Forward
At this point, I have undoubtedly discussed the River City series more than any other on this blog. I've spent a lot of time waiting for River City Girls 2 to debut so I can enjoy it, criticize it, or most likely both, but that isn't the only thing 2022 has on offer. We also have known for a while that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is coming this year, and in fact more recently I learned it will premiere this week. Meanwhile, because the 3DS eShop is circling the drain, I decided I might as well buy those River City games that actually got western releases, and play through them so I can maintain my proud position as a know-it-all who likes to lecture players who first learned of the series from River City Girls. Then recently, we also learned that River City Saga: Three Kingdoms is getting a release over here.
In other words, these months are quite overstocked with beat-em-ups I intend to play. Most from the River City series, but of course I can't say no to the Turtles. And given I'm going in so deep to this genre, I figured, why not blog about my experiences? So I'm doing that now. This series will feature reviews of beat-em-up games I played this summer, and we start it with River City: Tokyo Rumble.
At A Glance
The first of ARC's Kunio games to come west, Tokyo Rumble will feel mostly familiar to those who have played River City Ransom. A gang called the Lion Alliance is muscling in on Tokyo, so Kunio teams up with a few of his friends/rivals to defeat them. This means you can always have an AI-controlled ally tagging along and assisting you. You start with Riki but eventually Shinji and Misuzu also join, though only one can follow you at a time.
Welcome to River City (Or is it Tokyo?)
As is a proud tradition in River City games, this isn't your standard left-to-right scrolling beat-em-up; you can explore the city at your own pace and go where you choose, to an extent, but the set-up does have a twist that makes it a bit more confusing and restrictive. The city is divided into several districts, and often when you reach an end of one you'll just wrap around to its other end--or sometimes it's a dead-end. To get into any other districts, you'll need to take a train, and destinations only unlock after you defeat bosses--and the order you defeat them in is set in stone. Once you get this, the nearest train station is never hard to find, and a minimap does at least remind you what district you must visit to progress the plot. However, because you're not bopping your way through most of this game's terrain as a means of getting elsewhere, it can be hard to remember the layouts of the districts themselves, and this can be an issue when you revisit them.
Take in the Sights
I've been a pretty big critic of ARC's take on the Kunio series ever since they began making new entries on the 3DS, and this is because the graphics, I felt, were a big step in the wrong direction. The big offending issue is that canonically, Kunio is supposed to have brown-to-ginger hair, and Riki is supposed to have blue-to-purple hair. This has always been the case, but early 8-bit Kunio games had to simplify them to having just black hair. (8-bit sprites have substantial limits on how many colors they can use.) As soon as the 16-bit era rolled around, the in-game sprites started to represent their canon hair colors. This remained the case for the new/remade Kunio games that Million (who had the license at the time) released on the Game Boy Advance and DS, including the series' brief two-game stint in 3D, and it reached its peak in the gloriously colorful Kunio MMORPG, whose cancellation I still resent. But when ARC System Works took over the series, starting on the 3DS they reverted Kunio and Riki back to their 8-bit, black-haired sprites, while sticking them in a 3D environment that didn't match well. Also, while it would be one thing if ARC wanted to reboot the series so Kunio and Riki just canonically had black hair, they did not; ARC's art of the characters still depicts them as having more colorful hair, and being more colorful in general. I was instantly turned off and wrote this off as an ill-advised attempt to follow in the footsteps of Mega Man 9 and 10.
Having now given this game a fair chance, it's better looking than I initially thought. The environments are colorful and detailed, some of the other characters also have a lot of detail, and there is even some exploration of other body shapes with some characters, which allows them to convey more than they would be able to if they stuck strictly to the chibi-styled sprites of the Downtown Nekketsu sub-series. The one character who seems like a graphical misstep is Misuzu, as the game uses her sprites from the home console port of the original Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-Kun, and as that game used a different artstyle, she doesn't really look like she fits in with the rest of the characters--yes, that's even by her own freakish stgandards. Otherwise, while this game's graphics aren't impressive on either a technical or aesthetic level, they aren't generally ugly.
In spite of the above praise, the dated sprites for Kunio and Riki still look bad; in fact, the fact that many other characters are more colorful makes them look even worse. It seems like a self-evident axiom that a story's heroes are supposed to stand out compared to everyone else, and to be fair, maybe because this is a Japanese game, they felt it best to make Kunio and Riki stand out more by looking more Japanese than other characters. However, that still wouldn't explain why the art that ARC is making of these characters contradicts this, and a sprite also can have black hair while not being 8-bit.
Pump You Up
As is the case with most River City beat-em ups, this is also an RPG. Compared to River City Ransom, roleplaying elements have seen some changes in that few items you consume actually increase your stats. Instead what you get is more like what you would see in most RPGs; your characters level up from experience, and you can boost their stats a bit further by equipping clothes. While there remains a lot of food to eat in this game, unfortunately none of it does almost anything but heal you and the only difference between most menu items is how much they heal; the exception being those items that revive knocked out partners instead. However, with carry-out items that let you heal in the battlefield, you can only buy so many of one type, so there is a reason to buy multiple types. In fact, it's all-but necessary; more on that later.
Bigger Stories Aren't Always Better Stories
This game has a detailed plot and a lot of dialogue by River City standards, and that isn't necessarily a good thing. Let it be acknowledged that Kunio is to street brawling games what Mario is to platforming games, and on the one hand, that makes him a very important character in a very important franchise. On the other, it makes him an unapologetically simple character. In this game, at least, there isn't a whole lot to Kunio besides that he loves fighting and that he's great at fighting. (Assuming that you're a good player, of course.) Thus most of this game's plot is about fighting thugs, then bosses, then more thugs, and more bosses. The obvious objection is that this is true of the vast majority of beat-em-up plots, and indeed it is, but my issue with this one reflects the rule of thumb I mentioned in my Pokemon Masters review: A narrative's quality has to scale with its presence, or else what was a pleasantly simple story can easily become a boring or even annoying one. For example, there's no need to make a few short and functional phrases good in themselves, but if you're going to inundate players with dialogue, it really had better be entertaining.
Unfortunately, this game has plenty of dialogue, and the overall story it tells veers towards being annoying. Because this is a story where violence really is the answer--every single time--just about every major plot point is made to validate a protagonist who isn't all that likable. Kunio does have a strong sense of justice, but he's a lazy student, and in this story he's also a horndog who constantly flirts with his teacher--those last two things naturally annoy her. It's just frustrating to sit through a story where what should be character flaws never really hinder that character and the character is never forced to grow or apologize for any of them. Kunio's obsession with fighting is rewarded because it happens to be the thing that is needed to save the day here, and because it saves the day, his lust and book-dumbness just get overlooked. His allies Shinji and Misuzu end up being substantially more interesting and entertaining characters, which seems like a misstep. The bosses have a bit of personality, but their dialogue too often boils down to a loop of:
Boss 1: Now I'll beat you!
Boss 2: You beat Boss 1?! No way; now I'll beat you!
Boss 3: You beat Boss 2?! No way; now I'll beat you!
Boss 4: You beat Boss 3?! No way; now I'll beat you!
If you find yourself annoyed by this extended spiel about the game's plot and dialogue, when we haven't even gotten to the combat yet, well, what you feel here is basically how I felt playing it. When plot and dialogue aren't interesting and they don't serve any other purpose than to justify people taking it to the streets and punching each other, you might as well not have them and just skip right to the fights themselves. When nobody has much noticeable characterization, a shallow protagonist doesn't have to get on people's nerves, and when dialogue that is redundant is at least scarce, it doesn't cross the line to being tediously repetitive. With that summation of this game's biggest flaw, let's get to what is predictably it's biggest strength.
Enough Talk; Let's Fight! (Wait; have I said that already?)
This game's controls are, for better or worse, rather similar to what you got on the NES; there is a punch button, a kick button, and while jump also gets its own button now, it's still possible to jump by pressing the punch and kick buttons together. That all works fine, but also as with the original River City Ransom, blocking is just a context-sensitive action tied to the punch button, and this makes for some messy early-game battles. This game adds some judo moves to the mix; you can grab characters just by bumping into them, after which you can do a variety of throws, and it can be incredibly satisfying to throw an enemy into other enemies. It's just not all that practical much of the time, as you'll spend a lot of this game flanked, meaning the relative slowness of grappling will leave you open to attack. Fortunately, combat gets much better as you learn more moves. As with in River City Ransom, you do this by reading books; they're expensive and some of them are only sold in secret stores you have to find, but they're worth it. While up-close combat doesn't go far enough beyond button-mashing, at least that can't win you many bouts on its own unless you're at a much higher level. Special moves tend to require you to jump or run away before slamming back into your enemies, giving combat a fast and exciting guerilla feel. Others tend to propel your enemies away from you instead. They aren't the smartest, but knowing which moves are safe to do when, keeps this game from being mindless, and most enemies go down fast enough if you're the right level and know how to fight them. It's a fun time, whose only real fault is how much of it is basically the same fun time you could have in the original River City Ransom.
Then you get to the bosses, and what had been a fun time soon gets tedious. While they have more fancy moves than the basic grunts, bosses in this game aren't really any smarter than them; instead the difficulty comes from just how staggeringly many hitpoints they have. Also, these are not your typical video game bosses who follow a pattern. Their behavior is random, which means that this is almost certainly not the sort of game where you can get good enough to avoid taking any damage, or to pull off a move that is difficult to execute but strong enough to end fights in a hurry. Without huge amounts of grinding that would become tedious in themselves, your characters simply won't be strong enough to take down these bosses quickly, no matter how good you are at the game, and that means bosses, particular the last ones, are defeated not so much by flashy martial arts as by pausing and accessing your inventory. Yes, here is where we return to that pinned point from the "Pump You Up" section; defeating bosses in this game is often a matter of stockpiling heaps of food, drinks and medicine, and then constantly accessing the pause menu to consume these so you can outlast bosses, whittling them down slowly because they can't heal in kind. While the combat against these bosses is still engaging in itself, the fact that you're just going to be doing the same sorts of things repeatedly wears out its welcome.
Closing Thoughts
River City Tokyo Rumble is a serviceable game. It's an easy game to pick up and play, its core combat is fun and has a surprising amount of depth when you factor in the special moves you can learn, and the script has some occasionally funny jokes. Compared to the original River City Ransom, it's a step forward in several areas, and the combination of beat-em-up and roleplaying elements remains a good one. However, this game also shows the pratfalls of this sort of setting, characters and mechanics when playing up the RPG side of that formula. As this review series goes on, we'll learn that ARC's take on River City does get better...but unfortunately, first it gets worse...
