River City Girls 2 Vs Sonic Prime: The Biggest Battle of December 15 2022

Forward

My nonexistent readers may recall that I had earlier planned to review River City Girls 2 this Summer, because Wayforward had originally planned to release River City Girls 2 this Summer.  I had, in fact, planned out a whole series of articles on the assumption that the final entry would be a review of that game, but it turns out they needed more time they make the game, and delayed it to a later date, which turned out to be December 15.  

Coincidentally, that is also the time Netflix premiered the first season of Sonic Prime, so I decided to once again make an event out of RCG2's release by comparing these two properties that released on the same day.  Note, however, that this is still not my full review of River City Girls 2; that will have to wait until I have played more of it, as this is a long game.  It turns out that is just as well, because the developers haven't quite finished the game either, shipping it with issues that will likely be patched in due time; more on that later.  On the other hand, Sonic Prime was also released unfinished but in a different way; Season One has been cut down from an originally planned 13 episodes to just 8, and as such I was able to watch them all in a relatively short time.  Thus I can offer a more complete picture of that one.

Still, it might sound odd to compare two different media and pick a winner.  I guess it is, but to make it somewhat more fair I'm narrowing it down to categories both can qualify for.  So let's begin!

Round 1: Visuals

Both of these media are strong contenders in the looks department.  River City Girls 2 carries on the strong art direction of its predecessor; it's a pixel-based game but one that takes care to make its environments all visually distinct instead of mass-producing them via tilesets.  The characters are also well-designed and drawn, though many of the enemies are recolors of each other.  This, however, is actually to the game's benefit; doing this lets you get a feel for how they fight without their appearance getting repetitive.  In fact, that's overall a good way to describe this whole game; it's gloriously colorful, with the color pallets used to amplify any given vibe in any given environment the game is going for.  Uptown is a gaudy neon-drenched hub of business in a proud beat-em-up tradition, while Downtown is a grotesque sea of grunge, rust, graffiti and garbage so detailed that you can almost smell it.  I even found a haunted forest that gave off stronger haunted forest vibes than I expected to find in an urban beat-em-up.  If there's one possible complaint, it's that most of this is still more of the same we got in the first game, but I do notice improvement.

Sonic Prime is a 3D cartoon, but it, too, is quite dedicated to being over-the-top colorful and detailed (at first), as well as cognizant of how such things can set the mood of different sorts of environments.  This is good, because the point of Sonic Prime is to put its characters in different sorts of environments. (More on this later.)  What's more, this is clearly striving to be the most game-accurate Sonic cartoon ever.  We start our adventure in a lovingly-rendered 3D rendition of Green Hill Zone, complete with a loop-de-loop, rings, and familiar robotic enemies, before warping between a number of alternate realities.  The character designs are mostly what you'd expect based on their games, but they've never had such great facial expressions as they do here.  Furthermore, they get partial design tweaks to match with each new alternate universe we visit. (Again, more on this later.)  But with all of that said, it does feel like there's an uneven quality to it.  Most of the other alternate universes look rather underwhelming compared to New Yolk City, the alternate reality that Eggman rules. (Once again, more on this later.  Actually, this is getting tiring; let's segue to plot now.)

Round Winner: River City Girls 2.

 

Round 2: Writing

River City Girls 2 is a silly game, as was its predecessor, but mercifully, this time it's not all driven by misunderstanding and blind lust.  Instead, the plot is that the Yakuza, led by Sabu, are patrolling the streets itching for revenge on our hotblooded heroes and heroines...again.  I find it a relief that this time, you're unambiguously on the side of justice and doing a good deed for River City.  

But while that's a substantial point in this game's favor compared to its predecessor, in some regards its narrative also feels like a step down.  The first game's plot centered entirely around Misako and Kyoko's love-quest, and while they were shallow characters they were also thorough ones, constantly commenting on events going on.  Kunio and Riki could be unlocked for play but did not have their own dialogue.  This game gives you all four protagonists from the first and also two more you can unlock, and this time they all have their own dialogue...except not quite.  

For starters, while they all have their own voices, a lot of the script has been copied and pasted between characters; it's not nearly as much as I feared based on an early preview of the game but it's still more than I had hoped for.  This is a particularly big issue when it comes to interacting with NPCs; characters who canonically know each other should reflect that in their conversations instead of acting just like the characters who don't.  A notable moment of this came around the time I unlocked Provie, a character first seen in River City Ransom Underground.  She gives a backstory talking about how her best friend is a girl named Chris, also first seen in River City Ransom Underground, Chris has gone missing and Provie is looking for her, willing to fight her way through Yakuza to do it.  But when you first meet Chris in this game, she's aloof and suspicious, even if you're playing as Provie.  What should have been a sweet reunion instead became a glaring example of this game's dialogue cutting corners it shouldn't have.  Also, this game continues its predecessor's practice of having manga cutscenes at various points, but some of these assume you're always playing as Misako and Kyoko, so if you're not, the transition to and from those manga cutscenes is jarring.

But the most consistently notable issue with this game's dialogue is that compared to the first game, nobody talks all that much.  You'll go long periods of time with none of your characters remarking on what they're doing in-game, and while it's feasible that some beat-em-up players will like it better this way, this game is a sequel to River City Girls; one of the hallmarks of that game was the banter between its protagonists, it's likely that fans of that game in particular would prefer to have more gab in the sequel, and the developers announced unique dialogue between characters early on, so this relative quietness really is a letdown.  It also makes the experience feel a lot less "deliberate" this time around.  In most beat-em-ups, the linear structure of levels keeps in mind what you're doing on its own, but many River City games, this one included--actually, this one especially--are non-linear, and so while the stakes are technically a lot higher this time around, your characters often don't remark on that, and this actually makes things more confusing since it's easy to forget where you supposed to go.  Instead, you must consult your pause menu for that, but neglecting what has become practically a standard for open-world games these days, this game does not distinguish between main quests and side-quests, so what exactly is most crucial to do tends to get lost in the crowd--and it doesn't help that this time around, searching for things is constantly part of the challenge.  There was a time I was supposed to be looking for Marian, but lacking any clear idea of where to look, I got sidetracked by a side quest to rescue a bunch of cats, and only once I wandered into a place where someone lived who knew Marian did I even remember I had been looking for her.

What makes this lack of dialogue even sadder is that when dialogue does happen in this game, it's often quite funny.  Some people have different opinions on this, but I find the back and forth between characters in this film to be fairly charming.  I smiled at most of it, and sometimes, I laughed hard.  But with Wayforward's fixation on making everything a joke, you do get some missteps.  For example, this game reintroduces Ken from Kunio Tachi no Banka, but his depiction here is so different that it just feels like an insult.  Ken in his original appearance was a proud and serious character who was being duped by Sabu, and ended up being betrayed by him.  Instead of going from there, this game puts him back in service of Sabu, in fact as a dedicated bootlicker, and makes his personality obnoxious while also making him too pathetic to feel menacing.  Moreover, Wayforward can't exactly get away with this by claiming the game is in a new continuity, as earlier this year they released Kunio Tachi no Banka with the retroactive title River City Girls Zero, giving the impression that this game is meant to be a continuation of that game's events.  One of this game's writers, Adam Tierney, has revealed that he wrote most of this game before working on localizing KTNB, and I get the sneaking suspicion that he wrote this game before even playing most of that one.

Sonic Prime is a new animated take on Sonic the Hedgehog, and compared to past cartoons, this one is attempting to be more like the video games Sonic originated in.  There's a twist, though; this is also a multiverse story.  It starts with Sonic being way too reckless in fighting the good fight and shattering a mystical crystal he was not supposed to shatter, which causes...honestly it's not quite clear what it causes; get used to that in this show.  Whatever it is, though, it warps Sonic into an alternate reality where Eggman has conquered the world, or at least Green Hill Zone.  Oh, and no; it's not that alternate reality where he's won, nor that other one people like a lot less.  Before this show even premiered, a big complaint many fans had is that it missed a great chance to revisit old Sonic continuities that had been previously established.  That was a particularly sore point because this show was made by Wildbrain, which (in tandem with SEGA, presumably) holds the rights to DiC's old Sonic cartoons, so the opportunity was definitely there.  Instead, this show teleports Sonic into alternate canons original to it; some are comparably less interesting than what we could have gotten, while the most important one bares a strong resemblance to the setting of that Freedom Fighters cartoon near and dear to many Sonic fans, while also being annoying for not just taking the opportunity to outright be it.

It's often considered bad form to judge a work for what it isn't rather than what it is, but unfortunately even by the latter metric, Sonic Prime's writing leaves a fair amount to be desired, and the first place I noticed this is in Sonic himself.  This show is meant to be canon with the games, but it also attempts to shoehorn in a character arc for Sonic, about him learning to be less of a jackass and value his friends more.  The problem with this, beyond the fact that it is quite shoehorned--but probably also stemming from that fact--is that Sonic usually doesn't feel like that jackass in this show.  On the contrary, he's frequently the one talking about how awesome friendship is, some would say to cringeworthy degrees.  It's only in flashback scenes that are put in this show to make a point of what a jackass Sonic has been that he's actually shown acting like a jackass, which makes them seem out-of-sync with his characterization the rest of the show.  Speaking of out-of-sync, while some of this show's events are played in chronological order, it also does a lot of jumping back-and-forth in time, ala Batman Begins.  So again, while starting a show with a jackass version of such an iconic character as Sonic was a risky move in itself, this show only partially commits to Sonic feeling like a jackass.  What Sonic is throughout much of this show, though, is unbelievably stupid.  Early on, he blatantly ignores several warnings not to do things, setting in motion the main conflict of the series.  Later on in the series, after figuring out that he had traveled to another universe and thus the versions of his friends he met there did not know who he was, Sonic is suddenly warped to yet another alternate universe and has to figure these things out all over again.

Another sore point about this show's writing is that it's more concerned with taking people on a wild ride full of spectacle than it is with any of it making much sense.  We're never really told why Sonic shattering the mystical crystal causes him to start warping into alternate universes, nor why no version of himself is present in these alternate universes, nor why in one of these universes Dr Eggman lives with a bunch of his weird relatives, nor why another one of the alternate universes has Green Hill Zone mostly flooded, and while I accept that these are mysteries they're holding back on explaining for later, even more basic things often go unexplained in this series.  For example, in the universe where Eggman and co rule over New Yolk City, most of the animal denizens Sonic meets seem to be unable to talk to him or even notice he's there.  You might assume that something has rendered them into some kind of zombie slaves, except you never seem them doing any sort of work, and then to complicate things even further, Tails and Big the Cat are among those animal characters but they actually can talk; why they're exempt from whatever hypnosis or some such the others are under is unclear.  Moving along, animals no longer seem to be used to power robots in this universe, nor are they transformed into robots along the lines of one of the old DiC Sonic shows, but then all of a sudden, this universe's version of Amy Rose shows up and she has been transformed into a robot, and does have an animal powering her.  So again, it feels like this show establishes weird rules that it doesn't explain and then throws in equally inexplicable exceptions to the rules to twist that knife.

A final complaint I have is with Dr. Eggman's family, or maybe alternate versions of himself or maybe just buddies: While they do get the occasional laugh, most of them are essentially one-joke characters.  Beyond Eggman himself--who so far is unfortunately not used for much more than exposition dialogue--we've got a surprisingly athletic beatnik samurai--he's okay, actually--an old man whose one joke is that he's old, a lazy slacker whose one joke is that he's always playing a game on his tablet, and a baby whose one joke is the dreaded "Comprehensible Incomprehensible" (Or is it vice-versa?) shit.  You know, the bit with a character uttering something that couldn't possibly be interpreted as coherent speech (unless it's meaning the same thing every time) and another character immediately responding in a way that lets the rest of us know what the first character was actually meaning.  I won't sugarcoat it; I absolutely HATE this trope.  I hated it in Lassie, I hated it in Star Wars, I hated it Guardians of the Galaxy, I hated it in Tangled The Series, I hated it in examples I can't remember right now, and I hate it here.  I understand that fictional media are often unrealistic, but the problem here isn't that it's unrealistic, it's that, again, this is the same fucking joke every fucking time, and often that one joke is a character's whole fucking identity.  So yeah, so far I am not not a fan of the Eggman Council, and would have preferred Eggman and his robot minions on their own; at their peak they're a lot funnier than this.

With all of this scorn dumped on Sonic Prime up front, you're probably thinking I hated it all, but in fact, there's a lot I think it does pretty well.  Watching this show was a sentimental but surreal experience that kind of felt like falling two decades back in time, to an era before the Sonic series had crapped out several of its most infamous games and Sonic Team would then scramble to tear most of the supporting cast out of important roles to appease the crass but loud critics who blamed "Sonic's crappy friends" for the series' decline.  This show puts at least some of Sonic's supporting cast--Tails the Fox, Knuckles the Echidna, Big the Cat, Rouge the Bat, and Amy the also-Hedgehog--back into the spotlight, with much of the story being about Sonic's attempts to mend relationships that have broken in the various alternate universes he visits. (Shadow is in the show too, but so far seems to be trapped between dimensions or something like that.)  Is that meant to be some "meta" apology about how this series destroyed too many potentially great things in the name of progress?  I don't know, but it does feel more like a return to the Dreamcast/Gamecube era of Sonic, and what that era's fans want, than anything we've seen for years, and I generally enjoy the way these characters are portrayed here.  

Again, though, it also feels somewhat surreal that we're back here all of a sudden with scarcely any attempt made towards easing in people who don't remember that era.  This show doesn't spend much time at all with the default versions of the cast before warping into alternate universes that throw in subversive takes on them, and I question how effective subversion can really be to people with no expectations of how these characters are "supposed to" be.  Yet simultaneously, some things about this show seem retooled to make it simple enough for children to grasp, such as the whole show so far taking place only in different versions of Green Hill Zone, and Rouge being among Sonic's core group of friends rather than an antihero and member of Team Dark, as she was the last time she was relevant in the games.  This weird combination of factors and the partial ambiguity of for whom this show is even intended just brings us back to my earlier point about how this show is less concerned with making sense than with taking viewers on a wild ride.

The thing is, it's actually pretty good at that.  Sonic Prime is structured in a similar way to many Netflix original series, with a plot that veers in a lot of unexpected directions and episodes usually ending on cliffhangers, baiting you into binge-watching.  I might have resented such emotional manipulation if there wasn't much payoff, but in fact, this show does a decent job following up on things it teases.  For example, this show has rarely teased existence of an alternate universe only to leave it immediately after.  The one time it could be argued that this happens is towards the end, where it is used to make a point about not shirking one's responsibilities, and in a wise choice, the briefly visited alternate universe is too dull to resent its briefness.  But ultimately, what lets this show pay off its suspense, is all of its action, so now let's segue again.

Round Winner: Sonic Prime.

Round 3: Action

River City Girls 2 comes armed with the same fighting system as its predecessor, and that's a good thing.  It's got two basic attack buttons, plus also a block button and a special attack button, and these, sometimes in combination with each other, can be used to execute all manner of attacks...at least eventually.  You do need to unlock the better ones, and some of these you unlock automatically as your character levels up, but others you will need to learn in dojos.  Still, it won't be long before you build an arsenal of moves that make for a satisfying experience.  The controls for most of these moves are easy to learn, with the challenge coming from knowing when to do them, and the sound design makes it all the more deliciously crunchy.  From the grunting and yelling of the characters fighting, to the smacking noises their blows make on impact, to the sweet jingle of the money they drop, and even Megan McDuffee's catchy and percussion-heavy soundtrack, this game seems well-crafted to make you feel like you're "in the zone" with its fights...but it it does ship with one unfortunate issue that worsens it.

The first River City Girls was a surprise hit, not without its critics in terms of writing (myself among them), but well-appreciated not only for its unique premise, but also its robust fighting system that superficially resembled that of old-school beat-em-ups while having a lot more moves and some very complex juggling and combo mechanics under the hood--and it all ran smoothly at 6o frames-per-second, making it a snap to control all of those complex mechanics.  Only one thing was glaringly absent from this gameplay: It didn't have online multiplayer.  People could still do co-op the old-fashioned way, sitting side-by-side in the same room, but outside of arcades, you might not be able to find people who appreciate your desire to play a game about anime schoolgirls getting into street brawls, so the lack was sorely felt and Wayforward made online play a priority for its sequel.  Even after a substantial delay, though, it hasn't been implemented without a cost.  Unlike its predecessor, River City Girls 2 initially ran only at 30 FPS, and the difference was painfully noticeable in its controls.  To its credit, Wayforward immediately provided a workaround to this issue in the form of a beta build that restores the gameplay back to its 60 FPS glory, but this does not work online, and half a month since the game's release, there still is no other fix.  As such, if you dare to play this game online you will only experience it in frustratingly bastardized form, so while this gameplay is currently just as good its predecessor's, we will need to wait longer for it to truly break the new ground we've been requesting for over three years.

Sonic Prime also has a lot of fighting; as would be expected from a Sonic property, much of it is animal-on-robot violence, though you do get the occasional exception.  While these fights keep the show energetic and compelling enough, overall they aren't very intense.  Most robotic foes go down in just one hit, and while that does, in fact, reflect how most robotic foes are in most Sonic video games, the big difference is those video games aren't relying on enemies for their main sense of excitement.  Since this show very much is, the relative lack of bite to its battles can be considered a flaw.  Instead of adding weight to much of this, the show tries to compensate by having its battles run on longer, with larger quantities of foes to fight, and at least the belligerents move about as fast as you would want from a Sonic property, but frankly, a lot of the time it just looks like characters are being thrown at other characters, often for minutes on end.  It's not outright boring, and to be fair, there's a good chance it's as light as it is because the show is primarily aimed at children, but still, other Sonic media have gotten rougher than this so I don't see why that's a valid excuse.  The best fight we had this season is, tellingly, the one that most bucks this trend, being a fight between Sonic and Shadow that was confined to a flashback.  This meant we got to see a fight that still moved quickly but also left some ambiguity as to who had the upper hand and didn't ever feel like either of the fighters were just ghosting through each other.  More of this, please.

Round Winner: River City Girls 2.

 

 Conclusion

River City Girls 2 wins this battle two-to-one but I am not done with it yet.  I should note here that while I had only just started playing it when I started this article, now that I have finished the article, I have also since beaten the final boss, but I still intend to do extra stuff and go through the same fights but with different characters, not to mention also playing the game once some of the currently rough bits have been truly patched and work better.  I have plenty more to say about this game on both a gameplay and plot level, so look for a full review some time in the future; hopefully the near future.  But if you're more of a Sonic fan, also stay tuned as I will be sharing my thoughts on Sonic Frontiers, too.