River City Girls Zero’s Charming Presentation Masks A Frustrating Vintage Beat ‘Em Up

we may have to wait a little more before can pray pray pray our way to River Town Girls 2but beat ’em up fans can satiate their hunger by warping time in the re-release of a much older game from the ’90s, now retitled River City Zero Girls. It is already available for almost all platforms, including PC and Switch.

zero river city girlsCreated by WayForward, it is a localization of the 16-bit Super Famicom game developed by Almanic in 1994. Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka. Thanks to the success of 2019 river City Girls, Shin Nekketsu Koha is officially playable in the West for the first time. Instead of rushing into fights like sukeban brides Misako Y kyoko (don’t worry, they can be played later in the game), you return to the saddle as her suitors, Riki Y Kunio.

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The beginning of the game sees Riki and Kunio in jail after the pair were framed for a crime they didn’t commit. after requirement squat bench, the pair beat up the toughest guys in the slammer, escape, and begin their warpath to uncover the jerk who orchestrated their demise. Hereinafter, GCR zeroThe narrative of devolves into a bloody game of phone in which criminals and their girlfriends punch a series of punchable faces before discovering who framed Riki and Kunio. Weather GCR zerothe conservation of Shin Nekketsu KohaThe graphics and music are welcome, the preservation of its ’94-era gameplay proved to be a hindrance to my enjoyment of the game.

Unlike RCG’s large number of strings combined Y wacky special moves, GCR zero has a limited arsenal of attacks. His toolkit consists of a punch, kick, block, special punch and kick, and the tried-and-true jumping punch or kick attack. On paper, these essential mechanics comprise every beat ’em up. But in practice, they are extremely limiting, especially considering how delicate combat is.

While it was easier to pull off full combos on RCGstarting your attack too close to the enemy could lead to retaliation. GCR: Zero offers much less room for error on both fronts, so if you don’t execute it perfectly, Nine times out of ten, the enemy attack will land first and quickly drop you on your generous rear, making for an annoying game.

If the button presses are a millisecond slower than the computer’s, the potential flurry of attacks is eliminated with a simple punch or kick. To deal with this, he had to smash enemies with jump kicks or get lucky hitting inside the narrow blocking window of one of his attacks. Regardless, either tactic led to a Pyrrhic victory.

This made the game feel less like a frantic fighting game and more like a methodical game of kiting and micromanaging enemies at the pace of a chess player. To make matters worse, your characters’ punches and kicks feel useless compared to enemies because, unlike you, they don’t stumble when placed on the receiving end of a combo. To make things even more frustrating, his punches tend to land more often and are twice as strong as yours. A game that is difficult is all very well, but a game that broken is just overkill.

GCR zero lacks RCGThe revive mechanic of stomping the ghost back into your body KO, as well as item pickups. Instead, the four playable characters serve as additional health bars. For example, if Kunio loses his appetite, you can switch to Riki, Kyoko, or Misako and use their full health bars to complete stages. But due to the aforementioned meticulousness of hitboxes and enemies arbitrarily hitting harder than you, fighting bosses turned into a spree of switching between characters and praying my hits would land first.

Weather GCR zeroThe gameplay was irritating, everything else about the game was pretty cool. From the start, the game wastes no time evoking the feel of a Saturday morning anime with its catchy theme song upon return. Girls composer Megan McDuffie. Its opening cinematic was also masterfully accompanied by David Liu’s elegant and profound anime style.

GCR zero It also has a ton of customizations. From the pause screen, you can toggle a CRT (old school TV) filter and change the border layout and screen size. The game also allows you to choose between a relatively literal translation and a more lively one. RCG-style text Although WayForward initially found itself at the center of some discourse about his wording of the original text as “verbatim”, I preferred the RCG-localization style because of its hilarious language flavor and because the more I played GCR zerothe more i found myself missing RCG.

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This does not mean that GCR zero is devoid of its own fun beat ’em up segments, it’s just that they proved more boring than exciting after a while. GCR zeroNifty levels also tend to linger longer than expected with the length of some of the action segments. As fun as it was to jump on a merry-go-round and kick bad guys off their rooftops, having to repeat the action an odd number of times afterward made the creative piece feel like filler for the game’s runtime. I’m also starting to believe that motorcycle fight scenes in video games just suck because the complaints I had regarding padding and the game’s demand for fine-toothed comb hitbox accuracy were only exacerbated over the long period of GCR zeroroad fights.

Suffice it to say though GCR zero there’s a fresh coat of paint on top Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, preserving old-school gameplay mechanics doesn’t do the game any favors. Instead of just injecting his modernized take on the franchise through the lavish new cutscenes and text, he wishes WayForward had spent a little more time improving his combat as well.