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.

River City Saga Three Kingdoms: Summer of Beat-Em-Ups Part 5

 

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.

This game approaches its soundtrack mostly in what might be the most straightforward way a Kunio game set in ancient China could, with covers of iconic Kunio songs done with iconic Chinese instruments.  The game doesn't even shy away from that stereotypical "Dingdingdingding dingding dingding diiiiing" motif that has symbolized China for decades.

 

The result, while it generally feels appropriate, is of mixed success.  Some of these songs, like the character select screen and shop themes from River City Ransom, don't exactly benefit from their new orchestration and mostly sound tacky, but others, like the Double Dragon theme song and the Sabu's Mansion theme from Kunio Tachi No Banka, (rechristened "Fancy Fight" when covered in River City Girls), sound quite spectacular.  A surprise highlight is a new theme for Misuzu, which is mostly based on her boss theme from Kunio Tachi no Banka but also incorporates some of the music from her gang's stage in the original Nekketsu Kouha Kunio Kun/Renegade--and all while also sounding suitably Chinese, too!  

 

One conspicuous absence is the original "Running Around the City" theme from River City Ransom, and instead our standard overworld theme is one of several original compositions in this game.  It's probably for the best that they didn't try to make a rockabilly song work with Chinese instrumentation, but what we get instead loops far too soon for how often it plays in the game.  It ended up getting grating and I was happy when entering towns, as they gave me a break from that.

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.

River City Knights of Justice: Summer of Beat-Em-Ups, Part 2

 

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!

River City Tokyo Rumble: Summer of Beat-Em Ups, Part 1

Forward

At this point, I have undoubtedly discussed the River City series more than any other on this blog.  I've spent a lot of time waiting for River City Girls 2 to debut so I can enjoy it, criticize it, or most likely both, but that isn't the only thing 2022 has on offer.  We also have known for a while that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is coming this year, and in fact more recently I learned it will premiere this week.  Meanwhile, because the 3DS eShop is circling the drain, I decided I might as well buy those River City games that actually got western releases, and play through them so I can maintain my proud position as a know-it-all who likes to lecture players who first learned of the series from River City Girls.  Then recently, we also learned that River City Saga: Three Kingdoms is getting a release over here.

In other words, these months are quite overstocked with beat-em-ups I intend to play.  Most from the River City series, but of course I can't say no to the Turtles.  And given I'm going in so deep to this genre, I figured, why not blog about my experiences?  So I'm doing that now.  This series will feature reviews of beat-em-up games I played this summer, and we start it with River City: Tokyo Rumble.

At A Glance

The first of ARC's Kunio games to come west, Tokyo Rumble will feel mostly familiar to those who have played River City Ransom.  A gang called the Lion Alliance is muscling in on Tokyo, so Kunio teams up with a few of his friends/rivals to defeat them.  This means you can always have an AI-controlled ally tagging along and assisting you.  You start with Riki but eventually Shinji and Misuzu also join, though only one can follow you at a time.  

Welcome to River City (Or is it Tokyo?)

As is a proud tradition in River City games, this isn't your standard left-to-right scrolling beat-em-up; you can explore the city at your own pace and go where you choose, to an extent, but the set-up does have a twist that makes it a bit more confusing and restrictive.  The city is divided into several districts, and often when you reach an end of one you'll just wrap around to its other end--or sometimes it's a dead-end.  To get into any other districts, you'll need to take a train, and destinations only unlock after you defeat bosses--and the order you defeat them in is set in stone.  Once you get this, the nearest train station is never hard to find, and a minimap does at least remind you what district you must visit to progress the plot.  However, because you're not bopping your way through most of this game's terrain as a means of getting elsewhere, it can be hard to remember the layouts of the districts themselves, and this can be an issue when you revisit them.

Take in the Sights

I've been a pretty big critic of ARC's take on the Kunio series ever since they began making new entries on the 3DS, and this is because the graphics, I felt, were a big step in the wrong direction.  The big offending issue is that canonically, Kunio is supposed to have brown-to-ginger hair, and Riki is supposed to have blue-to-purple hair.  This has always been the case, but early 8-bit Kunio games had to simplify them to having just black hair. (8-bit sprites have substantial limits on how many colors they can use.)  As soon as the 16-bit era rolled around, the in-game sprites started to represent their canon hair colors. This remained the case for the new/remade Kunio games that Million (who had the license at the time) released on the Game Boy Advance and DS, including the series' brief  two-game stint in 3D, and it reached its peak in the gloriously colorful Kunio MMORPG, whose cancellation I still resent.  But when ARC System Works took over the series, starting on the 3DS they reverted Kunio and Riki back to their 8-bit, black-haired sprites, while sticking them in a 3D environment that didn't match well.  Also, while it would be one thing if ARC wanted to reboot the series so Kunio and Riki just canonically had black hair, they did not; ARC's art of the characters still depicts them as having more colorful hair, and being more colorful in general.  I was instantly turned off and wrote this off as an ill-advised attempt to follow in the footsteps of Mega Man 9 and 10.

Having now given this game a fair chance, it's better looking than I initially thought.  The environments are colorful and detailed, some of the other characters also have a lot of detail, and there is even some exploration of other body shapes with some characters, which allows them to convey more than they would be able to if they stuck strictly to the chibi-styled sprites of the Downtown Nekketsu sub-series.  The one character who seems like a graphical misstep is Misuzu, as the game uses her sprites from the home console port of the original Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-Kun, and as that game used a different artstyle, she doesn't really look like she fits in with the rest of the characters--yes, that's even by her own freakish stgandards.  Otherwise, while this game's graphics aren't impressive on either a technical or aesthetic level, they aren't generally ugly.

In spite of the above praise, the dated sprites for Kunio and Riki still look bad; in fact, the fact that many other characters are more colorful makes them look even worse.  It seems like a self-evident axiom that a story's heroes are supposed to stand out compared to everyone else, and to be fair, maybe because this is a Japanese game, they felt it best to make Kunio and Riki stand out more by looking more Japanese than other characters.  However, that still wouldn't explain why the art that ARC is making of these characters contradicts this, and a sprite also can have black hair while not being 8-bit.

 Pump You Up

As is the case with most River City beat-em ups, this is also an RPG.  Compared to River City Ransom, roleplaying elements have seen some changes in that few items you consume actually increase your stats.  Instead what you get is more like what you would see in most RPGs; your characters level up from experience, and you can boost their stats a bit further by equipping clothes.  While there remains a lot of food to eat in this game, unfortunately none of it does almost anything but heal you and the only difference between most menu items is how much they heal; the exception being those items that revive knocked out partners instead.  However, with carry-out items that let you heal in the battlefield, you can only buy so many of one type, so there is a reason to buy multiple types.  In fact, it's all-but necessary; more on that later. 

Bigger Stories Aren't Always Better Stories

This game has a detailed plot and a lot of dialogue by River City standards, and that isn't necessarily a good thing.  Let it be acknowledged that Kunio is to street brawling games what Mario is to platforming games, and on the one hand, that makes him a very important character in a very important franchise.  On the other, it makes him an unapologetically simple character.  In this game, at least, there isn't a whole lot to Kunio besides that he loves fighting and that he's great at fighting. (Assuming that you're a good player, of course.)  Thus most of this game's plot is about fighting thugs, then bosses, then more thugs, and more bosses.  The obvious objection is that this is true of the vast majority of beat-em-up plots, and indeed it is, but my issue with this one reflects the rule of thumb I mentioned in my Pokemon Masters review: A narrative's quality has to scale with its presence, or else what was a pleasantly simple story can easily become a boring or even annoying one.  For example, there's no need to make a few short and functional phrases good in themselves, but if you're going to inundate players with dialogue, it really had better be entertaining.  

Unfortunately, this game has plenty of dialogue, and the overall story it tells veers towards being annoying.  Because this is a story where violence really is the answer--every single time--just about every major plot point is made to validate a protagonist who isn't all that likable.  Kunio does have a strong sense of justice, but he's a lazy student, and in this story he's also a horndog who constantly flirts with his teacher--those last two things naturally annoy her.  It's just frustrating to sit through a story where what should be character flaws never really hinder that character and the character is never forced to grow or apologize for any of them.  Kunio's obsession with fighting is rewarded because it happens to be the thing that is needed to save the day here, and because it saves the day, his lust and book-dumbness just get overlooked.  His allies Shinji and Misuzu end up being substantially more interesting and entertaining characters, which seems like a misstep. The bosses have a bit of personality, but their dialogue too often boils down to a loop of: 

Boss 1: Now I'll beat you!

Boss 2: You beat Boss 1?!  No way; now I'll beat you!

Boss 3: You beat Boss 2?!  No way; now I'll beat you!

Boss 4: You beat Boss 3?!  No way; now I'll beat you!

If you find yourself annoyed by this extended spiel about the game's plot and dialogue, when we haven't even gotten to the combat yet, well, what you feel here is basically how I felt playing it.  When plot and dialogue aren't interesting and they don't serve any other purpose than to justify people taking it to the streets and punching each other, you might as well not have them and just skip right to the fights themselves.  When nobody has much noticeable characterization, a shallow protagonist doesn't have to get on people's nerves, and when dialogue that is redundant is at least scarce, it doesn't cross the line to being tediously repetitive.  With that summation of this game's biggest flaw, let's get to what is predictably it's biggest strength.

Enough Talk; Let's Fight! (Wait; have I said that already?)

This game's controls are, for better or worse, rather similar to what you got on the NES; there is a punch button, a kick button, and while jump also gets its own button now, it's still possible to jump by pressing the punch and kick buttons together.  That all works fine, but also as with the original River City Ransom, blocking is just a context-sensitive action tied to the punch button, and this makes for some messy early-game battles.  This game adds some judo moves to the mix; you can grab characters just by bumping into them, after which you can do a variety of throws, and it can be incredibly satisfying to throw an enemy into other enemies.  It's just not all that practical much of the time, as you'll spend a lot of this game flanked, meaning the relative slowness of grappling will leave you open to attack.  Fortunately, combat gets much better as you learn more moves.  As with in River City Ransom, you do this by reading books; they're expensive and some of them are only sold in secret stores you have to find, but they're worth it.  While up-close combat doesn't go far enough beyond button-mashing, at least that can't win you many bouts on its own unless you're at a much higher level.  Special moves tend to require you to jump or run away before slamming back into your enemies, giving combat a fast and exciting guerilla feel.  Others tend to propel your enemies away from you instead.  They aren't the smartest, but knowing which moves are safe to do when, keeps this game from being mindless, and most enemies go down fast enough if you're the right level and know how to fight them.  It's a fun time, whose only real fault is how much of it is basically the same fun time you could have in the original River City Ransom.

Then you get to the bosses, and what had been a fun time soon gets tedious.  While they have more fancy moves than the basic grunts, bosses in this game aren't really any smarter than them; instead the difficulty comes from just how staggeringly many hitpoints they have.  Also, these are not your typical video game bosses who follow a pattern.  Their behavior is random, which means that this is almost certainly not the sort of game where you can get good enough to avoid taking any damage, or to pull off a move that is difficult to execute but strong enough to end fights in a hurry.  Without huge amounts of grinding that would become tedious in themselves, your characters simply won't be strong enough to take down these bosses quickly, no matter how good you are at the game, and that means bosses, particular the last ones, are defeated not so much by flashy martial arts as by pausing and accessing your inventory.  Yes, here is where we return to that pinned point from the "Pump You Up" section; defeating bosses in this game is often a matter of stockpiling heaps of food, drinks and medicine, and then constantly accessing the pause menu to consume these so you can outlast bosses, whittling them down slowly because they can't heal in kind.  While the combat against these bosses is still engaging in itself, the fact that you're just going to be doing the same sorts of things repeatedly wears out its welcome.

Closing Thoughts

River City Tokyo Rumble is a serviceable game.  It's an easy game to pick up and play, its core combat is fun and has a surprising amount of depth when you factor in the special moves you can learn, and the script has some occasionally funny jokes.  Compared to the original River City Ransom, it's a step forward in several areas, and the combination of beat-em-up and roleplaying elements remains a good one. However, this game also shows the pratfalls of this sort of setting, characters and mechanics when playing up the RPG side of that formula.  As this review series goes on, we'll learn that ARC's take on River City does get better...but unfortunately, first it gets worse...