River City Girls

Genre: Arcade Brawler

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

(Note: Included in River City Girls 1, 2, and Zero + Double Dragon DLC Bundle, along with River City Girls 2 and River City Girls Zero.)

River City Girls, released on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2019, is an Arcade-Style Brawler in the Kunio-Kun series that is the follow-up to the 1994 Japan-only Super Famicom game Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka (recently announced to be coming to Nintendo Switch as a timed exclusive with the new title River City Girls Zero). American players who don’t follow the Kunio-Kun series closely may better recognize the series’ previously most well-known game, River City Ransom, which River City Girls also bears striking similarity to.

Regardless of which of these games you have and have not played, it’s fairly easy to quickly hop into River City Girls and pick up on the story and unusual anime vibe of the game. Players take the role of Misako and Kyoko, a pair of teenage girls who discover in a twist on the series’ usual trope that their boyfriends Kunio and Riki have been kidnapped. The two immediately decide to bust out of detention, ditch school, and fight their way through the city’s gangs to find and rescue their dudes in distress.

As those familiar with the Kunio-Kun games have come to expect, River City Girls is very anime-inspired in particularly silly ways. Evidently, 90% of the people in this universe have their lives built around fighting. Cheerleaders cartwheel into battle, sports players use bats, baseballs, and dodge balls as projectile weapons, and the school staff reacts to the girls ditching by demanding that every student in class beat the everloving crap out of the two girls until they comply and return to their seats.

This absurdly cartoony violence is heightened by the game’s presentation, with colorful, beautifully-animated characters in a pixel art style, with fully-animated anime-style cutscenes. This game’s visuals are absolutely bursting with personality, and so too are the characters themselves, with all of them fitting broad stereotypes that are well voice-acted, albeit in a somewhat cartoonish way that may grate on some players. All of this is backed by a fantastic soundtrack that combines chiptune and vocal pop songs to make for a wonderful, energetic presentation, with some highlight songs such as We’re the River City Girls, Detention, Knock Out, Bully, Can’t Quit the River City Girls, Boss Misuzu… I could go on. This game’s soundtrack absolutely rocks.

The gameplay here is pretty spot-on too, with a solid fighting system and great co-op gameplay. This game has RPG elements that are somewhat comparable to prior Kunio-Kun games like River City Ransom, with a somewhat non-linear world to explore, shops to spend in-game money in to refill health, buy new attacks, and even buy equippable items to enhance stats. There’s a good variety of enemies too. This game has all the elements in place to be a truly great entry in the genre.

However, like the titular girls themselves, this game has quite a lot of rough edges. Players will get a wide array of moves, but are unfortunately given little information about them aside from how to use them (often requiring a look at the command list). You’re not told prior to buying a move how it is to be used, not told its attack power or anything that sets it apart from other moves aside from whether it’s a light or heavy attack and what its animation looks like. And if you buy a move you just plain don’t like? Well, too bad, you’re stuck with it now, no way to reassign it to a different button or shut it off altogether.

And those equipment upgrades I mentioned? They universally seem to have only a minor effect on battle. It’s certainly nice to be able to decide on little bonuses you get, but you don’t really have any full control over your character build like this game may make you think you’ll have.

The game’s nonlinear nature can be frustrating too, as it makes for a lot of backtracking and far too many areas are locked off until you return to an area, and then it feels like the game is only allowing you to go where it wants you to go. So much for exploration.

There are other little issues here and there too. Sometimes you’ll whiff attacks that seem like they surely should have hit an enemy, the pause menu seems designed to frustrate players in two-player games as either player unpausing will take both players out of the menu regardless of what the other one wants. And once or twice I wasn’t sure where to go because there was no map marker I could see.

Please don’t get me wrong, River City Girls gets so much very, very right about the genre – the core fighting gameplay is excellent, the presentation is fantastic, and the soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. But the game’s many drawbacks keep this game from reaching quite the same heights as some of the best games in the genre. If you’re a fan of Arcade-style Brawlers or especially other games in the Kunio-Kun series, you should consider River City Girls a must-buy. For everyone else, it’s still an excellent choice, just be aware that it comes with some issues you’ll have to put up with too.

tl;dr – River City Girls is an Arcade-style Brawler in the Kunio-Kun series, with gameplay fittingly similar to River City Ransom. The core fighting gameplay is excellent, the presentation is outstanding, and the soundtrack is incredible, but this game also has a lot of rough edges that make this more frustrating at times than it needs to be. This is still absolutely a highlight of its genre, but its flaws bring it down a notch below the even better game it could have been.

Grade: B+

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