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...
Warning: This blog post contains spoilers of the plot of River City Girls, as well as the game that inspired it, Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio Tachi No Banka. Such are necessary for speculating where things go from here. I'm writing this with the assumption that you have beaten River City Girls and seen both of the game's endings1, though I'll provide some other information on the rest of the series.
Beating a Dead Horse
The last time I talked here about River City Girls--or the Kunio Kun series in general--the game had not even released yet. Back then I was solely addressing the characterization of the demo and how it had me worried. Turns out, River City Girls and its titular protagonists were far more amiably written than the vaguely Ren & Stimpy-like dynamic2 of the demo implied, and I grew to love this game's take on most of the characters--up until the ending, on which subject I will join the chorus of voices declaring that they derailed their characters and made them look like jerks for the sake of a meta-joke that, upon closer examination, isn't even valid by its own declared logic.
If you want a good explanation of why, I refer you to Flodo McFloodiloo's posts (yes; all of them from that link onward) in this Reddit debate. While Wayforward at least attempted to address all of the complaints with a patch that let you see a happier ending if you smashed all of the Sabu statues to unlock a fight against Hasebe and Mami, this happier ending remains attached to the fourth-wall-breaking comments of those bosses, which remains the worst part of the game's writing. There is likely no repairing that moment of the plot that was wrecked by faulty application of real-world trivia, but as Flodo said, it might be alright if the sequel just pretends it never happened and moves on, giving the protagonists some motivations beyond besides their creepy stalker tendencies.3
A Good History Lesson, the Likes of Which Don't Get You a Good Career
If you do a search for the Kunio Kun series online, you may discover documents stating that it is known as the "River City" series in English-speaking regions, or vice-versa. That's a fair statement, but only if we're talking about how it's been for a little over a decade, and this series is now 35 years old. Since its inception, it's been many weird places, nearly dead, owned by several different companies, and localized in so many different ways I'm not even going to count, but something pertinent to this blog is that when it was owned by Technos, the Kunio series essentially had two distinct branches. The first of these began in what was also the first Kunio game ever, entitled simply Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun. This may not be the most dark and serious game ever made, but it was still noteworthy compared to many games that came afterward and would become more famous, for its realistically proportioned characters, treatment of gang violence as a serious matter, and the presence of ice picks and a gun making it more serious still. The success of this game should not be understated; it not only launched a series but also set the standard for what beat-em-ups would become afterword; early uses of 3d and enemies who were, compared to some other genres, smarter and tougher.
What it did not set was the overall tone of the Kunio Kun series. The very next game in the series, Nekketsu High School Dodgeball Club, was...silly. The mere subject of dodgeball doesn't seem to carry as much gravity as gang violence, and although the characters can somehow kill each other with the balls, it's done in a cartoony manner of angels rising out of their bodies, and they can always come back, somehow. Furthermore, the characters in the game have more cartoonish proportions, with stocky bodies and disproportionately large heads. Interestingly enough, this was not originally conceived of as a Kunio game, but Kunio was stuck in because his first game was a hit. Odd origin aside, this game was a success too, and established what can be considered the other, goofier branch of the Kunio series. Despite not being the original, this branch, with its increasingly chibi4 characters and cartoony physics, mostly became the series norm. Then there was the issue with localization, which made things even more complicated.
Both of the games described above managed to get American releases, albeit localized. The first Kunio game was localized as Renegade, the second as Super Dodgeball, and the localizations cared little for retaining any indication that they were part of the same series. Kunio was renamed Mr. K in the Renegade, which also got its graphics altered in the western release to look less Japanese, while in Super Dodgeball his existence was essentially erased as the localization team re-centered what little plot it had around an American team. There's a Japanese team, but it doesn't have Kunio. Renegade would subsequently get a number of western-developed sequels, but none of the other Japanese Kunio games made in its style were released in the west; instead, when the west got Kunio games at all, they were from the more prolific, cartoonish branch of the series. By far, the biggest success among them was Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, localized as River City Ransom.
It deserved the success. While the original Kunio game set many of the beat-em-up genre standards, River City Ransom blends that genre with the roleplaying game (RPG) genre, giving players a more open world to explore and letting them build up their characters' abilities by buying food and other items at malls, using money they earn from defeating enemies. As was standard for Kunio games, the localization changed the characters' appearances and names; such as Kunio being renamed Alex and Riki being renamed Ryan. Though this series had been ancestral to most subsequent beat-em-ups, River City Ransom had still found an identity apart from them, ensuring that it, along with its chibi sprites and silly tone, remained the series' standard.
The most famous of several memes the game spawned.
Except when they weren't. From time to time the series' original creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto stepped back in to lead new Kunio projects, often with more realistically-proportioned characters and generally with more serious stories. This reached its peak on Super Famicom's Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio Tachi no Banka, a gritty and mature game wherein Kunio is framed for a murder, and thus must break out of jail and clear his name with his friend Riki, his girlfriend Misako, and Riki's girlfriend Kyouko5. Contrary to popular belief, this is not the first game where Misako appeared (that was Nekketsu High School Dodgeball Club: Soccer Story), but it is the first game where she is playable, and it is Kyouko's first appearance...and also her last, for 19 years. The game's plot is not exactly deep, but it's very serious, containing a moment where the villain shoots the girls; traumatizing everyone and prompting Kunio and Riki to go forth and take him down and once and for all. Misako and Kyouko survive, but that is not revealed until the end. The game was never released in the west at the time, and as Technos would go bankrupt soon after, it remained relatively obscure until recently, as would the Kunio Kun series.
Talk about mood whiplash!
Some time after Technos's closure, people who had worked on it regrouped and acquired the license. Production and release initially mirrored the direction they had taken in the Technos era; namely in that most games wouldn't get released outside Japan and those that did got localized in a variety of different ways. As it had already been localized before, Down Nekketsu Monogotari would be released stateside as River City Ransom EX, with the same localized names from the original American release despite graphics not being changed for this one. The next Kunio game to be released in the USA was Chō Nekketsu Kōkō Kunio kun Dojjibōru Bu, or as it became known in the western release, Super Dodgeball Brawlers. This is of note for actually keeping all of the Japanese names in the English version.6
Then in 2010, everything changed. Kunio-kun no Chou Nekketsu! Daiundoukai was released in the west as River City Super Sports Challenge, with the Japanese names intact, and this would be the standard for all Japanese-developed Kunio games since. Since then, River City has been the series' official western name, which means more than ever before, most people saw this series through the silly, cartoony, meme-filled lens of River City Ransom.
Thus the River City Girls Were Born!
Thus it was the case with me. I learned of this series by reading about the original NES RCR, then entered it with the GBA remake of that game and discovered the rest of the series online. That was also the case with Wayforward's Adam Tierney. He came to this series with a sense of levity, and as such. when he discovered Kunio Tachi no Banka, as he has recounted many times, his main takeaway from that overall dark game was his amusement at seeing rather diminutive girls taking down much larger opponents. He proposed to the current Kunio license holder, ARC System Works, that he would like to make a new game starring these girls, and they greenlit the project.
The resulting game, the first River City Girls, certainly deserves that name. It was probably inevitable that it would get a name starting with "River City", but while Adam Tierney was inspired to make it by playing Kunio Tachi no Banka,and it's the first Kunio game in a long time not to use a chibi art style, River City Girls mostly resembles River City Ransom in not only its humor, but also its RPG gameplay mechanics and more open-world structure. Though its plot is wrecked by the fourth wall humor in its secret ending and some of the things shown earlier aren't fully explained, it generally functions as a self-contained story with a consistent humorous tone. However, it's popularity has prompted Wayforward to push for both a sequel and a port of the game that inspired it, and this is going to highlight just how very, very different in tone they really are. In fact, they're not only different in tone, but as ShaggyTurtleStudios puts it, probably in different universes.
Though this is not outright stated, it seems rather necessary when what things can and can't happen in a game, and how they're regarded by people within that game, are so different. In Kunio Tachi no Banka, being shot by a handgun requires Misako and Kyouko to be hospitalized, and Kunio and Riki fear they will die, and regard death as permanent. Worth mentioning is that in that game, each character has his or her own separate life bar, but if anyone's life bar drains to zero, the game is over for everyone, so the player, too, has to treat death as a big deal. By contrast, in River City Girls, Misako and Kyouko fall off a tall building, rather nonchalantly plan on how to land gracefully, and after crashing through a roof, just remark that they'll be sore in the morning. If a protagonist in River City Girls is killed, represented by the Super Dodgeball ball angel rising out of his or her body, that character's ally can assist by stomping on his or her corpse to revive him or her, and even if that fails, simply entering a new room will also revive the ally. The plot of Kunio Tachi no Banka has Kunio thrown in jail because people believe he killed someone by running her over with a motorcycle. In River City Super Sports Challenge, Kunio can push an opponent into the path of a train as a way of beating that opponent in a foot race, and nobody cares! Though these games have the same characters and the same names between them, at least before localization, some of their worlds have quite different physical rules from one another and as such, their characters have different expectations.
Oh Man; Another Tangent?!
Think of it like Batman. Almost everyone can recognize Batman, even if they don't know him well. There are some standards, like Batman's costume having bat ears and him using gadgets. But Batman stories are also set in multiple different universes where things work very differently from one another. Very few people would suspect that these two videos are set in the same universe.
And in fact, they're not. DC Comics' policy officially recognizes that there are many different versions of their universe with different versions of the characters within them. The same is true of Marvel, a factor that has become well-enough known that it was used as the premise of the movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Characters from one universe can visit another, and it can be very entertaining, but it's important to their policy to emphasize their differences.
By contrast, Wayforward,in re-branding Kunio Tachi no Banka as River City Girls Zero, feels like it's acting like those differences don'texist between Kunio games7. This has the potential to put their writers in a bind, because having some clear rules that govern what happens in a fictional universe helps determine how characters ought to act and also the sort of stories one can tell in them.
Consider, for example, the necessary differences in how a cliff would be treated in a James Bond film vs a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoon. In a Bond film, anyone who falls off the cliff will die, graphically in some, and thus if James Bond fights someone near a cliff, the fight is suspenseful; each time someone is pushed close to the cliff's edge, we know it could be the end of that person. By contrast, in a Roadrunner and Coyote cartoon, a fall off a cliff will not kill a character. That character (usually Coyote) will certainly be hurt by the fall, and there may be a graphic depiction of sorts; maybe the character's body will be squashed into itself like an accordion, or maybe the character will make a hole in the ground shaped like his body, but they won't go the realistic route and kill the character in bloody explosion, which means that not only can a fall off a cliff be played for comedic effect, but it need not even be the end of the story. No matter how much pain we see Coyote (or any other of the many cartoon characters who fall off cliffs) in, the show can move on to another scene wherein the character is all healed and ready for another fight, much like the players you could murder with your super dodgeball in the Kunio dodgeball games. But such a cartoony approach to physics and biology isn't exactly a blank check to write whatever you want, as once you establish that such a fall is relatively inconsequential, if you even try to create suspense by making Roadrunner and Coyote have an epic battle at the edge of a cliff, you won't succeed. Audiences no longer have any reason to expect this to be a make-or-break moment for a character, so they won't8.
There is cause for concern there, but above all, curiosity. It's probably fair to mention that I don't have a particular preference for a game being lighter or darker; the key question is how to juggle the two. Based on the statement there, it sounds like it may be a similar situation to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Avengers movies. In those, the world is under huge threats, and the heroes have arrived to stop them, but they still manage to bring the quips and do a lot of good-natured bonding in the process. Possibly reaffirming this theory is that Wayforward earlier announced that River City Girls 2 would feature "the return of an old foe". That is a plot formula I really like, but it's still prudent to consider what contributes well to such a story, and what detracts. There are, of course, multiple factors, but they all feed into one point that I think is of the utmost importance: I have to like the protagonists. Moreover, this admiration has to extend all the way through the story and I must feel rewarded for liking them. Fortunately, as I will explain, I think we're on the right track.
Here I must highlight what the first River City Girls did well, but also what it did not. The beginning of the game I once found so iffy (that is, the part of it up until the first boss), I no longer have as much issue with, and this is because I played the whole game and saw its full characterization of Misako and Kyouko so far. Contrary to what I expected, Misako is not just a shallow, violent grump, but rather a pragmatic adventurer who has long been willing to defend her friend, Kyouko against bullies. Kyouko might still be a bit too stupid at times, but in this case "too stupid" means "stupid enough in some scenes that it's hard to believe her more competent behavior in others, which is a problem in many cartoon comedies, and though I'd prefer her stupider moments weren't there, her better bits in the game are very lovable. Even Kunio gets a small but likable bit of characterization in a cutscene before fighting Yamada. However, then there's those endings, which as ShaggyTurtleStudios put it, make everyone seem like a bad person, even though we heard a lot of dialogue and saw manga cutscenes up until that point that made them seem like good ones--also, actually showed the girls being in a relationship with Kunio and Riki.
What was going on? Was it all just a hallucination? Wayforward hasn't really answered, so we were left with the unpleasant feeling of characters we loved--some we loved even before this game brought them all new levels of recognition--being ruined, at least as viable heroes. We got that now infamous real-world explanation of why Wayforward wrote in that twist ending, but in-universe, what all happened? How much does each character remember? From which games? How much of what they remember is even real? Was it all just a dream? We don't know. When asked about it, Adam Tierney has said it's best left up to player interpretation.
In terms of sequel potential, though, of course it can't be. It's hard to tell if at the time of writing their original game's story, they knew that it would become incredibly popular and warrant making a sequel, but it did, and they're making a sequel. While we still know very little about it, the most exciting thing about this, for many fans who weren't amused at the original's twist ending, is that it almost demands Wayforward explains just what was going on in the original, and also to salvage its four playable characters as likable people who have other motivations besides just shallow lust. It's nearly impossible to do the same twist ending twice, the game will have additional playable characters, and each of the characters will have unique dialogue, so this time around, Misako and Kyouko have to be motivated by something other than rescuing Kunio and Riki from a threat that didn't exist. This time, it's nearly certain that there's a real threat. That is good. Also, River City Girls being as popular as it is means that regardless of what mixed messages it actually sent, most players in most of the world will think of its protagonists as canon couples.
The above describe all of the factors entailed in simply making a sequel to River City Girls, but there are additional ones added by Wayforward's decision to localize Kunio Tachi no Banka as River City Girls Zero and tie the three games' plots together.
History is the Key to the Future (Though Not to a Good Job)
First, giving the game wider exposure to people outside Japan makes it harder to trivialize. ShaggyTurtleStudios and Flodo_McFloodiloo both accurately assessed the issue with how the events of that game are regarded in River City Girls, at least by seemingly everyone other than Misako and Kyouko. What should have been traumatic and emotionally bonding events were discounted because they took place in just one game that was obscure outside of Japan and 25 years old at the time River City Girls was released, and players who weren't really aware of that game might have had an easier time laughing at the implication that Misako and Kyouko were just delusional stalkers who couldn't move on. Likewise, they have no reason to be upset that Kunio and Riki act like jerks, at least in the game's "bad ending". The video from Roger Van Der Weide that I linked in my last River City Girls post also had some nice insight into dark comedy. It needs extra context to work, and a common way to make unjust scenarios look funny is by detachment; that is, removing the humanity of emotion of characters so they can only be the butt of jokes. "However, we only laugh when we're detached. We don't want to see the guy who comically fell on his face on YouTube to be actually dying in a hospital bed." Having no personal memory of the game with serious scenarios and these characters being genuinely heroic, assists in such detachment.
However, by re-releasing Kunio Tachi no Banka and declaring that it is the predecessor to River City Girls, they are effectively signaling that the actual events of that game do matter. It's no longer old, it's no longer all-but unknown in the USA, and when it's brought back specifically to be the backstory of the River City Girls series, characters in that series can't ignore its events any longer. If they do, they'll annoy many players who, thanks to now having that game fresh in their minds, can't ignore them either.
Second, as jarring as it is how different the two games are in tone, I feel reminding everyone of Kunio Tachi no Banka helps give these protagonists a sort of moral anchor. I brought up Batman above as a better-known example of a brand that can go all sorts of stories in all sorts of universes with all sorts of tones. It can be very serious, or it can be very silly. But there are some things one can only take so far. The reason many people can enjoy all of these Batman media is because they're willing to follow Batman himself through them. He's been established as a character people admire and relate to, and to make them like the ride, some things about Batman, such as his motives, have to stay intact. His behavior in the moment has to reflect those motives, or at least, not contradict them. The big constant of having witnessed his parents being murdered in an alley making Batman dedicate his life and resources to fighting crime must be intact and it must matter. If Batman falls short of how he should act based on that past, audiences expect him to right himself by the story's end.
This is why All-Star Batman and Robin was so widely despised but The LEGO Batman Movie was generally well-received. Watching Batman do a lot of odd things can be very amusing, because many of those don't go against his origin as traumatized child, but if Batman ever starts tormenting children it's going to feel very wrong. Maybe not impossible to laugh at, but as Roger said, this sort of laughter would come at the expense of telling a proper story with Batman. There may be more debate on just how far Batman should become obsessed with a past-dictated moral code, but I think my point on this much is clear.
There's little doubt that these characters aren't like Batman, but if you play at least their fighting games that have a story beyond "there's a tournament", then it's still obvious that they're characters. In River City Girls Kunio and Riki barely function as characters because they're mostly just an objective, but inviting that games' players to play a game with those characters in a serious narrative sets them up to understand them as people. They're not deep; they're rough and hedonistic, but they're also dedicated friends who won't stand for the strong exploiting the meek. Misako and Kyouko, admittedly, didn't have as much personality in Kunio Tachi no Banka, beyond just being girlfriends,but that still puts them in a different context when they all have to save the day. There's something endearing about the concept of people you wouldn't normally think of as hero material being forced into a corner together and going up against a truly evil force, and once people have tasted that, they may well want to taste it again.
Conclusion (What Took You So Long?!)
Now, all of the above does not absolutely guarantee that Wayforward will stick this landing. They might still screw the plot of River City Girls 2 up. They might even make some changes to Kunio Tachi no Banka that ruin a lot of it, and if they do that, then the plot of River City Girls 2 may feel dead on arrival. However, it's not like the plot of the first River City Girls is a constant deluge of bad writing; it was, I probably wouldn't have kept playing it. So making a better plot doesn't really demand the writers get better at their job, so much as notice what bits were really odious in the original and not do anything like that here.
Note: Don't watch that movie on the left, regardless of what it is currently titled.
However, at least Wayforward is being completely honest about what they're doing. And the game is more enjoyable than Super K.
So for now, I patiently await their attempts at establishing a good narrative. I hope I get one, but if I don't, at least I should be able to make one Hell of a blog post about it! It might even be longer than this one!
Notes:
1. The game always had two final bosses, one of which could only be fought using an item unlocked after beating the other, and the bosses had unique conversations, but initially the manga cutscenes that played after the bosses were exactly the same. A patch eventually was made that changed the cutscene to a happier ending if you choose to fight the secret boss.
2. In other words, the rather common dynamic of a cheerful but more naive character paired with a grouchy but more insightful character.
3. You may note that their relationship seeming built on little more than shallow lust was also a big issue I cited about the demo. While the ensuing game did give the heroines more positive traits and made them likable characters, that problem with them was quite revived in the game's endings.
4. "Chibi" is a common Japanese term for character designs that look "boxed in and have disproportionately large heads compared to their bodies; Hello Kitty being perhaps the best known example.
5. This is not an easy name to romanize. Some Japanese words have vowel-sounds prolonged and while Japanese spelling conventions are generally much more consistent than English ones, a rare exception is prolonged "o" sounds; they are spelled by adding a u after the o, but pronounced as simply an o held longer. Thus with this name, I spell it "Kyouko", which is also how the fan-translation of Kunio Tachi no Banka spelled it; however, River City Girls did not attempt to maintain the prolonged vowel so both spells and pronounce it "Kyoko".
6. However, this was not the first Kunio game ever to do so; that was the Neo-Geo Super Dodgeball game.
7. Notice how in the linked Silicon Era article, the upcoming titles are immediately referred to as "two new games in the River City Girls universe", though to be fair that may just be how that article's writer interprets it and not Wayforward's actual stance.
8. This, too, may remind you of the sentiments I expressed in that post I did based on this game's demo. As with character personalities, warping reality for the sake of delivering a joke can be very effective, but it makes it harder to tell meaningful stories that appeal to other emotions. I plan to return to this theme in a later post, wherein I do a SpongeBob Squarepants retrospective.
A note before going into detail about this game: I am up to Chapter 10 in its Story Mode, have completed just one "Event" so far, and haven't obtained anywhere close to all the characters, so the opinions expressed here are to some degree tentative. Nevertheless, I feel I have spent enough time with this game that I can now say a lot about what I do and don't like about it. Onto the details.
Hey; how did you know I wore a ring?! Or were you talking about yours?
Foreward
In case you haven't heard, Pokemon Masters is a mobile platform spin-off of the Pokemon series, and while it keeps the collecting aspect of the core series, this time each Pokemon obtained has a human trainer to go with it; trainers brought back from all previous generations of Pokemon thus far. In fact, these human trainers are what you collect directly, their (under most circumstances) one-Pokemon-each forming what is known as a "sync pair" with them, and them all having gathered on the Island of Pasio to compete in a special tournament called the Pokemon Masters League, and their dialogue and interactions with each other and the player occupy a lot of the story now. This new focus on a previously underrepresented aspect of the Pokemon series proves to be double-edged; displaying some admirable creativity and passion, but with frequent reminders that this isn't what the series was designed to do.
Story Time
I've read it said in multiple other places that this game has good writing. By the standards set by other Pokemon games, that's a fair assessment. Characters speak in ways that fit their archetypes, occasionally their dialogue is relatable, and on some rare occasions it can be funny. However, the problem is that this still is a Pokemon game, so not much is really going on in it to foster stimulating conversation. The vast majority of what everyone talks about is Pokemon, a fair amount of talk about Pokemon is about them battling, and a fair amount of that Pokemon battle talk is about battling in the Pokemon Masters League tournament, which in typical Pokemon fashion takes center stage even though there's also a rival and an evil team to take on.
Well this sounds exciting! Except that fight never happens.
Yes; such shallow plot, characterization and dialogue are typical of Pokemon games, and that wasn't a big deal in games where plot, characterization and dialogue weren't the big draw anyway, but in this game they are, and having to wade through so much more of the same gets tiresome fast. There are some dialogue trees in the process, but no choice really makes any difference besides sometimes getting a different response.
There's no greater testament to how much this game's banking on character appeal and dialogue than the "Sync Pair Stories". These side missions, of which each sync pair has at least one, mostly have no actual gameplay; merely many lines of dialogue to read through or pretend you're reading through as you keep tapping the screen. They aren't what I'd call optional, as they grant you extra gems that can be used for the game's "GachaPon" system, which both unlocks new characters and can help power up characters you already own. (More on that later)
For a game whose appeal is supposed to be its characters, it doesn't focus nearly enough on making its characters appealing. One of the most immediately noticeable missteps of the game's story is that while the first two allies it grants the player are Brock and Misty, presumably due to them being Ash's traveling companions in the first three seasons of the anime, their personalities here bear no resemblance to those of their anime counterparts. Granted, the anime is divisive even among Pokemon fans, with some opining that it makes the whole franchise look too childish, but since these characters are obviously there for people who do like the anime, lacking parity just makes them feel hollow. Brock being constantly lovestruck and Misty having a hot temper may not be the deepest character traits and their appeal is subjective, but at least they're something. Brock and Misty in this game don't have much of anything to their personalities.
Also noticeable is that the graphics and voice acting don't do a very thorough job of bringing these characters to life. In still photos, Pokemon Masters looks quite good; while I wish most characters weren't so skinny and it seems like their upper bodies are a bit too small compared to their lower bodies, the vibrant colors and cell-shading give it an appropriately animesque look that's easy on the eyes. In motion, though, this game can stumble into the uncanny valley, with animations that seem poorly utilized or at times outright unfinished. Cutscenes progress as you click through lines of dialogue, and while the game is waiting for you to move on, characters might freeze in an awkward pose, or cycle repeatedly through an animation that seems like it's only supposed to be played once and then stop at the end.
Misty's mouth is not moving during that caption; it is just frozen in that open pose.
Then there are moments where dialogue text refers to things happening which clearly aren't, such as Korrina saying to watch her do her rolling axe kick and not doing it, or Blaine telling Flannery to get back up when she's already standing. Voice acting, meanwhile, is constantly like that, with every character's voice being limited to an introduction speech and a few catchphrases. Those catchphrases do well enough to add personality to battles, but they're spruced into text dialogue that is saying different things; sometimes very different.
So in short, a good rule of thumb for game narratives
should be that their quality should increase with their presence, and
this one's quality has increased, but not nearly as much as its presence
has. If only they let people talk about something other than Pokemon, even things that seem as mundane as taxes, vacuum cleaning and hiphop, they might manage to give people comparable appeal to Pokemon. But still, at least it has the things the Pokemon games are good at to fall back on, right? Somewhat.
Enough Talk; Let's Fight!
Combat in the traditional Pokemon games is turn-based, usually one-on-one, occasionally two-on-two, or very rarely three-on-three, utilizing four moves per-Pokemon, each with a limited number of uses, and an expanded "Rock Paper Scissors" system of strengths and weaknesses to the Pokemon and their moves. This game's battle system bears an obvious resemblance to those, but almost everything has been altered to some degree. Combat is now in real-time, the four-moves of every sync pair are split between the trainer's moves (most of which affect status) and the Pokemon's moves (most of which damage other Pokemon), and each sync pair only has one strength and weakness compared to others. Often, they're based on how the Pokemon's type worked in the core series, but with only one power relationship in each direction allowed, it can only go so far. Finally, while the trainers' moves still have a limited number of total uses, Pokemon moves have switched to using up stores of an energy meter that gradually recharges. (Generally the better the move, the more energy it costs.) Finally, bit by bit super attacks called "Sync Moves" charge up, which can make a big difference between victory and defeat.
All of the pros and cons surrounding basically every move lend the combat in Pokemon Masters far more depth than you'd expect from a free-to-play game on a non-game-focused platform; possibly even enough to garner the affection of fans of the core Pokemon titles, despite the reduced use of type effectiveness. In stark contrast to the narrative portions of the game, you can't just click through battles and expect to win unless you're a much higher level than the opponent; you constantly have to think. (You can set an AI to fight battles for you, but it's not very smart.) That's good.
However, some of the limitations placed on moves slow things down far more than they should in a real-time combat game, and worse still, keep the team mechanics from reaching their full potential much of the time. The aforementioned energy meter is unrealistically shared by all three Pokemon on a team, and while sometimes being unrealistic can lead to better gameplay, it really doesn't here. If a Pokemon's attacks have an advantage over an opponent (and it's easy to adjust your team so that they will), the best strategy is usually to fire off these super-effective attacks (or just one, repeatedly) as quickly as possible, hogging up most if not all of the energy bar. As a result, in most matches I have fought, there's at least one Pokemon that I don't use for anything besides an extra target for opponents to hopefully attack instead of my more effective Pokemon--and in some matches, two Pokemon might be ignored in kind.
Come on, refill! Cross Poison! Cross Poison!
Another place where unrealistic mechanics bog the gameplay down is the relationship between Pokemon and their trainers. They're obviously separate entities, but if you choose to use a trainer move (which again, don't affect the energy meter), somehow that trainer's Pokemon's moves become unavailable to use for a time. Probably a brief time, but when you have two other Pokemon who aren't disabled that's just one more thing that will lead to some Pokemon doing almost nothing. Conversely, while the trainers aren't attacked directly in fights, if their Pokemon faint that makes the trainers' moves unusable, too. What can I say, when a big part of a game's premise is that a party of three is fighting in tandem and a third of that party is often nearly useless, something has gone wrong, and play-testing should have made them see that and fix it.
The Story Mode of Pokémon Masters is almost completely linear, with scant room for emergence. In occasional sections you'll be allowed to navigate a bit around a map by clicking on arrows, looking for (poorly hidden) items and talking to people, but the majority of Story Mode is you moving where the plot says, meeting whom the plot says, talking and fighting with whom the plot says, in the order the plot says. Even though you can change who's on your team between every sub-chapter, that has no bearing on which characters feature in the cutscenes. As addressed in last section, the story that gives this mode its name isn't exactly worth the price of admission, and then at some point, difficulty shoots up, forcing grinding, and engagement with that plot plummets even further.
Let's Keep Fighting!
Pokémon Masters has been praised for how limited its microtransactions are, with the only things costing real money being the gems used for the trainer gacha machine--and note that the Story Mode will unlock a lot of sync pairs, and that there are many in-game ways to get the gems. That is indeed nice, especially in a franchise aimed at children, but it seems like the game was designed to feature a lot more microtransactions that were dropped before release. I say this because much as in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Legends and probably other freemium mobile games, the new, stronger opponents in later chapters will force you to battle weaker opponents to level up, and it seems purposefully inefficient. Leveling up seems straightforward at first; just fight and gain experience, but it soon becomes apparent just how much more complicated it is. Sync pairs have maximum level caps that you must pay other items to raise, and furthermore, leveling up does not unlock new moves the way it does in the core series; these, too, require items to buy. Finally, there are items that can be spent to level up characters in the same way as experience was. The fastest way to earn all of these items is to visit a designated training area, but it's still not very fast. It's a mess of collectable trinkets that seems to be there just to annoy people into paying their way through it, except they can't.
Of course, grinding (that is, fighting weaker enemies to power up gradually) is common in the core Pokémon RPGs, too. There are likely few RPGs where it isn't. However, in the past it felt better incorporated into the adventure. Can't beat this gym leader? Then take a hike to the outskirts of the town, explore tall grass, and get in fights with Pokémon to power up, and then come back into town. It's wasn't great worldbuilding, but it still lent some sense of a consistent story. In Pokémon Masters, a game with almost no independent movement, you just open a menu and select what you want to do; continue the Story Mode, whose battles are tied together by cutscenes and dialog, or spend some time in Training Mode, whose battles aren't. This game breaks with freemium convention by having no energy system to limit how much you can fight these battles before having to either wait or pay for a refill; you are free to play this game for as long as you like, earning what you can. [NOTE: That has changed since I wrote this article] But would you really want to? Your reward for playing this game more is getting to play it more, and playing it just isn't that satisfying.
Conclusion
This review has been almost entirely criticism, so to clear the air up, the game is not terrible. Its actual combat has a commendable amount of depth for a mobile game, and on occasion its dialogue is appealing. Everything in this game is, at worst, okay. It doesn't often rise much higher, though, and the thing about things that are just okay is that when they're constantly crammed down one's throat, particularly the same few just-okay things repeatedly, they start to feel much worse than just okay. Among mobile freemium RPGs, you can certainly do worse, but among Pokémon RPGs you can certainly do better. DeNA seems to have missed the point of making a Pokémon game. They focused on the things that the Pokémon series hasn't traditionally been good at without changing them enough, while throwing out many things that the series has been good at and changing those few good things it left in too much. However, I still support a character-focused Pokémon game in theory, and I hope this game can eventually grow into its self-appointed shoes with new events. For the moment, though, while this isn't the worst mobile game I've played by a long shot, it is easily one of the most disappointing.
When River City Girls was announced months ago, I was excited. When it was revealed last week, I got even more excited. More excited still when I learned that it would have a playable demo at Anime Expo 2019; to the extreme I spent a lot of time revisiting Twitter just to see if someone posted footage and info.
While that describes many people, I have a special stake in this because by American standards, I know a lot about the Kunio Kun series, localized in various ways in the West. I never heard of it during the earliest phase of its life on the NES, SNES, and a few other consoles of that era, but Seanbaby's amusing tribute to River City Ransomgot me interested in it; enough that when I learned Atlus would port the game to the Game Boy Advance, I had to buy it. So I bought it, I had fun, and I got confused by the ending text saying that the adventure was just beginning. Last I checked, there weren't any sequels. Still, digging around online, I discovered that there were; most just never were released outside Japan. I became more than a little obsessed (NOTE: I actually wrote the original version of that linked TV Tropes article, back before the site banned me for insisting Spider-Man 3's plot had flaws. Some people have soft spots for the weirdest things!), seeking out and playing many games of this series I missed out on, and probably my favorite of the under-appreciated games was Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio Tachi no Banka. (Yes; this series' games often have very long titles.) It starred Kunio and Riki, going up against mobsters with the help of their playable girlfriends, Misako and Kyoko. Sadly, the series had all-but died by then, and its revivals seldom called back to that game, but then River City Girls promoted Misako and Kyoko to the starring roles, and I was stoked. So again, I eagerly awaited and searched for footage of the demo, and finally Metro Kingdom Radio posted it. I remain quite excited for this game--but I also have some reservations about its narrative.
These issues didn't actually dawn while I was watching. I was too busy laughing at all of the biting humor and being impressed at the fanservice that implies a great familiarity with the source material. This game directly addresses how confusing the series' continuity is by having Misako and Kyoko interact with Hasebe and Mami, playing on how which are Kunio's and Riki's girlfriends differs from game to game. It has someone actually, physically barf. It helped that the graphics were great and the gameplay looks great, too. After the demo was over, though, I started to consider that some things feel offputting about the writing. Characters seem too shallow and mean-spirited. Let's go through the scenes in chronological order to demonstrate why I feel this way.
We'll start with the intro, where Misako is zoning out during a dull math lecture, while Kyoko keeps her sanity by looking at her cellphone. Misako complains, Kyoko gets a text revealing that her boyfriends have been captured, and the two skip class; Misako insulting her teacher's math lecture on the way out. The principal comes over the PA, inviting the other students to beat the girls into submission, and the game begins. I'll be honest, I don't have a huge reason to like these girls. Certainly, I remember feeling like Misako and Kyoko did in that math scene, and I even covertly read Treasure of the Lost Lagoon: An Otto and Uncle Tooth Adventure during math lectures, but that was in Elementary School; I'd long-since grown out of such covert distractions by High School. (Though not the out of being bored by math and getting distracted by my mind wandering.) Also, note that I said "covertly"; why is Kyoko able to look at her phone in full view of everyone else, and only get caught when she reacts? (For that matter, as she says, she doesn't normally go to that school, so why is she there now?) Then there's Misako mouthing off to her teacher. It's not like I was unaware this series' protagonists were described as delinquents, and it was obvious from the reveal that Misako was going to be a bit of an antiheroine compared to Kyoko, who both looks and acts nicer (even if she looks at her phone during class), but where's her good side? Sure; she's going to rescue her boyfriend, but the way it's presented just comes off as shallow and possessive. We don't get enough background to for it to come off otherwise.
That same theme repeats itself when they meet Hasebe and Mami, whose only character traits are being rivals for the affection of Kunio and Riki (Also maybe their kidnappers, but who knows?), and mean to the heroines as a result. Again, it's funny because it references how the heroes have different girlfriends in different games, but it sacrifices all of those characters' likability for the sake of that one joke. Walt Disney called this reckless dedication to laughs at the expense of other qualities, "The Tyranny of the Gag". What's worse, the sorts of people who will actually get the joke are also the sorts of people who will remember that no past Kunio game has ever portrayed Hasebe and Mami as awful, catty characters. I still tend to think of Hasebe as Roxy, the sweet girl in River City Ransom who pretended to be the villain's girlfriend in order to spy on him and go report his actions to the heroes, and I'm not alone. More recently, she's become a very powerful fighter with a no-nonsense persona. That doesn't mean I didn't also love Misako and Kyoko in Banka (Would you want to type that game's whole title out every time?), but this game just decides up front to designate that game's heroines as the preferred girlfriends and make the other girlfriends jerks to suit that narrative. When fanfiction does this, smarter readers call the writers out on it.
The next conversation of note is with Misuzu. There are a lot of funny jokes exchanged, but then Misuzu gets catty too; implying that Kunio and Riki should dump the heroines and instead get with her. It's funny, sure, but where did this even come from? When was she ever romantically linked to them? Readers of a certain inclination may note that every female character who had a lot of dialogue in this demo seems to be driven by desire for male characters. (Specifically, the two male characters who are usually the heroes of the series, but here were meant to have the spotlight removed from them.) Some people, that bugs a lot. For me, there's not anything wrong with caring about people of the opposite sex; in fact, it stands to reason that there is plenty right about it. A female action protagonist isn't less dignified for caring about a male character; any more than a male action protagonist is for caring about a female character. In this game demo, though, what's on display reads less like caring about people of the opposite sex and more like just wanting them, for reasons that can't be assumed to be much more than lust without much more info given.
If it seems like I'm a bit too obsessed with having likable characters in a game about people beating each other up, I point out that this series' normal hero isn't just a badass; he's a badass with a good heart. The very first Kunio game had far less narrative elements than this demo did, but it started with Kunio's friend Hiroshi being beaten up by thugs. Kunio goes and beats them up in retaliation. He's not a squeaky clean hero; such as would leave it to the cops. Since Hiroshi isn't captured or currently under attack, this isn't a rescue or defense effort; it's a painful punishment for misdeeds, dished out by someone who enjoys dishing it out. Still, he wouldn't do it to someone who was either unable or unwilling to fight back. It's strongly established from Scene One that there's a conscientious side to Kunio.
While this game is clearly more comedic than that one, it also features more narrative elements. A character like Misako could get away with just being a badass if there was little plot to speak of, but since they're going to have a plot, she should have a nicer side. The more narrative complexity increases, the more character complexity should increase, and sometimes this means sacrificing quick and easy jokes for more nuance. The portrayal of the girls in the intro scene to this demo, Misako especially, felt like what that video describes as Newgrounds-style humor. There is not much apparently driving her character besides "I hate math, I like fighting, and Kunio is sexy", so quick jokes are possible, but it's harder to see her as a sympathetic protagonist in a game where she will have much more dialogue.
For that, she would have to be fleshed out, and the best way to do that would be to go into detail about her and Kunio's relationship; establishing that it was actually a very good one. Here is a rewrite of the scene that allows the girls to be more sympathetic:
Teacher: We find the absolute Min and Max on the specified interval--
Misako: This is unbearably boring and confusing! I wish I had Kunio here to help me with math. He might be even worse than I am at it, but he'd certainly try! He's too nice not to, and his company would make it more fun.
Kyoko: [Rushing in with cell phone] Misako! Kunio and Riki have been kidnapped!
Teacher: Hey! No cell-phones in class!
Kyoko: But this is important! A student from this school is in trouble!
Teacher: Eh, he was a dumb jock anyway who gave our school a bad name. Now I demand you take your seats!
Girls: No; you take them!
[The rest of the scene proceeds as normal]
The above is probably less funny because it is less spontaneous, but it adds more depth and a sense of karma to the ordeal, establishing that Misako and Kyoko aren't just the heroines; they deserve to be the heroines. Misako is revealed to be driven by more than just lust; her relationship is also a friendship based on compassion. Kyoko isn't just misbehaving; she's in here with the phone specifically to sound the alarm. Finally, by establishing the teacher as not just boring, but also spiteful, Misako can berate him for being boring without feeling like a jerk herself. (Note: Unlike Hasebe and Mami, he's an original character, so it's fine to make him a jerk to make the heroine look better.)
I want to be fair and stress that this is not a final game; for all I know, that is not going to be the first scene in the actual game, which in turn, may well add more depth to Misako, and Kyoko to a lesser extent (since she's nicer and needs it less). Even if that is the first scene, the characters could be salvageable with others establishing that they're sympathetic and their relationships has value. But I'm wondering if the writers are up to it, or care, and there's probably no reversing the derailment Hasebe and Mami got.
Make no mistake; this game will likely be great. I trust the developers to make a game that plays and looks great, and clearly it is at least going to be funny. Precisely because of those factors, though, I think this game is going to have a big impact; it's the most grandiose and talked-about game in the series. It saddens me that this impact might entail transforming once venerable characters into walking punchlines.
I'm occasionally characterized by others as having very strong opinions on various things in popular culture. Some of this charactization is accurate--if it wasn't accurate, I probably wouldn't write these blogs, after all--but I don't think I hate as many things as people think I do; this being mostly an illusion caused by my devoting more time to talking about what I find negative. Positive things, in my opinion, simply don't need to be discussed as much; they should just be experienced. Overall, my opinion of most popular things is best characterized as ambivalent. The vast majority of cultural things I don't care enough about one way or the other to say or write much. However there is one writer, well-known as the creator of one very popular fictional universe, on whom and which I've said little because my feelings on them were not dispassionate, but rather conflicted. That writer is the late (and during his life, barely recognized) Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and after my most recent encounter with his work, I've decided that now is the time to organize my thoughts and share them.
People reading this likely assumed, when they got to the part about my conflicted feelings, that I was about to say something like "He was a wonderful writer, but a horrible racist, so I feel bad enjoying his great stories." In actuality, my opinions on both aspects of the man and his work are more nuanced.
First, the controversial parts of Lovecraft's mentality run deeper than racism. Racism back then was part of culture, and it was easy for someone to get away with being casually racist--at least among readers of the same race! However, Lovecraft's work reflected a deeper psychological factor, which he self-identified as "Fear of the Unkown". It's this fear that his work ran on, and would have still run on if prohibited from discussing race, but even absent that most controversial manifestation, I'm not convinced many people actually share this phobia--particularly to as great an extent. So this calls into question whether Lovecraft's ideas are really as scary as his most passionate promoters allege. Second, the claim that Lovecraft was a wonderful writer is a hard one to quantify by most metrics available. The most likely validation people would give for his writing quality is that his work is still celebrated today, despite its problematic content. However, as argued in my last point, the "problematic content" runs deeper into his writing than just outdated racial opinions and into a controversial opinion of what is actually pleasant or unpleasant; leading to potential creator and audience dissonance.
That is not to say that none of Lovecraft's sentiments have aged well. On the contrary, growing up in an era of rapidly advancing science regarding the nature of the cosmos and prehistory had a big effect on Lovecraft's fiction. His stories often star curious explorers and researchers delving into the unknown, and discovering that humanity and its values are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Many find this revelation maddening, if they even survive the journey. Lovecraft's constant assertions the geocentric (and as a result, human-centric) views that animated much of history were in fact, naive, have since become widespread scientific consensus. At the same time, there is something of a moral component to his stories, albeit subtly. The notion that scientific progress could undermine values and spell disaster for humanity was not a new one even in his day, but while many reactionaries like the Christian Apologetics proposed the retention of values out of a belief that their underlying historical sources were to at least some degree true, Lovecraft offered arguably a more flexible, nuanced argument: Even if you can prove that the underlying historical sources of those values aren't true, perhaps you should hold onto them anyway. A lot of culture, careers, and related things have been built upon them, and even if the collapse of them all is ultimately inevitable, it could behoove you not to do things that hasten that collapse. (Note that for a time, Lovecraft considered himself both an atheist and a conservative; a combination of traits many modern Americans would find odd--though he abandoned the latter attitude toward the end of his life.) This message, much like the haunting cosmic philosophy Lovecraft framed it in, remains tremendously valuable to many people writing many stories (as illustrated by the future statement of Dr Zaius in Planet of the Apes, "I'd advise you not to look for answers; you might not like what you find"), though of course there will also be many who hold that scientific progress has helped far more than it has hurt.
Yet if the worrisome philosophy Lovecraft espoused towards delving deeply into things remains pertinent even now, likewise even during his time it must have seemed odd for a man to draw on inherently unpleasant notions to write stories meant to bring readers pleasure. I observed last post that stories get awkward when awkward contradictions underly their narrative; particularly when the show must go on despite the intended message. Such an issue arguably runs deep in Lovecraft's work; the message is that people shouldn't go looking for the truth about the world and beyond, such as defined in his canon, but for anything interesting to happen, they must, with contradictions alternately constraining what can happen and sending mixed messages about what can happen. When putting humans up against overwhelming odds to inspire fear, there's a bit of a balancing act writers have to figure out. If humans can just defeat, or at least escape (sometimes a bit of both) the cosmic horrors, they really aren't too scary. If humans stand no chance against these horrors, then there is no real suspense either, since people will know how it ends, which also lessens the incentive to become invested in a story. In practice, on occasion a hero in Lovecraft's stories will beat the odds and survive a daunting encounter with the cosmos, but more often the inevitability of an unhappy outcome constrains the plot to a character simply finding out about the cosmos, either ending before it's too late or ending just as it becomes too late. Whether the story in the process contained much or any action or intense, quickly escalating scares, seemed less important to Lovecraft than to most other horror writers.
As to the actual prose by which Lovecraft advanced his alien-themed horror stories, it can certainly be said to display his erudition, but how well this lends itself to horror stories is quite up for debate. Lovecraft's penchant for long-winded descriptions, not just of that which was alien but also of any familiar things he found picturesque, adds tremendous artificial length to his stories. This can be particularly galling in the aforementioned stories that deal more with revelation more than resolution, as they then come off as killing time and ending abruptly just as they're getting good; almost as though Lovecraft ran out of time. Worse still, to returning readers whose appetites have been whetted by the promise of fascinating alien entities beyond the threshold of what we regularly perceive, it can be irritating just how many stories spend an unnecessary amount of time bringing a whole new protagonist to that threshold.
All things considered, then, speaking as someone who read a lot of his work back around 2004-2008, I am going to express the possibly controversial opinion that HP Lovecraft was not a particularly good writer; frequently falling prey to his own ego and putting his stories in a bind with a cosmology whose scope made it hard to wield well, but somehow despite all this, he managed to create a few great things that saved his legacy. Every time I attempt to revisit his work, I find much of it tedious, but reaffirm that The Call of Cthulhu and The Shadow Over Innsmouth are great stories. Actually, as I'll go on to explain, there's some evidence that this opinion isn't controversial.
It's no secret that the most famous thing Lovecraft created is Cthulhu, the giant, octopus-faced, bat-winged humanoid monster imprisoned under the ocean but always preparing for his apocalyptic return with the help of his sociopathic cultists. His name has, since the death of Lovecraft, become the name for the mythos in which Lovecraft's stories were set, and even is featured prominently in works that actually have little to nothing to do with him. It should be noted, for example, that The Call of Cthulhu is the only story Lovecraft wrote in which Cthulhu personally appears, though he is referenced in many of Lovecraft's other stories. Why, then, is Cthulhu such an enduring--and at times, even endearing--icon of his work?
I would argue, and I am not alone, that Cthulhu's appeal, rather unique among Lovecraft's entities, owes to being highly and rapidly conceivable upon description. A tremendous advantage The Call of Cthulhu has over many of Lovecraft's stories is that its titular monster is described near to the beginning of its narrative; in the form of a statue. Moreover, he has fewer features than many Lovecraft monsters, which allows readers to visualize him easily based on the description--an especial bonus considering how long it takes Lovecraft to describe details! Too many other Lovecraft stories feature a protagonist moving towards the revelation of an otherworldly entity, inevitably at a pace that at least seems slow given Lovecraft's tendency to over-articulate everything. Then the entity can underwhelm when it finally appears, due to the same over-articulation crawling over such a mess of features that it takes a great attention span to visualize. However, The Call of Cthulhu's namesake is teased early on, and kept constantly on the readers' minds from the start, building suspense up for when he appears live. While the murderous occultists that also feature in the story can be scary on their own, it's the epic creature that holds it all together. Also, the story has multiple action scenes, with police trudging into the woods to confront Cthulhu's cult, a pirate battle, and finally the harrowing encounter with Cthulhu himself. The framing device of the first-person narrator piecing this all together also comprises something of a story arc; while the theme of a character coming to regret his curiosity is common to Lovecraft, here it feels like actual character development.
In sum, The Call of Cthulhu is a great story, but its greatness often feels in-spite, not because, of Lovecraft's infamous tendencies. (Though it does have a lot of racism, but more on that in a moment.) Lovecraft was afraid of alien and incomprehensible things and fond of longwinded prose, thus he conceived many overly-detailed monsters based on both. Yet it's his rare monster who hits close to home by drawing on a few things most humans recognize and not much else, that has been his biggest success. Lovecraft's penchant for longwinded prose is present, but Cthulhu's a classic design that even his longwinded prose can't render dull to many readers. Cthulhu has a long, complicated occult history attached to him, but he can work just fine as a standard, rampaging kaiju, and does get the chance in the climax of the story. There is an arc, with a setup and a resolution. Lovecraft often rebelled against standard expectations of what makes a good story, and when his most-loved story is an anomaly that conforms more closely to said expectations, for whatever reason, it doesn't feel quite right to see it as a mark of true brilliance.
The second most famous thing Lovecraft created, I would argue, is his dark and under-explored version of New England, dubbed "Lovecraft Country" by his successors, and featuring dilapidated, creepy and broadly shunned towns such as Innsmouth and Dunwich. There is an autobiographical component to this setting, as it is where Lovecraft spent most of his life. The other notable place he lived for a time was New York City, whose multi-ethnic population constantly triggered and intensified Lovecraft's xenophobia, ultimately inspiring him to move back to his hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. While his unpleasant time in New York City inspired him to write the stories, He and The Horror Of Red Hook, ironically it was the rural New England setting, which he found more comforting, where he set most of his horror stories. It was dark at night, the extensive tree cover made it easy to get lost there, made the few outposts of humanity seem remote from one another, and provided potential cover for places where bad things could happen without outsiders knowing. This, blended with old Puritan worries about evil supernatural forces, made the region a good microcosm for Lovecraft's worries about the whole world, and beyond, where civilized people--which to him meant those of Northern European descent--were outliers against savage peers.
Such underlying xenophobia has aged terribly, yet Lovecraft Country has survived its demise. The aforementioned story, The Call of Cthulhu, was not set primarily in Lovecraft Country. Instead, in more ready reflection of Lovecraft's fears of the foreign and exotic, it visited many more locations, Louisiana, Scandinavia, Australia, and the Oceanic Pole, where Lovecraft set Cthulhu's home of R'lyeh. However, despite the ensuing popularity of Cthulhu himself, he tends to get folded back into Lovecraft Country, or at least gets his name applied to it for publicity's sake. For example, the video game The Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, is in fact based mostly on The Shadow Over Innsmouth, set in and around that haunted town. There is also called a movie called Cthulhu, also based on The Shadow Over Innsmouth. Cthulhu himself doesn't actually appear in either! We've read why Lovecraft himself saw Innsmouth and similar thinly-populated New England locales as good places to set horror stories, but why has this setting endured so much for modern audiences?
Once again, I would argue that it is in spite of Lovecraft's propensities rather than because of them. Modern popular sentiments do not consider foreign countries necessarily scary, nor cosmopolitan cities with people from those foreign countries; many find these places romantic, instead. What can scare people of these sentiments, then, are essentially the alternatives. If foreign countries and big, (multi-)cultured cities are romantic, then logically more rural, less-traveled, less (multi-)cultured regions of the United States, passed over by progress, commonly (though not exclusively) referred to as redneck, are places to be shunned. Ironically, while Lovecraft was afraid of race-mixing, he was also afraid of inbreeding, which he called out in the Lovecraft Country story, The Dunwich Horror. The association he observed between inbreeding and rural America is one that has lasted to this day, and unlike race mixing, the unhealthiness of inbreeding has been scientifically validated. Lovecraft's observation of these sorts of places being less conventionally educated, overall, also holds true in the modern cultural perception. Thus, for modern audiences with "politically correct" views on race, it is still entirely possible to write an effective story of evil afoot in antiquated, remote places that most Americans have the good sense to avoid.
It is partially for this reason that The Shadow Over Innsmouth remains such a compelling story; easily my favorite of the Lovecraft stories I have read. The other big reason is it possesses narrative qualities akin to the aforementioned The Call of Cthulhu; there is a character arc, with the narrator-protagonist going on a harrowing journey, his attitudes and goals changing as he learns more. Also like The Call of Cthulhu, there is action, although in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the narrator is the one who experiences it. The story is not just about his discovery of the shunned town, but also his adventures within it--and they do have a substantive ending. Lovecraft's xenophobia is manifest in the particular nature of the evil afoot in Innsmouth; a fish-based religion imported from Asia, but the events it sets up, wherein the hostile locals hunt the protagonist through the dark, aging town, can be scary for anyone of any background. Indeed, while they may be practicing a foreign religion, within their own town the Innsmouth folk themselves are effectively the xenophobes, determined to ensure that a visitor from the outside world never leaves alive to tell their secrets. So the story may feel particularly relevant to anyone who has ever been a noticeable minority in a town that dislikes said minority, in a way many other Lovecraft stories obviously would not. Granted, the Innsmouth folk are also scary for another important reason that I won't spoil here. As with Cthulhu, then, Innsmouth, and the surrounding region reminiscent thereof, has an appeal so much more universal than many other Lovecraft creations that it almost feels like an accident.
Some would say this isn't being fair to Lovecraft, and it is only fair to acknowledge that he, like many people, was complex. He considered himself a cultured intellectual, undoubtedly a self-designation shared by many modern readers who deplore his racial views, and as if in preview of that irony, his writing was full of notable contradictions. Lovecraft was a curious researcher who saw a great risk to curious research. The alien was frightening to him but this fright was compelling to him. He was constantly unafraid to write about his dated values that have since died but also constantly writing about being afraid that his dated values would soon die. He often depicted non-European people as scary in his stories, but paradoxically in his brand of horror that also meant depicting them as being more correct about the true nature of Earth and the cosmos. Perhaps these contradictions, born as they are of a mind that considered moral values illusory, help Lovecraft's canon resonate with people whose moral values differ from his.
Nevertheless, I find myself cringing whenever I read modern Lovecraft aficionados denigrating other writers' takes on his creations, with such criticisms as they aren't hopeless enough. (As if there was any objective logic to the idea of entertaining people with thoughts of hopelessness!) For me, the contradictions in Lovecraft's psyche and work are manifest in some stories being much better than others, and while I admit to not having read the vast majority, of the ones I have read I hold only the two I praised here in any major esteem. I may change my opinion upon reading more of his work, and I intend to, but suffice it to say I do not find his work easy to read, so I can't say when.
PS: Some readers will argue that I write a lot like HP Lovecraft; particularly after reading that last sentence. To these people, feel free to suggest a shorter way to convey all of the ideas in this post, which I trust you have read in its entirety!
