Time is a funny thing. The way you experience it can feel vastly different depending on whether you are enjoying what you do, or whether you were being tortured. For example, I played just a hair under fifty hours of Shakedown Hawaii and loved almost every minute of it. Then I played twenty-two hours of River City Girls, and it felt like it would never end.
Unlike Shakedown Hawaii, an homage to GTA games, River City Girls is an actual entry in a very long-running franchise, Japan’s Kunio series. The intellectual properties were bought by ARC systems, who then went on to make this and many more games. I can’t talk about the quality of the others, but I can say this was quite a painful experience, both physically and mentally. Beating the game somehow made all of my efforts even worse, like deciding to pick my nose after scratching my sweaty butthole.
Oh, and I need to warn you, there will be massive story spoilers this time, because I cannot explain my pain without exposing that god awful ending. So if you want to avoid spoilers, skip this review, okay?
River City Girls follows Misako and Kyoko, two delinquents who nobody likes. Don’t feel too sorry for them, because by the end of the game, you’ll feel the same way. With few exceptions, they insult everyone all over their town, and they complain about everything. Their adventure begins when Kyoko, who is skipping school to hang out in detention at Misako’s school (remember this point) with Misako, gets a text message that their boyfriends Kunio and Rikki have been kidnapped. (Remember that too.) So they first must bust out of school, with the principal rallying the other students to stop them.
And let me stop there. First, Kyoko isn’t a student at the school. The principal somehow knows she’s with Misako and keeps telling student to “Stop those girls.” This makes zero sense, but it’s just the first of many plot points that are bolted onto a fighting game to keep it moving forward no matter how unlikely any of this is.
Before the game has even moved out of the school, the action is paused every few seconds for pop-up tutorials, and there’s no way to turn that off. Opening the menu gives one pop-up for every screen, and even getting out into town, there’s more pop-ups.
I wish I could say that was the most frustrating part of the experience, but then there’s the controls, which worked better in the old NES days when there was only a D-pad and two buttons. For starters, instead of assigning a dash button to one of the triggers or face buttons, dashing is activated by tapping the analog stick twice in the direction I want to move, but the dash gets shut off if I change directions, and just getting it to work reliably was damn near impossible. Worse, because I’ve developed hand tremors, even the slighted wiggle of my thumb could be interpreted as a dash command. So when I need to walk, I ran past opponents or into attacks face first, and when I needed to run, I literally couldn’t do it to save my life.
None of this is customizable, by the way. When it comes to this or any other accessibility features, you get bubkes. This is coming from ARC, who in Dragonball Fighterz added all kinds of nice touches to make the game welcoming to newbies and pros alike, and to handicapped gamers as well. This serves in stark contrast to River City Girls, where there’s not even a beginner’s mode, just normal and hard.
I should also mention how the attack and interact button are the same, which is all kinds of fun when an enemy drops a weapon. Then my character crouches to pick it up, and the opponent who dropped it springs up off the ground and pummels them. So I get up and try to fight back, only to try to pick the damn weapon up again. I try to walk away from it to make the attack work, and the same opponent does a sliding kick to introduce their foot to my character’s boobs. Later on, the game adds in the ability to pick up opponents and use them as melee weapons, and this has the exact same aggravating chain. Both ideas could have worked if interaction and attacks were separate buttons, but as they are in this game, they just add more friction to a control scheme that didn’t need more “help.”
While I’m going on about things that don’t make sense, there’s zero point to the leveling system. On the character’s menu, numbers go up to seemingly reflect their growing powers, but every single fight takes exactly the same slow number of punches and kicks to end, and the health bar drops with the same consistency when compared to the start of the game. Like, if they wanted to unlock attacks at certain levels, that’s fine. But don’t bolt on a ridiculous rising power level when I can confirm nothing is changing.
Then there’s side quests, because of course there are. The first is getting a cheeseburger for someone neither of the heroines like. Said burger costs twenty-fucking-five dollars, so kiss that first new move from the dojo goodbye. Worse, this fucker just keeps showing up to assign more bullshit:
“Beat up this guy in the men’s room so I can pee.” What?
“Smash the cars of people making us look bad because we’re so poor!” What the fuck?
“Kill these yakuza snitches!” What. The. Actual. Fuck.
The writers were so desperate to find anything for side quests, they assigned the dumbest jobs I’ve ever worked in a game, and I once had to hunt for batarangs and graffiti in Gotham Knights. And I loved Gotham Knights.
Let’s get back to the plot while also covering boss fights. At the end of each section, the girls run into someone bossy, triggering a cut-scene followed by a bunch of dialogue that always goes like this:
“What have you done with our boyfriends?”
“I…who are you, and why are you asking me about this?”
“You kidnapped them, because that guy said so.”
“I don’t know him either. What the fuck are you two bitches on about?”
“Grrr, let’s fight!”
This triggers the boss fight, and every boss has increasingly aggravating powers to drag out their fights. While you’re stuck with mundane melee options, these assholes get magic powers like telekinesis and even flight. There’s one boss, Hibari, who some designer decided wasn’t having a fair fight with her flying and lobbing unblockable magic attacks, so they let her keep summoning two minions to run in from either side of the screen. They also felt that the only way to do damage to her was to precisely time one attack and stand under the boss in a pixel perfect position to make said attack bounce off her force field, back down to the floor, and then back up to her. Then, and only then is the player allowed to make a few attacks, amounting to doing minor scratches to her health bar while she and her friends can decimate my health bar with one hit.
The Hibari fight and every other boss fight highlights the discrepancy between what counts as a hit for me versus what counts for the boss. If a boss’ attack whiffs my character but doesn’t actually connect, well, that’s close enough. Meanwhile, I’ve practically got to be practicing proctology to make sure I can find the boss’ hit box, otherwise it doesn’t count. Oh, and randomly, the bosses can just decide they don’t feel like taking damage or staggering in a combo. Because why not, right?
Upon ending a fight, there’s another dialogue that goes:
“Wow, you girls are tougher than you look.”
“Now tell us where our boyfriends are.”
“I already told you, I don’t know you or them. But if they really were kidnapped, go to the next neighborhood over and look for this guy to beat up. They probably know something,”
At no time do either of these idiots collect proof that the people they’re attacking have any solid information at all. For that matter, they don’t even have any information on who took their boyfriends or why they did it. Aside from a single flashed scene in the opening introduction and the intro song saying the girls need to save their boyfriends, this Rolls Canardly creaks from one boss fight to the next on the strength of one thing: that Misako and Kyoko must find Kunio and Rikki no matter who they have to thrash to do so.
So, ready for the punch-line? Kunio and Rikki were never kidnapped, and what’s more, they aren’t Misako and Kyoko’s boyfriends. Remember that text message that got this whole thing started? It’s never explained who sent it, or why. Setting aside that brain fart from the writers, the end of the game is, “Hahaha, theses chicks aren’t just rude and stupid, they’re also delusional!” Wow, that’s…that probably the shittiest game ending I’ve seen all year, and it somehow manages to make the ending of the NES classic Pro Wrestling, “Congratulations! A Winner is you!” feel more rewarding.
Getting to the end, the game unlocks Kunio and Rikki as playable in a New Game Plus mode. I thought I’d try that to see what it changes, and it doesn’t change anything. The principal is still yelling at students to get “those girls,” the boys have no dialogue of their own, or non-girly items to buy in the shops. But the creamed corn topping this steaming pile of poo is that the fucking tutorial pop-ups come back around. Yes, you just beat the game. You probably know how everything works by now. But you still have to suffer more because, again, why not?
I’m told that River City Girls 2 was all around a better game, but I think it will be a while before I try to play it because of how badly this game soured me on the setting, the characters, and the franchise in general.
For all these reasons, I’m giving River City Girls two stars. It’s been a while, so I want to remind y’all that I only give 1 star to broken, unplayable games. But man, I was so tempted to drop the 1 star bomb on these chicks, and I cannot recommend this to anyone, for any reason.
Feh.