Game Review: River City Girls
2024-Apr-29, Monday 09:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
A while ago, before the Plague Years, the trailer for a beat-em-up game came out and I thought it looked great. It immediately reminded me of my days playing River City Ransom with ![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
wanderluster_kp, punching out the Generic Dudes and picking up their money, playing baseball (meaning one player throws a rock and the other player tries to hit it out of the air with a stick before getting thwacked), trying to figure out the surprisingly-complex progression mechanics--it took us quite a while to realize that you had to backtrack to beat the game and couldn't just always run from left to right--and chowing down on food, box and all, from the stores. Even once we were good enough to beat it, the gameplay kept us coming back, and to this day we both remember it fondly. When I told wanderluster_kp about River City Girls, her immediate response was "Can you play baseball?"
But at the time, I didn't have anyone to play it with, and my life was too packed with other activities to stay home and play games. And then the plague began and the games I did play were all single-player games. To cut this short,sashagee was browsing through the list of games on sale on her PS5 a couple weeks ago and saw River City Girls, and I said, "Oh, that one!" and told her to check it out. She watched the trailer, saw it was half off, and over the last week or so, we played through it.
"Don't mess with us /
We're the River City Girls 🎶"
River City Ransom, originally ダウンタウン熱血物語 (dountaun nekketsu monogatari, "Downtown Hot-Blooded Story") is part of the long-running Kunio-kun series, which has dozens and dozens of games in Japan. Most of them never left Japan, like the light-novel-title-esque ダウンタウンスペシャルくにおくんの時代劇だよ全員集合 (dountaun special kunio-kun no jidaigeki da yo zen'in shūgō, "Downtown Special Kunio-kun's Period Drama! Everyone, assemble"), and the ones that did were heavily edited and released as standalone titles, like Renegade (originally 熱血硬派くにおくん nekketsu kōha kunio-kun, "Hot-blooded Tough Guy Kunio") or Crash 'n' the Boys: Street Challenge (originally びっくり熱血新記録！はるかなる金メダル bikkuri nekketsu shinkiroku! harukanaru kin medaru, "Surprising Hot-Blooded New Record! The Distant Gold Medal").
All the titles are like that. No wonder they were changed for America. Even this game is 熱血硬派くにおくん外伝 リバーシティーガールズ (nekketsu kōha kunio-kun gaiden ribā shitī gāruzu, "Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio-kun Side Story: River City Girls").
Since most of those games didn't come out in America and those that did weren't tied in to an ongoing series, River City Girls tries to be judicious with its references. For example, the game has Mami and Hasebe as side characters. Mami was Riki's girlfriend in the original Downtown Hot-Blooded Story and Hasebe was her friend, but when localized they were named Cindy and Roxy, the same way that Kunio and Riki were "Alex" and "Ryan," so when these two characters kept showing up I had no idea who they were. Similarly, the second boss of River City Girls, Yamada, was originally called "Slick" in River City Ransom where he was the final boss and the Kunio-kun wiki page on him has a giant list of the games he's been in, none of which I've played and most of which have never been released overseas. However, I was delighted to see that the leaders of the two dojos were Billy and Jimmy of Double Dragon fame. Some of the opponents you fight are Double Dragon references too, like Linda or the Abobo boss fight. One of the River City Ransom gangs was called the Zombies and River City Girls occasionally has you fight...actual zombies. The shop music is a synthy remake of the River City Ransom shop music. And finally, I found the super-secret shop in River City Girls by checking the same general location where it was in River City Ransom. You don't need to play 30 Kunio-kun games to know what's going on.
Delinquent life.
Nostalgia can't drive the experience, though, because this is a game and the play is the most important part. In that, River City Girls sticks very close to the formula established by River City Ransom. You have two characters, Kyōko and Misako, who play basically the same. They have a weak attack, a strong attack, a special attack, a jump, and a grab, and they have the same basic stats and abilities. At the aforementioned dojo, you can buy new techniques, like Misako's Stone Hands or Kyōko Dragon Feet, that open up button combos. Down and special to use nutcracker, or up and special to use acro circus, or combo extenders that add an extra attack to your basic weak attacks, or the ability to stomp on defeated enemies to do extra damage while they're down or pick them up and slam them into other enemies. And of course, there are weapons littering the stages, various baseball bats and chains and trash cans that both you and enemies can pick up and hit each other with.
The actual combat feels fun, especially once you can do more than just hit weak attack over and over. Once you get a bit more tactical choice and can punch enemies extremely hard and knock them into each other, flail around you to knock back a group of enemies, launch an enemy into the air with a single attack, and so on, then it's more interesting to figure out how to deal with the waves of enemies that show up and attack at any possible opportunity.
That said, I hope you like a lot of combat. This is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up, so in classic arcade tradition you'll be fighting hundreds of enemies, and none of them are fodder. Even the simple enemies at the very beginning if you return--like we did because we realized there were some rooms in the starting high school--still need to be knocked down 4-5 times before they finally expire, so no matter how much power you attain you'll never get powerful enough that you can just slaughter waves of enemies without thinking about it. You always need to put in a bit of thought and effort.
If you don't and run out of stamina, you end up downed and the other player has a short window of time to come over and stomp the little angel that's rising up back into your body, which gets you back up. Otherwise, it require a screen transition and the downed player loses half their money. The best way to avoid this fate other than not getting hit--good luck with that--is to go shopping.
Legalize it.
In addition to the Dojo, there's a wide variety of shops scattered across River City selling sweets, desserts, burgers, and ton of food, plus accessories that you can wear. Every enemy drops money, so you'll accumulate stacks of cash as you fight your way through the hordes of enemies.
In River City Ransom this was the way in increase your stats, but River City Girls takes a different and, to me, baffling design direction. As you can see in the above screenshots, the game has levels an XP--completing sidequests and beating enemies earns you XP and gains you levels, which slightly increases your stats. Because leveling increases your stats, food can't do that because you'd be able to use it to circumvent the leveling system, so all the food just increases your health. That means that there's never any reason to buy any particular food over another except for the price-to-restoration ratio, and Legal Drugs wins that with its actual medical supplies so there's no actual decision-making necessary. Go to the sauna if you're in Oceanview, otherwise stock up on first aid kids ($28, restores 60% HP), and only buy the other food if you have no other option or if you want to see what it does.
...and having written that, I did a bit of research and learned that you do get a stat boost from eating food, which is why there's a check mark next to it. The game never once tells you this or even implies it, you have to learn about it from external sources. Bad form, game.
Accessories have more interesting abilities but are hampered by their lack of impact. When I reviewed Dragon Age: Origins, I complained that all of its magic items felt dull next to the items in Baldur's Gate II and it was mostly because the bonuses were incremental and you could never tell that any of them were actually doing anything. The accessories in River City Girls are the same way, things like the Knife Earrings's "Increase sharp weapon damage by 10%" or the Ribbon Bra's "10% chance of double items from vending machines" or the Garter's "Extra 5% damage from any kick attacks." Over the course of the entire game they probably give you a bonus, but there's basically never any situation where you'll be like "Yeah, putting on the Fishnet Top really saved me when that throwing attack did 5% more damage!" They don't appear on your character model (probably a good thing when it's mostly underwear and you're playing highschool girls) and you never get a message or any feedback that they're working, so if you're like me, you'll throw on something like "5% extra damage to male enemies" and forget accessories even exist. It's a real missed opportunity after how interesting seeking out the shops and eating everything was in River City Ransom.
Round One. Fight!
In contrast to the relatively generic dudes that make up most of the game's enemies, the boss battles are a real delight. All of them have interesting and unique mechanics that require you to do things that combat against mooks does not. The pictured fight has essentially a rhythm game segment, where colored markers drop from the top of the screen as Noize plays with her band and you have to dodge them. Sure, it was a little annoying as it was happening, but it was different and neat and the main distinction between this and something like how Devil May Cry turned its last boss fight into a rail shooter is that the sequences here were phases in between more standard beat-'em-up parts, not the entirety of the fight. And if a boss was the equivalent of an ordinary mook with more health and who started changing colors and flashing as they got to low health...well, that would be pretty faithful to the genre's roots, it's true, but it wouldn't be interesting. The whole point of a boss fight is that this is not an ordinary enemy, otherwise it would just be an ordinary enemy, so when Hibari flies around or Misuzu turns invincible for a moment or Sabuko launches water droplets that bounce and hit you, I took it in stride.
I mean, River City Ransom's bosses just hit harder and every single one of them could be easily beaten by getting them up against a wall and using Stone Hands repeatedly.
Anything is better than that.
.
Overall, River City Girls was a lot of fun, and while there are a few undercooked systems, they didn't harm the experience because they were tangential to wandering the streets and beating up fool--that part was solid. But the story...well. It begins with Kyōko and Misako receiving a text that their boyfriends have been kidnapped, and so they set out to beat up everyone in their path to rescue them. As they kept running into people who had no idea where Kunio and Riki were, I thought they were going to make it all a joke, where Kunio and Riki were hanging out with (Crash 'n') the boys and had just forgotten to tell their girlfriends about their plans. But what actually happened was:
At the very end, the girls drop into an onsen where Kunio and Riki are hanging out, and when they say how happy they are to see them, Kunio and Riki act like they've never heard of Kyōko and Misako. After the whole story is about how love will make you take on sorcerers, goth seamstresses, Double Dragon bosses, zombies, robots, and even climb a yakuza tower and fight the oyabun, the ending is the equivalent of "haha, it was all a dream!" with a side of "wammin be crazy." And then it just goes to credits and the game ends.
sashagee says of the game:
There's a New Game+ mode and a secret ending, but after the downer original ending I'm really not motivated to get it. The way to do a normal ending and secret ending is to make the normal ending tease the secret ending so you think oh, I know there's more interesting story out there, I've got to push through and get it. The ending of River City Girls is so annoying that it just sucks all desire to do that right out of me--a bad story is worse here than a non-story like "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" That said, the most important part of a beat-'em-up is the gameplay and River City Girls has that, so as long as you're prepared to overcome a disappointing ending, I recommend it.
wanderluster_kp, punching out the Generic Dudes and picking up their money, playing baseball (meaning one player throws a rock and the other player tries to hit it out of the air with a stick before getting thwacked), trying to figure out the surprisingly-complex progression mechanics--it took us quite a while to realize that you had to backtrack to beat the game and couldn't just always run from left to right--and chowing down on food, box and all, from the stores. Even once we were good enough to beat it, the gameplay kept us coming back, and to this day we both remember it fondly. When I told wanderluster_kp about River City Girls, her immediate response was "Can you play baseball?"But at the time, I didn't have anyone to play it with, and my life was too packed with other activities to stay home and play games. And then the plague began and the games I did play were all single-player games. To cut this short,
sashagee was browsing through the list of games on sale on her PS5 a couple weeks ago and saw River City Girls, and I said, "Oh, that one!" and told her to check it out. She watched the trailer, saw it was half off, and over the last week or so, we played through it."Don't mess with us /
We're the River City Girls 🎶"
River City Ransom, originally ダウンタウン熱血物語 (dountaun nekketsu monogatari, "Downtown Hot-Blooded Story") is part of the long-running Kunio-kun series, which has dozens and dozens of games in Japan. Most of them never left Japan, like the light-novel-title-esque ダウンタウンスペシャルくにおくんの時代劇だよ全員集合 (dountaun special kunio-kun no jidaigeki da yo zen'in shūgō, "Downtown Special Kunio-kun's Period Drama! Everyone, assemble"), and the ones that did were heavily edited and released as standalone titles, like Renegade (originally 熱血硬派くにおくん nekketsu kōha kunio-kun, "Hot-blooded Tough Guy Kunio") or Crash 'n' the Boys: Street Challenge (originally びっくり熱血新記録！はるかなる金メダル bikkuri nekketsu shinkiroku! harukanaru kin medaru, "Surprising Hot-Blooded New Record! The Distant Gold Medal").
All the titles are like that. No wonder they were changed for America. Even this game is 熱血硬派くにおくん外伝 リバーシティーガールズ (nekketsu kōha kunio-kun gaiden ribā shitī gāruzu, "Hot-Blooded Tough Guy Kunio-kun Side Story: River City Girls").
Since most of those games didn't come out in America and those that did weren't tied in to an ongoing series, River City Girls tries to be judicious with its references. For example, the game has Mami and Hasebe as side characters. Mami was Riki's girlfriend in the original Downtown Hot-Blooded Story and Hasebe was her friend, but when localized they were named Cindy and Roxy, the same way that Kunio and Riki were "Alex" and "Ryan," so when these two characters kept showing up I had no idea who they were. Similarly, the second boss of River City Girls, Yamada, was originally called "Slick" in River City Ransom where he was the final boss and the Kunio-kun wiki page on him has a giant list of the games he's been in, none of which I've played and most of which have never been released overseas. However, I was delighted to see that the leaders of the two dojos were Billy and Jimmy of Double Dragon fame. Some of the opponents you fight are Double Dragon references too, like Linda or the Abobo boss fight. One of the River City Ransom gangs was called the Zombies and River City Girls occasionally has you fight...actual zombies. The shop music is a synthy remake of the River City Ransom shop music. And finally, I found the super-secret shop in River City Girls by checking the same general location where it was in River City Ransom. You don't need to play 30 Kunio-kun games to know what's going on.
Delinquent life.
Nostalgia can't drive the experience, though, because this is a game and the play is the most important part. In that, River City Girls sticks very close to the formula established by River City Ransom. You have two characters, Kyōko and Misako, who play basically the same. They have a weak attack, a strong attack, a special attack, a jump, and a grab, and they have the same basic stats and abilities. At the aforementioned dojo, you can buy new techniques, like Misako's Stone Hands or Kyōko Dragon Feet, that open up button combos. Down and special to use nutcracker, or up and special to use acro circus, or combo extenders that add an extra attack to your basic weak attacks, or the ability to stomp on defeated enemies to do extra damage while they're down or pick them up and slam them into other enemies. And of course, there are weapons littering the stages, various baseball bats and chains and trash cans that both you and enemies can pick up and hit each other with.
The actual combat feels fun, especially once you can do more than just hit weak attack over and over. Once you get a bit more tactical choice and can punch enemies extremely hard and knock them into each other, flail around you to knock back a group of enemies, launch an enemy into the air with a single attack, and so on, then it's more interesting to figure out how to deal with the waves of enemies that show up and attack at any possible opportunity.
That said, I hope you like a lot of combat. This is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up, so in classic arcade tradition you'll be fighting hundreds of enemies, and none of them are fodder. Even the simple enemies at the very beginning if you return--like we did because we realized there were some rooms in the starting high school--still need to be knocked down 4-5 times before they finally expire, so no matter how much power you attain you'll never get powerful enough that you can just slaughter waves of enemies without thinking about it. You always need to put in a bit of thought and effort.
If you don't and run out of stamina, you end up downed and the other player has a short window of time to come over and stomp the little angel that's rising up back into your body, which gets you back up. Otherwise, it require a screen transition and the downed player loses half their money. The best way to avoid this fate other than not getting hit--good luck with that--is to go shopping.Legalize it.
In addition to the Dojo, there's a wide variety of shops scattered across River City selling sweets, desserts, burgers, and ton of food, plus accessories that you can wear. Every enemy drops money, so you'll accumulate stacks of cash as you fight your way through the hordes of enemies.
In River City Ransom this was the way in increase your stats, but River City Girls takes a different and, to me, baffling design direction. As you can see in the above screenshots, the game has levels an XP--completing sidequests and beating enemies earns you XP and gains you levels, which slightly increases your stats. Because leveling increases your stats, food can't do that because you'd be able to use it to circumvent the leveling system, so all the food just increases your health. That means that there's never any reason to buy any particular food over another except for the price-to-restoration ratio, and Legal Drugs wins that with its actual medical supplies so there's no actual decision-making necessary. Go to the sauna if you're in Oceanview, otherwise stock up on first aid kids ($28, restores 60% HP), and only buy the other food if you have no other option or if you want to see what it does.
...and having written that, I did a bit of research and learned that you do get a stat boost from eating food, which is why there's a check mark next to it. The game never once tells you this or even implies it, you have to learn about it from external sources. Bad form, game.
Accessories have more interesting abilities but are hampered by their lack of impact. When I reviewed Dragon Age: Origins, I complained that all of its magic items felt dull next to the items in Baldur's Gate II and it was mostly because the bonuses were incremental and you could never tell that any of them were actually doing anything. The accessories in River City Girls are the same way, things like the Knife Earrings's "Increase sharp weapon damage by 10%" or the Ribbon Bra's "10% chance of double items from vending machines" or the Garter's "Extra 5% damage from any kick attacks." Over the course of the entire game they probably give you a bonus, but there's basically never any situation where you'll be like "Yeah, putting on the Fishnet Top really saved me when that throwing attack did 5% more damage!" They don't appear on your character model (probably a good thing when it's mostly underwear and you're playing highschool girls) and you never get a message or any feedback that they're working, so if you're like me, you'll throw on something like "5% extra damage to male enemies" and forget accessories even exist. It's a real missed opportunity after how interesting seeking out the shops and eating everything was in River City Ransom.
Round One. Fight!
In contrast to the relatively generic dudes that make up most of the game's enemies, the boss battles are a real delight. All of them have interesting and unique mechanics that require you to do things that combat against mooks does not. The pictured fight has essentially a rhythm game segment, where colored markers drop from the top of the screen as Noize plays with her band and you have to dodge them. Sure, it was a little annoying as it was happening, but it was different and neat and the main distinction between this and something like how Devil May Cry turned its last boss fight into a rail shooter is that the sequences here were phases in between more standard beat-'em-up parts, not the entirety of the fight. And if a boss was the equivalent of an ordinary mook with more health and who started changing colors and flashing as they got to low health...well, that would be pretty faithful to the genre's roots, it's true, but it wouldn't be interesting. The whole point of a boss fight is that this is not an ordinary enemy, otherwise it would just be an ordinary enemy, so when Hibari flies around or Misuzu turns invincible for a moment or Sabuko launches water droplets that bounce and hit you, I took it in stride.
I mean, River City Ransom's bosses just hit harder and every single one of them could be easily beaten by getting them up against a wall and using Stone Hands repeatedly.
Anything is better than that. .Overall, River City Girls was a lot of fun, and while there are a few undercooked systems, they didn't harm the experience because they were tangential to wandering the streets and beating up fool--that part was solid. But the story...well. It begins with Kyōko and Misako receiving a text that their boyfriends have been kidnapped, and so they set out to beat up everyone in their path to rescue them. As they kept running into people who had no idea where Kunio and Riki were, I thought they were going to make it all a joke, where Kunio and Riki were hanging out with (Crash 'n') the boys and had just forgotten to tell their girlfriends about their plans. But what actually happened was:
Story Spoilers
At the very end, the girls drop into an onsen where Kunio and Riki are hanging out, and when they say how happy they are to see them, Kunio and Riki act like they've never heard of Kyōko and Misako. After the whole story is about how love will make you take on sorcerers, goth seamstresses, Double Dragon bosses, zombies, robots, and even climb a yakuza tower and fight the oyabun, the ending is the equivalent of "haha, it was all a dream!" with a side of "wammin be crazy." And then it just goes to credits and the game ends.
sashagee says of the game:I loved the game... until the ending.You look it up online and articles are mostly consistent. The game is fun, the music is great, the graphics are crisp, and the ending is baffling and makes people want to throw the game through the wall.Story Spoilers
The ending was super disappointing. I thought that Mami and Hasebe were going to be the end boss after the yakuza boss at the tower. I thought they would've hired the yakuza to kidnap them and brainwash Kunio and Riki into thinking they were their girlfriends and then you could beat some sense into them again. Alas no we just get women be crazy and delulus... sigh. So unoriginal. I do love the music and gameplay style. I like the comic book style cutscenes just wish the story was a bit better. It felt consistent until the end. Then like the girls I just wanted to stomp the game to death.
There's a New Game+ mode and a secret ending, but after the downer original ending I'm really not motivated to get it. The way to do a normal ending and secret ending is to make the normal ending tease the secret ending so you think oh, I know there's more interesting story out there, I've got to push through and get it. The ending of River City Girls is so annoying that it just sucks all desire to do that right out of me--a bad story is worse here than a non-story like "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?" That said, the most important part of a beat-'em-up is the gameplay and River City Girls has that, so as long as you're prepared to overcome a disappointing ending, I recommend it.
