All Things Considered, How Cruel is Palworld Actually?

 

Service with a smile (Sometimes)

NOTE: This post is going to completely ignore that other controversy surrounding Palworld, the one that deals with its originality or lack thereof.  I do have some thoughts on that, but that subject isn't too closely related to the in-game ethics, so for another day.  This also is not a review, which I may also write later, but as of writing this, have not seen enough of the game yet.  So with those out of the way, let's begin.

Bad Reputation

Pocketpair's Palworld has sold millions and become one of the most widely-played games of Janurary, 2024, but hand-in-hand with the hype has been an ongoing controversy about the game's disturbing undertones, mostly related to animal cruelty.  To give an insight into how Palworld gained such ill-repute, allow me to share my personal story of how I discovered it.  

Back in 2021, a YouTube channel called Skyhoppers made a video criticizing the story of Pokemon Black and White, arguing that the games explored potentially interesting subject matter in their plots, but ultimately failed to do it justice, because to do so would call into question the entire premise of Pokemon.  I recommend the video, but to summarize, Pokemon Black and White are about a bunch of radical animal rights activists who crusade against the whole business of capturing Pokemon, training Pokemon, and making them battle other Pokemon, attempting to persuade people to set them free.  It seemed quite an audacious move for a video game series to feature a plot taking to task everything that its players were supposed to find fun about it, and opened the door to a lot of philosophical discussions...or at least it could have.  

However, as I have stated in a past blog post, when the show must go on, a franchise based on fictional stories can rarely bear to permanently undermine its status quo, so any characters who wish to do so must be treated as wrong in-universe.  And so it was in Pokemon Black and White.  Towards the end of the story arc, it is revealed that the leader of these radical animal rights activists has a hidden agenda; he wants to conquer the world, or at least the region, and convincing people to set their Pokemon free was only a means to his end of leaving them defenseless as he kept his own Pokemon to use as weapons of war.  

In itself, this wouldn't be a bad twist, but in the context of those games, it was used as a quick way to declare all of the preceding arguments about animal rights to be irrelevant instead of actually engaging with them, because again, to give them any permanent legitimacy would give the Pokemon series substantially less cheery vibes from then on, and a haunting sense of hypocrisy.  As an aside, I personally dislike any stories that take a real-world debate and try to invalidate one of the positions just by writing one side's proponent as having insincere motives, and I should write more on that in the future, but that is beyond the scope of of this post.

Moving on, while Skyhoppers was musing about what could have been had they followed through and explored their themes a bit more, he couldn't help but briefly mention and show a trailer for a suspiciously Pokemon-like game that took a deeper and less flattering look at the ethics of creature collecting games, a then-obscure indie game called Palworld.  

As someone who has long-since soured on the lore of the Pokemon series, seeing it as schmaltzy, repetitive and obnoxiously naive about its many questionable implications, my interest was instantly piqued, and I went to watch the trailer to Palworld in its entirety.  I was impressed by many aspects of the gameplay that were apparent even at that early point, so I kept following the game's development, but it soon became apparent that most of the discourse around the game was comprised of other YouTubers watching and reacting to its trailers.  Myriad viewers were shocked and amused at the sight of "Pokemon With Guns"; from the very start, the buzz about Palworld focused mostly on its potentially disturbing moral content.  

Now that the game has become a breakout hit, that buzz has become a roar.

Putting it in Perspective

For what it's worth, Pokemon itself is not devoid of the occasional disturbing bits of lore; a substantial amount of it relating to outright death.  Quite a few PokeDex entries mention Pokemon killing each other or even killing people.  That doesn't all just flow one-way, either, as some of the PokeDex entries for Lapras mention people hunting them to near-extinction.  During a memorable moment in the original Pokemon games, you learn of Team Rocket killing a Cubone's mother for resisting them.  On that note, numerous terrorist organizations keep popping up throughout the Pokemon world, and even conventional warfare occasionally utilizes Pokemon as weapons, as mentioned by Lt Surge.  The subtext of all of this is that a world full of monsters with all sorts of awesome elemental powers is, go-figure, dangerous.  Also potentially hardcore to truly awesome levels. 

Mommy!

However, the series has maintained an overall positive tone and a cuddly, infantile reputation by being very selective in when, how, and in what doses it lets players experience these darker themes.  Most of the time, it's strictly tell and not show, and even when it is shown, generally the protagonists themselves are not allowed to partake in much. 

Sometimes, it feels like they wrote themselves into a bit of a corner when attempting to conceive a franchise that was both interesting and child-friendly, which could explain this much beating around the bush.  In theory, a world where children are allowed to wield creatures that are essentially living weapons, and wander the country unsupervised while doing so, sounds like it's heading for disaster, having the potential to be as brutally anarchic as the Grand Theft Auto series, and calloused adults who grew up with Pokemon may be tempted to wonder if there's a link between this and just how many Pokemon-powered evil organizations keep springing up in this world.  The rules governing Pokemon games, though, are such that your protagonist has no choice but to be well-behaved.  Instead of ever letting you be the soldiers who fight alongside their Pokemon, against other soldiers presumably fighting alongside theirs, the series almost always casts you as a vague child, starring in a plot that gives you a motive only to become the region's champion by competing in matches governed by a lot of rules, and even when you run into wild Pokemon and villains, in the context of gameplay they act exactly the same way as friendly opponents.  Even the when not being used in violent ways, the vast powers of the titular monsters can only be deployed in very specific circumstances, governed by still more seemingly arbitrary rules; for example, even if a Pokemon is strong enough, lore-wise, to push a boulder around, it's only allowed to do so when you've obtained a certain gym badge and used a hidden machine to teach it a move, and you'll never be able to use its strength for any other function in the world unless the game says it can use another such move, which you must obtain another hidden machine and another gym badge to do.

Such cautious and censorious game design has been a double-edged sword for the Pokemon franchise.  It certainly has helped Pokemon to become the largest child-friendly media franchise in the world, in a way a more offensive series would not have, but it has also kept it from living up to the full potential posed by its theoretical premise, leaving that up to peripheral media like anime, manga, and spin-off games when it is shown at all, and in turn, also kept it from embracing the free-roaming, emergent and experimental sort of gameplay characteristic of many AAA game franchises these days.

In that context, Palworld may be best understood as creating lore that is actually reasonably similar to that in Pokemon, but choosing to take up a different double-edged sword.  It tears off the kid gloves, tears out the arbitrary restrictions and restructures itself so that it really is more like Grand Theft Auto, except with Pokemon-like creatures.  The result is a game that allows the players to be absolutely vile in how they utilize this world, if they choose to be, and this has certainly been played up in trailers for maximum shock value, as it turns out, to great effect.  But what is gained from this anarchistic approach to design is that now players can actually experience many aspects of the Pokemon world (or pretty close) that heretofore they were only able to read and dream about, or in rare cases, witness secondhand.  And this is a big part of Palworld's runaway success; it fills a niche that has been gaping for a long time.

The Sinister Urge

I have above explained why you can be a terrible person in Palworld, if you want.  That is something that generally comes with the territory of open-world games, though a few, like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, don't really allow for it.  But an important question for many people curious but worried about this game is, does it reward evil play?  Is what players can gain from treating Pals badly more than they can gain from treating them well?  As it happens, and perhaps disappointing to many people, the answer isn't cut-and-dry.  A lot of factors seem to lean one way while many others lean the other, and I'll do my best to detail them all.

"You're not really gonna shoot a lamb, right?" "Yeah, in the face."

Violence against Pals, of some sort, is one of the first things you'll experience in Palworld.  Sounds damning, but that in itself doesn't make it any more mean-spirited or disturbing than Pokemon.  Maybe it's a bit more edgy since you can actually see the fights play out, but most people have seen Pokemon fights play out too, thanks to peripheral media like the anime.  The fact that a lot of the combat (though not all) you'll see in this game is human vs Pal might make it seem a bit harsher, but it's not like that sort of scene is totally absent from official Pokemon media either, though it is fairly rare.  

Those two examples, of course, don't feature guns, which from the start have been the most noted of this game's disturbing elements, and from many cultural perspectives it could be argued that the inclusion of realistic guns makes a game more "adult".  But what ESRB rating Palworld should get isn't what is being debated here, how "cruel" their inclusion makes the game is.  Since Pokemon games already heavily involve Pokemon attacking each other, logically, any argument that using a gun to shoot a Pokemon would be exceptionally cruel rests entirely on being able to demonstrate that a gun could harm it significantly more than any attack from another Pokemon would.  Not only can this not be demonstrated, but there is also no clearly defined threshold of how much a Pokemon can be damaged before such can be considered cruel.  Theoretically, that threshold does exist and would most likely be whatever would kill a Pokemon, as evidenced by the aforementioned time Team Rocket killed a Cubone's mother, but within Pokemon gameplay, no amount of damage dealt can do any more than make a Pokemon faint, and it was never clarified what else Team Rocket had to do in order to outright kill one.

The above describes Pokemon, but what about Palworld; how is it different?  The first place to look would be out in the wilderness, where most fights will take place, and you'll get some strangely mixed messages on the subject.  The game does not directly state that Pals have been killed; in combat scenarios it uses the word "defeated", and while their bodies go limp when they are in this state, otherwise, the sight is quite tame.  That said, when "defeated", Pals will drop loot like leather, meat, and bones, so that would seem to make it clear that they have been killed, right?  In most games, yes, but oddly enough, if instead of delivering the killing(?) blow, you capture a Pal in a Pal Sphere (which you could probably have guessed was Palworld's version of a Poke Ball without seeing it), you will also be awarded those items.  Now granted, if you capture a Pal, that original Pal's existence, bits of numerical data though it may be, will be preserved, while if you "defeat" a Pal, that individual is gone forever, until the game randomly generates the same collection of numerical data.  However, the same is technically true when a wild Pokemon "faints".  Meanwhile, if a Pal in your party faints (or is defeated), it can make a full recovery, though this requires a trip to your base.  

In my experience, there's only one way in the game that a Pal can officially die, and that's if you butcher a Pal you own with a meat cleaver. (Yes, it has to be a meat cleaver; any other sharp object in the game won't work.) In real life, butchering with a meat cleaver means cutting up a creature that's already dead rather than killing it, but let's not sweat the technicalities.  "Butchering" a Pal will give you another instance of the loot you would get from defeating or catching it, but that's not so much as to give you a strong incentive to do it.  

So just as with Pokemon, there's quite a bit of ambiguity how cruel the game's combat is or is not, albeit for different reasons.

Always in Demand

However, it is worth mentioning that the loot obtained from defeating or capturing Pals is essential to crafting many important items in the game, and in that sense, even if you don't actually need to kill(?) Pals, you are incentivized to go out and harm them for personal gain.  That's before we even talk about the notion that once Pals are captured, they essentially become slaves (but we'll get there soon).  

Some would rationalize that all this is fair enough from a realism standpoint, making Palworld into essentially a reenactment of the history of civilization, retreading key points when people exploited and twisted nature to their own ends, as well as maybe a satire of Pokemon that zooms the perspective out to reveal the darker implications of its world.  But the problem with such rationalization is that many of these crafting requirements are not realistic.  

Some of them reflect reality closely enough, for example some items made with leather and keratin in real life are made with analogous items in Palworld, but there are also instances of things that could be made with animal parts but also could have ample substitutes fairly early on; for example, many saddles you need to make for riding Pals can only be made with bones, even when wood is common.  Then, there are cases when the game largely ignores reality in order to force objects into accordance with its elemental system.  Several different elements of Pal, such as poison, fire, and ice, grant loot types specific to their elements upon being defeated or captured, and generally any devices the game can relate to those elements, it makes dependent on harvesting those Pal bodyparts.  Want to smelt metal in a furnace?  Then you'll need to three Flame Organs and might have to go shoot some adorable foxes to get them.  Want to get out of that barbarism via modern technology?  Well, good luck, because you'll need a whopping twenty Electric Organs just to build a power generator!  There are many, many other examples of this sort of unrealistic dependency, too numerous to list here.

You won't get an uplifting Katy Perry song inspired by this use of electric critters!

 

One of the most offensive crafting requirements to me, however, is the use of Pal horns to make medicine.   There is folklore around the world, going back centuries if not millennia, which associated horns with magical powers, able to ward off everything from demons to diseases, and while such has dissipated in much of the First World, it still holds sway in some places like China, and the demand for horns in traditional Asian medicine has created a huge market for poachers, and driven some species, like elephants and white rhinos, towards extinction.  It's incredibly depressing to see a video game validating such harmful beliefs, even more-so that most players probably won't even notice this issue. 

Many of the more advanced devices and structures you can craft also require "Ancient Civilization Parts", which in typical SciFi/Fantasy fashion, are more technologically advanced than people today are.  To get these, you need to defeat bosses, which are located in various places.  You can find some of them in the overworld, you must venture into dungeons to fight others, some have their own arenas you warp to and battle them in, and then there are tower bosses, who (go figure) are fought in towers.  The bosses are often rare species and always larger than the species norm.  I bring all this up because it's another place you could argue Palworld encourages cruelty, since boss pals often (though not always) have other Pals helping them out in the fights.  Most times you fight Pals in this game, it's fairly easy to capture them instead of defeating them, and since it oddly rewards you the same, that arguably feel like the compassionate option, but that gets much harder when several Pals gang up on you and others will take the opportunity to smack you down while you attempt to capture their comrade.  You also can't rely on your own Pal allies to draw attention away from them if your plan is to capture each one instead of killing them, since your Pals will go right ahead and land the killing blow if not recalled in time.  You could just try to evade other Pals and capture just the boss, which might be doable in the overworld, but in dungeons where things are cramped, not so much. So basically, against boss mobs, especially in dungeons, it will often boil down to "kill or be killed", at least for some of the members.

That essentially wraps up the combat aspect of Palworld's potential cruelty, albeit without a clear answer. (Deja vu!)  It's not presented anywhere near as innately cruel as selective trailers made it seem, and generally (though not always) there are compassionate ways to get around killing (or whatever you do when you drain all of a Pal's HP), and so many people will be able to go through it with a clear conscience, but there are also many iffy elements to those who look for such things.  And of course, whether catching a Pal is truly more compassionate than just "defeating" it may depend on its life in captivity, so let's talk about that, next.

Home is Where the Heart Is

While a strong case can be made that Palworld encourages you to harm and exploit Pals while in the field, the same can't be said for how it handles bases, and if your impression of this game is based mostly on that early trailer Skyhoppers saw (particularly the bit with a Pal collapsing in an assault rifle factory), you might be surprised at how wholesome it gets.  Whether that's a pleasant surprise or not depends on the player.

There exist some people who will always consider the base labor system to be slavery.  After all, you capture these wild animals in balls, and clearly these balls do something to their brains, because from then on the captured creatures become willing to serve you.  But as often is the case, when judging this it's important to compare it to Pokemon, because not only is that equally true there, but in most Pokemon games that servitude is utilized mostly to make these creatures fight each other for people's amusement and personal glory.  It seems ironic that this fantastical cockfighting has become accepted as fine and child-friendly, while utilizing these creatures' loyalty to do things like growing and cooking food, building structures, and sewing clothes is morally dubious.  After all, keeping people fed, housed and clothed is usually considered very benign.  

The go-to justification for the heavy combat focus of Pokemon is that they enjoy it, and they don't die or even get permanently maimed in combat; the worst that will happen is they faint.  That's all a bit "take our word for it", but to be fair, if people could make such a full recovery from combat, a lot of them would probably be beating each other up for fun, too.  With that in mind, so far as I've seen, your Pals can't actually die from working in a base, either.  They will indeed collapse from exhaustion and also starvation, but this just results in them being "incapacitated", and as with Pals that have been rendered unconscious from damage, a trip back to the Pal Box will fix that, given time.  That is fortunate, because this game's AI pathfinding and collision detection are very faulty at the moment, which far too often means Pals getting stuck somewhere and then starving. (A big enough issue for the developers to name it specifically as something to fix with patches.)  The game also intends for you to pay attention to their ailments, as the UI will alert you to them.

Are you sure you're in a good condition?  Because you have a major injury.  Might want to get that checked out!

 What is more, base-building comes with its own unique mission objectives, requesting you to build specific things and rewarding you with the ability to deploy more pals to the base concurrently, and many of those things relate your Pals' well-being.  For example, they must eat to survive (or at least, maintain consciousness), and you can hand-feed them, which is quite cute, but a more convenient option is to build a feeder box, which you can place food in, and Pals will then go eat from whenever they get hungry.  You can also build planter boxes to grow that food, and devices to cook it into various meals.  Pals also need to sleep, and you will be tasked with building beds for them and alerted when there aren't enough beds for the amount of Pals you have in your base; without them, they will still sleep but get angry.  You can even make them a hot tub so they can take a good therapeutic soak!  Not only is the well-being of all your Pals noted verbally, but the developers have gone above and beyond to give them facial expressions and body language to convey whether they're feeling good or bad.  A certain sort of player will take pride in pushing Pals to their breaking point, but for everyone else, it'll feel rewarding to make them happy and healthy.

Enjoy your break; I'll take over mining for a bit.

The ultimate measure of a successful base, though, is reaching a point of self-sufficiency.  Much like different buildings have different purposes, different Pals have different skills.  Not all of them will be able to build things, not all of them will be able to plant things, not all of them will be able to spray things, not all of them will be able to harvest things, and not all of them will be able to transport things.  But obtaining and deploying a combination of Pals can give your base that vital combination of skills needed to handle a every part of the food supply chain.  Once you get that working, the threat of starvation wanes a lot, and it starts to look less like a gulag and more like a co-op.

Taking care of that will make your base ready to take on more heavy and advanced industries.  It's still on you to choose what buildings to make and where to make them, as well as to place orders in any building that can produce more than one thing, but once you've made those choices, there are Pals that can help with those tasks, too.  You'll be motivated to build better and better stuff, because raiders will try to invade your base from time to time, and they get stronger as you level up.  So stay ahead, make sure at least some of the Pals you've assigned to your base are good fighters, and build yourself some weapons!

And with all of that in mind, it must be asked, what actually is this?  Is it slavery, with workers obediently building and growing what their overseer demands?  Is it late-stage capitalism, with every facet of society obligated to take in things and make them into other things?  Is it "true" communism, when so many things have been made that now without being ordered, everyone labors voluntarily and happily, but only as long their capacities permit, never getting paid but never needing to because they never need to pay for their necessities, and never taking more than they need to?  Is it libertarian survivalism, erecting off-the-grid outposts that are completely independent from the outside world and prepared to fight hard to defend that independence?  Or is it simply ranching, ever a world unto itself detached from politics and economics, and unrecognized as such merely because the creatures in this game can do some things that real livestock can't.  Maybe so.  To a large extent, it depends on how you look at things and how you run things.

Which, come to think of it, is a fitting microcosm of Palworld, as a whole.

At One with Everything

As noted above, there are quite a few mixed messages in Palworld, with regards to overall ethics.  I've done my best to present them all as factually as possible without coming to any definitive conclusion, but I expect other people will come to a wide variety of opinions about it, and perhaps that is not unrelated to how many other things about Palworld have also generated a wide variety of opinions, running the spectrum from love to hate.   

Palworld's unexpected blend of elements hasn't been unanimously hailed as good game design, but it has proven to be the perfect blend for generating conversation about it.  In some ways, the game feels a bit like a mirror to reflect the gaming culture and Internet culture that exist at the moment, and so many people who look at it can find something to substantiate their own opinions.  If you go in wanting to see the game as a love letter to the Pokemon fanbase, endeavoring to let them experience the dreams of what they'd do if they had Pokemon instead of just what Ash Ketchum does, you'll find many aspects that confirm that.  If you'd rather see it as a brutal and judgmental satire of Pokemon that holds that franchise's entire premise in contempt and rubs players' noses in everything potentially problematic about that premise, there are also certainly things that would seem to corroborate such a take, albeit in a way that makes its morbid take amusing rather than depressing. (As even the darkest satires tend to do.)  You can take the now-infamous design philosophies of Pocketpair's CEO as shameless bandwagoning or as a sign of great respect towards gamers, being very in touch with many things they like and being willing to provide them at a reasonable price.  It can cater to player desires, both to inflict misery on other living beings and to build them an adorable utopia where they're all smiles, providing many poignant photo opportunities either way.  Or maybe even a combination!

A memorable moment on my base, seconds after my squad of adorable cats mauled some raiders to death.

Society may never reach a consensus about this game's ethics, nor many other aspects of it.  But the game's overpowering ability to be so many different things to so many different people may be a very big part of why it has gotten so huge.  All of the debates raging back and forth about it provide free publicity, and this, in turn, drives more and more people to actually buy and play it.  Sometimes, it seems, controversy really does sell...and perhaps that could spawn an ethical debate of its own.

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

 

 

 

Forward

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

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

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

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

At a Glance

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

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

 

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

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

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

Color Me Impressed

 

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond "Barf"

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

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

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

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

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

Finally, the Fighting!

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Failing Upward

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Oh right; there's actually another mode.

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

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

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

Closing Thoughts

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

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

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