RIVER CITY GIRLS ZERO Port Has Some Fun Additions To The Original Game
River City Girls Zero is an updated localization port of Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka which follows Kunio and Rikki as they prove their innocence in a crime they were framed for. The game has everything you loved about the original, plus some new music and the manga cutscenes you loved from River City Girls. It’s not without its flaws though, for me the actual game play felt clunky and still old.
Hands down, the best update brought to the game is the new introduction song and animation. Megan McDuffee was the perfect composer for the game series. I loved her music for the first River City Girls and this introduction song is even better. It does a great job at recapping some of the events of the game without giving away the story in a humorous way. If you don’t ever play the game, you should at least look up this song because it is worth listening to.
The overall look of the game is everything fans of 16 bit graphics are looking for. Everything runs well in general. This is the first release of the game in the USA and Way Forward has accommodated us with two different translations, the literal translation and the localized so you can pick whichever you prefer. I went with the localized and it was fine, there wasn’t anything too egregious from what I noticed. I really enjoyed the manga cutscenes and made me really miss having some voice acting throughout the game, but I understand they wouldn’t want to do that in order to preserve the game. I loved how they poked at the continuity of everything. The true ending for River City Girls references Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka and now the ending cutscene of River City Girls Zero references River City Girls in order to get us ready for the sequel game. The whole thing left me wondering if the events of Zero are supposed to be canon for the newer River City Girls game, hopefully the sequel will help answer that question.
Other fun features are they added a filter to make your screen look like an old CRT screen. It doesn’t really add anything to the gameplay, but it is fun to see it look more like how it originally did. There is also the great feature of being able to save any time. If you’re as disorganized as I am and prone to losing those save passwords, this is always a welcome feature. As far as ports go, Way Forward has done a great job with this one.
Now for the bad, I hated the gameplay controls. Everything felt really difficult to do, like my character was a lot slower than computers. Now I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not great at these kinds of games, but there were fights where it felt like the enemy could hit me from way farther away than I could hit them. So I would be stuck trying to get in close to land a punch only to instantly get knocked away. Again, I’m not awesome at games like this, but it was a really frustrating experience when I didn’t have issues like that playing River City Girls. I’ll give it some forgiveness for being an older game, but it did make me wish I could be playing a remaster of the game instead. The motorcycle sections were a nice break from the side scrolling fighting though.
Overall, I enjoyed discovering the story for this game. It was fun to see the girls in their original glory and to see some of their history with Rikki and Kunio. It really made me pumped for when River City Girls 2 comes out. Not my favorite entry in the series, but if you’re a fan of old school games you will enjoy this one. While I’m not a big fan of the game itself, the port was excellent and I would give it a 9/10.
