Platforms: Switch (Xbox, PC, PlayStation 4 and 5 coming later)
When River City Girls came out a couple of years ago, I was instantly charmed by the adventures of Misako and Kyoko beating the crap out of everything that moved. Combat that felt great, striking visuals, a thumping soundtrack, and some genuinely great writing – it was easily one of the biggest surprises I had played that year.
Well, cut to today, and WayForward brings the first appearance of Misako and Kyoko out of Japan for the first time. In River City Girls Zero, originally known as Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, you play primarily as Kunio and Rikki, the usual protagonists of the River City/Kunio-kun games. Misako and Kyoko come along for part of the journey but calling this a River City Girls game is a bit misleading.
Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio-tachi no Banka is a 2D-brawler (or a belt-scroller) that was developed by Almanic, whose best-known game in the west is probably E.V.O.: The Search for Eden. Now, if you’ve played that one, you might have an idea what to expect here gameplay-wise. While E.V.O. was an interesting concept, playing through multiple animals as they go through their evolutionary process and eventually become human, the actual gameplay was a little clunky. That holds true in RCG0 as well, never feeling as good as the nearly 33 years old, original River City Ransom, never mind the recent River City Girls.
RCG0 gets away from the squat, SD-style characters that most games in the Kunio-kun series use; instead, going with more realistically proportioned characters. The biggest issue with this is the range of your attacks. You get seemingly the same hitbox as you would if you were squatter, but your arms and legs don’t have the reach you’d think, leading to a lot of missed attacks. You’ll swear you have something lined up, and, nope, swing and a miss. The bigger sprites also move rather slowly, even at full sprint, never moving with the speed you’d expect out of a brawler.
A trademark of the Kunio-kun series has been the diversity of the moves, and RCG0 flubs it on that front. All four of the characters have basic punch, kick, back, jump kick, stomp, and jumping stomp attacks, along with two special moves that each character can do. The boys get the ability to grab opponents, as well as straddle any of them laying on the ground and lay a pummeling down on them. The girls, on the other hand, lack the ability to do any of the more grappling-orientated attacks, putting them at a severe disadvantage. And that leads to the biggest problem with Misako and Kyoko’s role in the game – damage sponges.
The girls don’t hit as hard, and their second punch attack seems a couple of frames too slow. When I’d use the girls, I regularly got my attacks interrupted. And without the ability to grapple characters, it made it even more challenging to land anywhere near the amount of damage that the boys could. Really, it feels like the only reason Misako and Kyoko are there is to help beat the standard opponents until you get to the boss fights. Once you go toe-to-toe with a boss, the weaknesses of the girls become pretty apparent.
While you can switch to any of the characters at any time, if any one of them gets knocked out, it’s game over. This would be unbearable if not for the generous checkpoints. Too many times I’d be using Kyoko and think I have enough health to get off a few more attacks before I’d have to swap her out. Then to have an enemy interrupt my attack, hit her twice, knocking her out, and making me replay that section. Yes, managing your health in beat-’em-ups is part of the game, but with no way to recover health in-game aside from getting past some threshold, it can be downright infuriating at times.
Having something like that happen while having three other party members at full health can make even the calmest person’s blood pressure rise. The only thing that kept me from putting down the controller permanently in those instances is that your party comes back fully healed. That was enough to keep me chugging along through the fights. If this choice intended to make you try out the other characters more, all it made me do was sideline the girls and brute force my way to the boss fights, let myself get knocked out, and come back with a fully restored party. Only then would I use the girls, chipping away at the boss until they safely do no more, and then switch over to the boys.
If that wasn’t enough to turn you off, there are also some platforming sections and motorcycle-driving sequences that aren’t going to win you over. The platforming is, admittedly, minimal, but trying to jump and grab onto a moving ledge isn’t something RCG0 does very well. The motorcycle sequences can be even more frustrating. Enemies will pop up to attack you. Hit them once, and it knocks them out, but you have to be so precise, you’ll be bumping into them trying to line up a hit, chipping away at your own health bar, until the game finally decides you’ve lined up correctly. You don’t get to swap out characters during these sequences either, so run out of health, and it’s back to the beginning of these too-long sections.
WayForward’s presentation, save for a couple of glaringly odd choices, is fantastic. The usual screen aspect ratio and filters options are there, and the fully-voiced, manga-style prologue and epilogue are great additions to tying the game to Misako and Kyoko. You don’t get much of their personalities from RCG coming through in the game, so having that helps remind me how much I love the two of them. WayForward also opted to do two different translations for RCG0. One is a more straightforward translation of the game’s dialogue, while the other is stylized more towards their personalities from RCG. Giving both options is great and should appease all but the most annoying “translation-versus-localization bros.”
The odd choice is in the wallpapers. Typically, you get some character art or something that fits the aesthetic of the game you’re playing. But in this, you instead get two rather garish-looking backgrounds with Limited Run’s logo emblazoned in them. While I usually play without one of these border frames anyway, these made that choice even simpler.
And the last little touch for the game’s presentation is Megan McDuffee, responsible for most of the River City Girls fantastic soundtrack, returning with a few new tracks. These play over the main menu, manga panels, and ending. If you dug her work in RCG, Megan’s work here is fantastic as well. It plays nearly in sharp contrast to the largely-forgettable Shin Nekketsu Kouha: Kunio-tachi no Banka soundtrack.
River City Girls Zero is hard to recommend. While the work WayForward put into the presentation is beyond commendable, the underlying game goes from boring to play at its best to frustrating at its worst. Boring and inaccurate combat, way too much story for a 2D brawler, frustrating non-combat sections, and perhaps worst of all, having Misako and Kyoko playing second fiddle to Kunio and Riki in their own origin story makes skipping this and waiting for River City Girl 2 seem like an obvious choice. If WayForward hadn’t put in the work it did in bringing this out of Japan, there would be nearly nothing worth noting of the girls’ first appearance. That said, River City Girls is out there still, so I’d recommend just going and playing that instead of this disappointing look back at their introduction to the world.
