Video Game Review: River City Girls Zero

Developer: WayForward

Publisher: Arc System Works

Genre: Beat-‘Em-Up

Reviewed On: Nintendo Switch

When River City Girls was released by WayForward a few years back, it was honestly one of the best entries to the Kunio-Kun series that I had ever played. Besides incorporating a lot of the brawl work and well designed room combat, it took the pixel art game and elevated it to something really special, as well as having amazingly fluid animation for everything from fights to placeholder bouncing. It was fun, it was frantic, it was a perfect blend of homage to the classics while embracing the future. The game was such a hit that it wasn’t surprising to hear that River City Girls 2 was announced in a recent Arc System Works press release. However, one massive surprise was the reveal of River City Girls Zero, which would be an updated port of a much older SNES title, Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka. This classic Kunio-Kun title was never released outside Japan, so it was somewhat exciting for the announcement that it’d be coming to the West, finally, and the Switch seemed like a great place to experience it (though it should be getting releases on all major platforms at the time of this review).

Now, the premise is fairly simple: Kunio and Riki get arrested for a crime they didn’t commit, they escape, and have to clear their name while also taking care of people trying to move into their territory. The reason that this was tagged as River City Girls Zero is this game is the first time players had access to Kyoko and and Misako as playable characters, which was pretty revolutionary for the era (not to be a drag, but strong female protagonists were still a bit sparse back in 1994). So, in that aspect, it makes sense for this older title to finally get a proper Western release, even if the namesake is slightly disingenuous. More on that in a moment.

For what it’s worth, most of the upgrades that came to this modern version of a 16-bit game are intelligent and visually appealing adjustments. The inclusion of the anime opening and manga-styled storytelling directly reflects elements that we saw in River City Girls, and it works really well here. It’s clear that WayForward is treating this property with love and affection. They want to add elements that were either extremely difficult or impossible to incorporate to the original, like the fully voiced options for Japanese or English, or a sung opening song where the lyrics don’t sound like they’re garbled through a McDonald’s drive through speaker. In those moments, the game is wearing its new armor proudly, and I applaud it.

When you get into the nitty gritty, though, you realize that a direct port isn’t always the best choice, especially because there isn’t the nostalgic element that many Western players will have. When I first played the Super Mario All-Stars collection on the SNES, it was wonderful because the core gameplay of the classic Mario games couldn’t really be improved upon, and I was able to reflect and appreciate what came before and what we played now, with the added benefit of new spritework to make the game look polished. With River City Girls Zero, I’ve never played the original game, so the resulting spritework looks extremely weird. Everyone looks too elongated, and the way that the color saturation works with these updated palettes gives a very uncanny valley feel to it all. I see what WayForward wanted to do: capture the SNES vibe while utilizing modern techniques for building and crafting characters. But it feels like it backfired: instead of old meets new, it comes across like did a demake on it, taking a great game, purposely rolling it backwards, then trying to quickly cover it up using the blur tool in Photoshop. I simply hated how the game looked.

Additionally, due to the limitations of the SNES, most of the combat feels so segmented and episodic that it was hard to get into the flow of the game. When it came to River City Ransom and even the more recent River City Ransom: Underground, the way you moved between fights allowed the atmosphere of Kunio-Kun to really sink in. It became almost legendary, the idea that everyone was out to get you and you were a hard-nosed thug who just wanted to do well by your own sense of justice and morals, even if that conflicted with society’s classic “good and evil” schematic. These ideas carried over well into River City Girls, allowing mayhem to overflow outside of the classroom or gymnasium and into other places, highlighting the kickass nature of two women who weren’t just living in Kunio-Kun’s world, but were queens by their own rights. Here, it’s just snapshot after snapshot of fights, stopping, resetting, and then fighting again. It feels more staged, less natural, and more like you’re doing a television drama about fighting than actually getting into the flow of combat. So even though the characters have deliciously varied attack styles and a surprisingly complex set of moves (front and back attacks totally covered), you only get far enough to start to enjoy yourself before it screeches to a halt and you have to start over again.

River City Girls Zero is in a bizarre place. On the one hand, I want to support the localization of other games to the West regardless of age: it took close to 30 years before we finally had Earthbound: Beginnings but I bought it on my WiiU regardless to celebrate and support the idea. On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t have used the River City Girls moniker to draw attention to the game, because it sets up expectations that simply aren’t met. This could have been a new Crash & The Boys game or something like that, but, instead, I’m left comparing it to the last title to wear the crown of River City Girls, and it did it far better than this game. Still, the one thing I will say is that it runs well and it can be fun with two players: it’s just boring and flat as a single player adventure. For a short little jaunt at a reasonable price, consider grabbing it for time capsule purposes and also to support the future of River City Girls 2. Just be warned: there’s clearly a reason why this game wasn’t localized before.