There are occasionally brief platforming segments where you’ll need to press Y (punch) to grab a ledge, but the game’s instructions fail to mention that. Kicking enemies while they’re down is possible but weirdly hard to activate. You’ll quickly find that Misako & Kyoko are basically there to absorb attacks, as their attacks are fast but relatively weak, and they have no ground game. Checkpoints are plentiful, but that may come at the cost of watching an un-skippable dialogue sequence when you restart. You must juggle them based on health, because if just one of them dies, it’s game over. Roughly half the game allows you to swap between Kunio & Riki freely, and the other half involves all four characters. You’ll fight a couple of them more than once-including one fight that essentially happens twice in quick succession. Jump kicks provide easy knockdown opportunities, but it’s easy to get hit out of them.īoss fights go on too long, their attacks are too powerful, and those attacks usually override your own. Special attacks-activated by holding L/R and hitting a face button), are required for success, but setting them up usually involves some pre-planned choreography. Kunio & Riki can pummel dudes who are lying prone, but Misako & Kyoko can’t. You can block, but the window is quite short. The controls feel imprecise, not just because it’s ridiculously hard to line up an attack, but also because button sensitivity often feels inconsistent. I said that old games shouldn’t be “fixed” for modern audiences, and while I still believe that, such a philosophy lands on RCGZ like an ACME anvil. “This is game preservation as it should-keep the wrinkles, warts, and missteps…let the strengths of the original games speak for themselves.” Now, I want you all to recall what I said in my recent review of Shadow Man Remastered: After that, we are treated to an appropriately meta manga cutscene-linking it to RGC-in which our heroines find and fire up Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kuniko-tachi no Banka.Īll good things come to an end though, and I’m sorry to say that RCGZ is not particularly fun to play. The real draw for me, however, is the intro and outro cutscenes produced largely by one of my favorite retro-anime artists, David Liu, with a new theme song composed and performed by Megan McDuffee, who also produced the exquisite soundtrack for RCG. WayForward has handled the localization beautifully while adding now-standard display options, like various aspect ratios, a CRT filter, and (frankly awful) letterbox borders.

The game is weirdly cutscene-heavy for a brawler: Kunio and Riki are framed for a hit-and-run, escape from prison, and set about trying to clear their names and coming across some plot twists that wouldn’t be out of place in a daytime soap opera. For our purposes, it’s significant in introducing the characters of Misako and Kyoko. It’s the first English-localized port of a 1994 Super Famicom titled Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka. It’s an interesting title for a lot of reasons.įirst, you’ve probably heard that this is not actually a new game. While we impatiently wait for River City Girls 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold (probably not the real title), WayForward has given us River City Girls Zero (RCGZ) as a stopgap. RCG is an attractive, charming, modernized brawler that I really enjoyed despite some minor issues, and the titular girls were engaging and fun. This offshoot of the River City series, more properly the Kunio-kun franchise, featured Kunio & Riki’s significant others-Misako and Kyoko-as they painted the town black and blue in search of their kidnapped boyfriends. You dear readers might recall my 2019 review of a delightful WayForward brawler called River City Girls (RCG).

River city girls