River City Girls Zero (PS4)
The River City/Kunio-Kun series has always been more popular and prolific in its home country of Japan, but many of the brawler and sports games starring juvenile delinquents still received international release steadily as the series continued on. Few entries earned much attention after the original River City Ransom on NES, but WayForward was able to catch people’s eyes with their 2019 beat ’em up River City Girls. Rather than focusing on the series’s usual heroes of Kunio and Riki though, that game turned its attention to their girlfriends Misako and Kyoko whose involvement in the series had been fairly minimal beforehand. To give people a look at that history though, a game that never left Japan would receive a rerelease, their first appearance in Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka rebranded as River City Girls Zero despite the fact they are mostly secondary protagonists compared to their boyfriends in their initial outing.
Utilizing some cutscenes styled like manga panels but with English voice-acting, River City Girls Zero frames itself as a video game Misako and Kyoko play after buying it from a pawn shop. Contextualized as an adaptation of their first adventure but not necessarily a completely accurate telling, River City Girls Zero smooths over some potential canon concerns from their newer reimagining while still being able to present the original Super Nintendo game without doing much beyond translating it. The game does offer two translations even, one that is more accurate to the original while the other injects some more of the characters’ modern personalities, but once you’re past the framing device, you really will find yourself playing the original beat ’em up in a much smaller resolution with its old school graphics and catchy retro music.
While a theme song and animated cutscene help to present the premise of the original game, the actual story of Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka focuses in mostly on Kunio and his friend Riki. A hit and run has been committed by someone who is a dead ringer for Kunio, leading to him and Riki being locked behind bars. Quick to escape prison, the two delinquents head off to clear their name, finding both their schools have been taken over by others in their absence and soon finding out the connections their adversaries have to threats far bigger than fellow delinquents. Along the way Kunio and Riki check in on their girlfriends and end up bringing them along for some of the adventure, although a much greater chunk of the game will just have the two male teenagers fist-fighting their way to answers on their own.
The beat ’em up action of River City Girls Zero can take place either on a tilted plane or in a locked side-scrolling 2D manner, and while you and enemies will both be more vulnerable in the 2D presentation style, it at least eliminates the positioning issues the tilted plane has since it can sometimes be difficult to determine if you’re lined up with an enemy properly or just a step or two off. River City Girls Zero lets you play as up to four characters depending on the point in the plot you’re at, and they all have unique aspects but mostly rely on the same fundamentals. All characters have a similar kick combo while the punch combo the boys utilize is turned instead into a series of slaps for the girls, but these both are used for much of your basic damage. A jump kick can knock enemies flat, but all characters have a unique special attack like Riki doing a rising spiral uppercut while Misako will launch herself forward in a ball. Unfortunately, while the game does show a quick set of attack inputs before the game commences, it also makes the odd decision to include the entire Japanese manual and not translate any of it despite it clearly describing additional moves you’ll have to experiment with button combinations to discover otherwise. Luckily it’s fairly likely you’ll stumble across a few on your own, but a more unfortunate fact becomes apparent across the adventure as you learn Misako and Kyoko are almost objectively worse to play as than their boyfriends.
Riki and Kunio both have attack options that are entirely unavailable to the girls. Both can grab enemies in front of them and continue punching them while they’re restrained, and while every character can stomp on a foe who has been knocked flat, only Kunio and Riki can sit on their chests and whale away on them for even greater damage. On the bright side, the game does not ask you to commit to any one character, the player instead able to freely swap between them with a button press. Each character has their own health bar and clearing certain levels comes down to swapping out characters well to keep them healthy, a game over triggering the moment one of them has been knocked out completely. In two player co-op this unfortunately remains true for each individual player, meaning if one person dies as a character they can be left watching as the other player freely swaps between the remaining three. Healing between stage segments starts off a fairly common occurrence at least and if you do get a game over, the game allows you to continue from a fairly recent spot with full health on everyone. Passwords even allow you to jump in at almost any segment and can be viewed by pausing anytime, although this rerelease also allows you to Save and Quit to make a quick save any time. Sometimes loading that save can lead to no audio playing when you jump back into the action though, but a game reset can fix that strange bug.
Most of River City Girls Zero’s issues are far greater than an audio bug though. Starting off the action is fine if pretty straightforward, but when the game starts wanting to up the difficulty, it does so in annoying ways. Your attack combos in River City Girls Zero won’t necessarily stun enemies stuck in them, giving them opportunities to interrupt you with attacks of their own that you will unfortunately be stunned during. This makes any attempt to move in and attack unnecessarily risky and there doesn’t seem to be a good way to predict when it’s safe to strike and when it’s not. It’s not some attempt to discourage long combos, they are still likely strike you if you only land a few hits and then try to beat a retreat, and while you do have a guard, foes don’t leave themselves open to a counterattack long after their own moves are invalidated. Jump kicks seem a remedy for a bit, a way to knock most enemies about, but soon enemies become competent guarders as well and bosses especially can see your jump kicks coming. The back attack actually ends up one of your best options, but shuffling about to line one up can still be annoying even though almost every enemy never sees them coming. The good news is only the final two bosses really feel like they overly strain the combat system, but a few bosses before then like the owner of a discotheque will likely force out the strategies where you back attack or jump kick for slow whittling down rather than them being strategic or kinetic confrontations.
The discotheque is just a boss arena, but River City Girls Zero does have quite a range of places to battle in and some that have a material impact on how you fight. The amusement park has a ferris wheel section where you’ll need to leap up onto the cars to batter foes, Riki’s school is so rundown that the ground can crumble beneath you as you fight, and a warehouse interior will have you climbing up higher and higher while trying to avoid getting knocked down by the goons waiting above. Most standard enemies will just fight you with the same attacks but with increased competence, but there is a frequent and drastic gameplay shift that crops up in the form of motorcycle stages. Here you’ll be driving along a long and winding road, and while some opposition will ride up on their own bikes and need to be kicked away, the bigger danger during these segments probably comes from the shape of the road. Some turns can be taken at blisteringly high speeds without concern while others that look fairly similar will lead to your character struggling to stay away from the highway’s concrete walls. There is no real penalty for driving slow, even the enemies often struggle with antagonizing you if your speed is inconsistent, but these sections are often more annoyances since a death requires a full stage restart and that death will be instant if you make contact with the barriers on the side. River City Girls Zero having the Save and Quit options probably best benefits it here so you can speed up these less engaging sections by making your own checkpoints.
THE VERDICT: Reviving a game that never left Japanese shores is a commendable effort, but River City Girls Zero’s desire to remain faithful leaves you with a beat ’em up game much worse than the one whose name it is riding on for recognition. You get a bit of personality and style from the introduction and ending scenes, but otherwise you’ll be immersed in an old school brawler that gradually prunes your battle options by introducing bosses who only fall for repeated tricks and enemies who will interrupt your standard combos. The bike sections aren’t very exciting and can force replays with their potential for instant losses, but it would be wrong to say the game doesn’t have a few moments where things come together right. Swapping between the four heroes ends up an interesting management system for the early action where you have more options on how to approach them, and the level variety adds some spice before difficulty tries to take center stage as the only focus.
And so, I give River City Girls Zero for PlayStation 4…
A BAD rating. Teetering on the edge of TERRIBLE, River City Girls Zero avoids it once you cool off a bit from some of the rough final bosses and the Save and Quit system helps the motorcycle sections assuage avoid being truly tedious. It is a shame the game wants to put so much of its spotlight just on Kunio and Riki since the action is its most interesting when you can swap between all four fighters, Kyoko and Misako having fewer moves but working as part of a strategic system that way. You might want to hold onto the boys’ health so they can handle tougher situations, but also utilizing them sooner means the fights will likely go faster. The game often putting continue points at the start of fairly small sections means bouncing back from losses isn’t too rough even if you forego the Save and Quit system, although the co-op is still held back by the game being content to turn one player into a spectator until the other fails as well. A lot of the early combat that does work better is admittedly a bit basic though, the game having the right idea to introduce a few gimmicks and having foes who guard or avoid you better isn’t a step in the wrong direction. When it starts to become foolish to even try and attempt standard attacks though, River City Girls Zero boxes itself into mostly flying kicks, special moves, and the back attack, and the fighting becomes too repetitive and plain when you’re locked into options that can be slow, weak, or involve touchy set-ups that makes fights drag on.
Fans of River City Girls will very likely not like River City Girls Zero, and while the name recognition has propped up some evaluations of it, the original Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka received a far more tepid response from Japanese reviewers who weren’t in a state of mind to forgive a game because it’s retro. It is wonderful that a piece of history was made available to a wider audience and there are cute and smart touches that make this better than just throwing the original out there unaltered, but River City Girls Zero also doesn’t really deserve the patience people will implore you to approach it with. The game comes after beat ’em up greats like Final Fight, Streets of Rage, and Konami’s many licensed arcade brawlers, the SNES original here archaic and stilted even when it was new and not tidied up enough to be worth more than some praise for game preservation now.