a shame, as the story actually gets much better after you've defeated the Yellow Turbans. Kunio and friends fall in with various government officials, but they turn out to be of varying moral character, and the heroes that rose to prominence battling against outlaws soon find themselves rendered outlaws due to disagreements they have with their leaders. It's an interesting plot that keeps moving in new directions and introducing new characters, of course played by various iconic denizens of River City.
However, for as many characters as make an appearance, the story doesn't keep most of them around long enough to feel like they enhance the game much, and when a big selling point of this game is that River City characters are reenacting Romance of the Three Kingdoms, that's a problem. What makes this worse is that, while some of the characters will fight alongside you instead of just being bosses (a few will do both of those), you only ever get to play as Kunio, at least if you limit yourself to singleplayer. There is also a co-op version of story mode, but the other player only plays as a servant to Kunio. Unfortunately, that's probably an inevitable side effect of making a beat-em-up follow the plot of a novel written many centuries earlier; doing this mandates where any character can be at any given time and so while it would be nice (and possible) to have the ability to switch between which present characters you were playing, in some cases there would be no other character there to switch to. Now seems as good a time as any to segue into talking about the gameplay.
Beat-Em-Up With Chinese Characteristics
This game mostly keeps the control scheme introduced in River City Rival Showdown, so conceptually, it's in a good place, but in execution it's a bit worse.
Actually, allow me to clarify: This game keeps the button functions from that game but I played it on PC, and I couldn't actually get it to recognize my controller so I just had to keep it on Keyboard settings and link my controller to that via JoyToKey, so I set it up to reflect the default 3DS controls in River City Rival Showdown. With as easily as I got past that problem, I almost feel like I shouldn't make much ado about it, but in many games released on Steam these days that problem wouldn't even be there, so I do consider it a substantial point against this game. Moving on, though, there are some other issues that make this feel overall more clunky to play.
First while there is still a run button, unlike in Rival Showdown, and in fact, unlike the vast majority of games that have a run button, you don't just hold it down when you want to run and release it when you don't. Rather, in your default state you walk, when you tap the button you switch to run mode, and tapping it again will switch you to walking. This is far from game-breaking, but it is a downgrade. All things considered, there usually isn't a reason not to be in run mode, but one thing that will make you want to slow down on occasion is that this game is full of melee weapons to pick up and use, and in run mode you tend to run past them. Also, you will almost certainly get hit in this game, probably you'll also get decked a lot, so there's a lot of starting and stopping involved in battle, and when the same button input activates walk and run mode, it isn't always easy to remember which one you're currently in while you getting mobbed, floored, or getting mobbed while floored! Knowing that essentially requires you to remember how many times you pushed the button, and you wouldn't have that issue if simply holding the button always meant one thing and simply not holding it always meant the other thing!
Also, for whatever reason, while in almost every other game's menus, the game's most commonly pressed button would be your "confirmation" button, here it is inexplicably the grab button instead. That is weird.
There aren't really any other control issues to mention, but there are plenty of mechanical ones. The grab button once again grabs both enemies and weapons, but you need to press the kick button to throw them; there is no longer any putting them down gently as there was in RCRS, which sucks because that is often useful when want to go unarmed but keep a good weapon for later. Unfortunately, you're going to be wanting to do that often here, because blocking can now block the weapons, too. This game went for a trinity of basic attack types that each have their own advantages; punches charge the special gauge fastest (more on that later), kicks are the most powerful, and grabs can ignore blocking, and that would be a fine balance if weapons weren't part of the equation, but because they are, they can be blocked, and you can't grapple when holding a weapon, a big part of the combat you'll be doing is just unpleasantly messy. I should point out that enemies also know how to grapple, and I found myself in many cases where I drop a weapon so I can grab a blocking enemy, only to find that enemy grabbing me first, sometimes suplexing me afterward. I've opined in the past that weapon combat in the River City series is kind of lame to begin with, and it turns out that making the weapons a whole lot weaker in many situations was not the way to fix this.
Then there are special attacks. This game initially seems to keep intact River City Rival Showdown's policy of giving you a special attack meter, which drains as you use special moves. In truth, though, this one is a lot more messy. The majority of special moves no longer detract from the meter, and since many of them can break through blocking enemies and are a safer way to do that than grappling, I took full advantage of this feature, but as a result there were many situations where a few moves got a lot of use and most others got hardly any. Not helping this is that most of these special moves do not utilize complicated button combinations, so many flat-out replace basic attacks when equipped. This proves to be a problem in cases where a special attack comes with both advantages and drawbacks; for example, you can equip a move that will change your basic sword strike into a theatrical maneuver wherein the character first pauses to pose, and then charges forward, potentially slicing through whole crowds of enemies. Cool, yes, but that pause can really cost you if you're so flanked by enemies that they'll knock you down before you can get in the charging slice, making you wish you could just do basic sword strikes to get them out of your hair the old fashioned way. You can fudge around this by going to the pause menu to equip or de-equip special moves depending on what function you want a single button press to do at the moment, but this would still flow much better and be much more fun if so many moves weren't mapped to the exact same simple button input, and mutually exclusive because of it. A few other, more powerful special moves, do indeed use the special meter, but all of them deplete it completely, meaning that you don't really have the ability to string powerful special attacks together into combos. That's a real shame, as these are some of the coolest moves in the game. Your first "last resort" special attack will slow down time and allow you to slash through enemies with a huge blade while that lasts, and later you can also learn a flying bicycle kick that cuts through whole crowds of enemies. As it stood, I still found myself using these moves a lot, but didn't see any need to unlock many of them.
The final tools at your disposal during combat are "tactics". These use another meter that works similar to that used by a handful of special attacks, except it's harder to fill but can have multiple uses as a compensation, and give some of the rare reminders that Kunio is playing a general in this game. With a simple combination of buttons, players can subject their enemies to several types of artillery barrages, many of them purposefully bizarre, or order postmen to deliver supplies to the battlefield in a hurry. These generally aren't usable often enough to feel like a core gameplay element, but they do make battles more fun when they actually are, and the accompanying cutscenes feature some of the finest sprite animations in the game.
And Now, the Truly Awful Part of the Gameplay
While the beat-em-up gameplay you'll be doing in this game is at least serviceable and intuitive, your progress through it will frequently be gatekept via platforming segments. You've probably played two-dimensional platformers viewed from the right side of the protagonist, and you've probably played three-dimensional platformers viewed mostly from behind the protagonist, who can not only move in directions but also rotate. You probably have not played three-dimensional platformers viewed from the right side of the protagonist, who has the ability to move in all directions but never rotate, and this game may have a lot to do with why you probably haven't.
Make no mistake, side-scrolling beat-em-ups have often featured multi-tiered environments and platforming to some degree, but it was kept simple so the limited movement and perspective didn't hurt much. River City Saga Three Kingdoms commits my most hated sin of game design in making the part of the game that is different from its core gameplay also be much, harder than its core gameplay, and worse still, mandatory to get through before you can go on with its core gameplay. Technically, when your current quest requires you to pass through a platforming segment, you can choose to go grind on more enemies instead, but there is simply no progressing in the plot until you bite the bullet and bungle your way through that segment. It can be difficult to figure out where exactly your character intersects with an environment, where to jump and even jumping too soon can be just as bad as jumping too late.
The kindest thing I can say about these things is that the only penalty you incur from falling into pits is losing a little bit of health; had these falls actually killed you, I would be ready to call this game almost unplayable. However, it actually does get near that level of frustration in moments where you're supposed to move back and forth, left and right as you climb up a region via various platforms at different heights; falling in these areas truly does mean having to do it all again, or at least much of it again. There aren't too many of these moments, but they are always a major buzzkill.
There is another recurrent complaint that critics had about this game, that is that it requires you to collect things at various points in the story and give them to certain people. I find this very easy to pass thanks to a guide for where they are being posted on Steam, but I can imagine that people who don't know where would just give up, particularly given just how confusing the travel itself is.
We Can Be China Heroes
There is another mode to this game, and it seems made almost as a compensation for most of the flawed things I described above. China Heroes Mode saws this game's experience down to something more akin to a conventional beat-em-up, in which the only goal is to fight your way through a bunch of enemies, then a boss, repeating for several more stages that progress in the same order as the main games events and with the same enemies, but without any leveling up, unlocking new moves, fetch-quests, or NPC conversations. Strangely enough, enemies will still drop coins, even though you cant spend them. Most enticingly, this mode lets you play as a bunch more characters, 24 altogether, although you need to complete prerequisites in |Story Mode to unlock them.
Sounds good so far, but in fact, this mode is pretty undercooked, and bogged down by myriad issues of its own. The diverse abilities of the different characters are not explained anywhere, so it's on you to just fiddle around with the controls and figure them out. You had better do it quickly, because there is no saving progress in this mode, and while it's obviously shorter than the main game, it's still an excessive length to expect someone to complete within one sitting. Also sometimes you have continues and sometimes you don't, and this isn't explained either.
Unfortunately, while in some regards this mode is less obnoxious than the main one, it's while you're slogging through this ordeal of beating a whole bunch of enemies to proceed that it truly dawns how messy this game's combat mechanics really are, and some of the issues are grandfathered in from River City Ransom as a whole. Compared to the elegantly pre-scripted behavior of enemies in TMNT: Shredder's Revenge, these AI mechanics are highly randomized, and such was acceptable in River City Ransom and most derivative games because they usually gave you the option of running away from enemies, or sometimes even around them, if you got too battered. Healing up and powering up would help you get through eventually. But take out the option of not fighting sometimes, as well as the roleplaying, and the random nature of it all is just too unfair to soldier through. Oh, and speaking of things that were removed and things that are unfair, for some reason you can't block in this mode. Most of your enemies can't either, but some bosses can. Why they made this choice I don't know; perhaps they ad realized that blocking in the Story Mode is overpowered, and instead of tweaking it they just threw the baby out with the bathwater. I've never had much respect for game developers who react to flaws like that.
Incidentally, this mode allows up to four players to cooperate online, but I couldn't find anyone playing. It's also not cross-platform, which doesn't help.
It really is a shame that I feel so let down by this mode, because it is what interested me about this game. For what it's worth, it has by-far the most playable characters ever in a Kunio beat-em-up, and it isn't afraid to go wild with choices, such as Abobo, Kunio's counterpart from the Feudal Japanese spinoff of River City Ransom, the River City Girls versions of Misako and Kyouko (the core series versions of those characters are in this game too, though only core Misako is playable), and even a tiger (that I haven't unlocked). I wanted to love this mode for that reason, but it's just marred with far too many flaws.
Which sadly is a fair summary of this game as a whole.
I Can't Even Think of a Clever Title Here
Back when I reviewed Pokemon Masters, I closed the review out by admitting that while the review's tone was almost entirely negative, the game was at worst, okay. That can essentially be said here, too. There is some time-honored fun to be had in River City Saga Three Kingdoms, and I think the several things it does well, like graphics, are worth crediting as such. But this game was promoted alongside Kunio's 35th Anniversary, and for something of that magnitude, it should have been better than okay. This should have been one of the best Kunio games ever made. Instead, aside from a few truly impressive aspects, this is just one more River City Ransom, with lots added to change things up, but usually not for the better. Moreover, while I think a number of tweaks could really improve its mechanics, we'd still be left with Kunio in Romance of the Three Kingdoms being something less than a match made in heaven. Simply too much has to give in order to tell a pre-established story accurately, making the iconic characters feel wasted on the scenario.
Also, it deserves repeating: Those platforming sections suck.
Summer is Over, and That's Okay
With that, Summer of Beat-Em-Ups is officially over, a bit too late but who cares? I worked somewhat hard on this, and I must say, it really tested my patience with this genre. It seemed like a good idea at the time, a way to celebrate how an old genre is back in vogue, but part of me wonders how long it would stay in vogue with how stale it felt after a while...but to be fair, all but one of these were Kunio games. I think I also did it because I've often gotten on a high horse lecturing newcomers about Kunio in light of River City Girls welcoming a lot of outsiders into this fold, and maybe this was karma, of a sort. Sometimes things you feel enthusiastic about will disappoint you and make you wonder why you cared so much. But I still wish this series the best going forward...I'm just not quite sure what the best is.
Time to go play some other genres.
