River City Girls (Switch) Review – Not That Dope

PhantomZ2 barges into River City with River City Girls onto Nintendo Switch! Thank you to WayForward and ArcSystemWorks for sending us a review code!

If you’ve kept up with many of my reviews through not just on my own channel, but mostly through Source Gaming – I care far more about style when it comes to selling me on a game. The gameplay matters to me once I’ve obtained the game. Which is why, even though I’ve never played a 2D Beat ’em Up game before, I was so interested in River City Girls. In addition to the games’ sense of presentation, it is also a joint creation between WayForward and Arc System Works, two developers that create really fun games. So with thanks to WayForward and ArcSystemWorks for sending us a review code, let’s barge into River City with River City Girls on Nintendo Switch.

STORY:

As soon as you start your new file, you’ll be entered straight into a well-drawn and eye-catching comic book cutscene featuring our two main characters: Kyoko and Misako. While basking in the boredom of learning in detention, their punishment is immediately disrupted when they receive a text message showing their boyfriends, Kunio and Riki, being shoved into a van. With the loves of their lives kidnapped, Kyoko and Misako head through River City to fight off goons, students, police officers, and some bosses to find out where their boyfriends are being kept.

Along the way, you’ll meet various NPCs that are friends with Kyoko and Misako or just people they happen to know. These NPCs serve as a way to guide you through the story by suggesting where you should go, even though their directions are exactly where you should go to beat the game. Sadly these characters aren’t focused on too heavily, except for about three of them: Godai – their creepy neighbor that will ask you to complete certain tasks for the sake of his satisfaction but will heavily reward you for them. Then there is Hasebe & Mami, they are the rivals of Kyoko and Misako. Although you never fight them in the game, you’ll learn that they also have an eye for Kunio and Riki.

Outside of these three, everyone else that you talk to doesn’t have much to contribute in terms of feeling like a character. For example, Hiroshi is a character you’ll meet that will suggest trying to go through the mall. Why is he there himself? Because he wanted to buy a limited edition comic book. Is there anything else about him? Not really and that’s how it feels for every other character in this game, including the bosses and their reasons to fight. While I love the interactions between Kyoko and Misako, the world around them didn’t provide enough for me to enjoy. This may be because Kyoko and Misako themselves simply care about getting their boyfriends, not really wanting to spend time focusing on anything else, but as the player – I’m not given a reason as to why I should even care about Kunio and Riki from the beginning of the game to the NORMAL end. I specifically want to state the normal ending because there are these Sabu stages that are hidden throughout the game for you to destroy. If you destroy all of them, you get something special and it is possible that this could lead to a secret ending. It also might not, but this is just to also bring awareness to that possibility.

GAMEPLAY:

Now let’s get into the meat and potatoes, River City Girls is a 2D RPG beat-em-up. You’ll walk and run through different parts of River City to fight off enemies when you enter any area and grind for money and EXP as more enemies spawn in. Although you start with a small set of moves, you’ll earn new attacks as you level up and can purchase more attacks from the dojo. With the money you earn from pummeling your enemies and completing missions, you can also buy items and equipment from the various amounts of stores. At the end of every sector of River City, you’ll face off against a boss and then head onto the next area that is suspected to be where Riki and Kunio were taken. This is all pretty simple from the sound of it, but sometimes the gameplay can become a bit frustrating or confusing in terms of design.

Since I’m new to this genre, the controls felt very awkward and had the possibility of being handled better. To explain, here is the controller layout: Y is your light attack AND action command (talking, picking up items, going through rooms), X is your heavy attack, A is your special attack, and B is your jump. Then we have R and ZR as the buttons used to shield and L and ZL as the buttons used to recruit the last standing enemy on a stage and to also call for their help. To dash, you have to double-tap left or right and you sidestep up and down when double-tapping in those respective directions. These controls can’t be changed at all thus taking away your option to make playing the game more comfortable, but also frustrating when trying to do something else. For instance, because the Y button is the Attack AND Action button, I found myself accidentally going into the next room when I only meant to hit an enemy that was trying to wail on me. Considering that enemies will also chase you down and have aerial attacks, attempting to run and jump out of the way could potentially also lead to getting hurt anyway. Sometimes I would also accidentally pick up an item that was close by, thus opening myself to being attacked for a short second, when I meant to just hit an enemy. I felt like a better option would’ve been to make either ZL or ZR a run button and the other the special attack button, and then making the A button only the action button. However, I think I know why this may be the case, at least for the Switch version: single Joy-Con play-style. At any time while you’re playing, you can change add in another player, thus taking away some of your other buttons if you play with the Joy-Con sideways.

In terms of how the game handles enemy drops and EXP, that also can be very confusing. When first starting the game, it felt like the early areas had the enemies at a strength that was equal to the player’s. Of course, as you progress, later enemies will be stronger and will continue to appear in later areas, but will never appear on a stage that was before their introduction. This is fine, but after roaming around to the earlier stages to see if I missed anything, it seemed as if the enemies didn’t scale specifically to the character I was playing. Before you start your play session, you can choose your difficulty, if you want to play alone and if you want friendly fire on. Then you choose you to play as either Kyoko or Misako. The progress you make in terms of money and EXP for one character, including items and equipment, doesn’t transfer over to the other character. So when I had Kyoko at around level 20 and wanted to go back to level up Misako, who was at level 10, it was harder to grind successfully because enemies were scaled up based upon the higher level character. While I should already be better at playing the game because I already have experience with one character, the amount of work I put into helping Kyoko have more attack options doesn’t translate into how viable playing with Misako will be. Although I don’t understand why this occurs, it may be because a second player can join at any time, however that still doesn’t excuse it when I’m only playing by myself.

Our next lesson comes with the money system. As stated prior, when you beat enemies and complete tasks, you’ll earn money and rewards. However, whenever you die – you lose money, which I think is a bit too much of a punishment. I can understand losing money from being defeated in normal stages, I should work harder to take out enemies and make sure I’m defending myself as well. However, I think the fact that I lost and I’m taken back to the start of the area is almost enough of a punishment. This is also because when you die, any items you used between the last save (by the way, this game is always auto-saving and you can’t turn it off) aren’t replenished. So if I’m not getting my items back and one asset to surviving is having items and being able to buy items to replenish my health, why take away so much of what is meant to help me survive? This becomes frustrating not only when losing boss battles because to progress boss battles are required, but when losing UNAVOIDABLE BATTLES.

At times, your progress will be halted to fight off a set amount of enemies before you can move forward. Most of the time, this will be for when you’re first going through a new part of town. The issue comes when they’re put in an area of the town that you’ve not only explored, but were only passing through to backtrack. One specific example that really ticked me off is in Downtown River City, where when entering through the bottom part of the Bus Station area, I was immediately pushed into an unavoidable battle – when not only my intention was to go buy health items, but to also try and grind up Misako, my lower leveled character. I lost and then thought, “I’ll come back later and go the other way.”, except when you die, you spawn at where you originally entered the area from. So each time I spawned, I was pushed IMMEDIATELY INTO THE UNAVOIDABLE BATTLE! So if I continued to lose, I lost more money! Since I didn’t have any items with me and enemy health drops are scarce in this game, I had to play far more carefully than normal. This also didn’t help that due to the presentation of this game having a theatrical styled aspect ratio, I wasn’t visibly aware of the area’s rooftop above me still being part of my surrounding – thus limiting my jump height and ability to perform jump attacks.

Returning to talking about money, when going to purchase items at a store – you actually can’t see what the effect of the item is unless you: buy the item AND use it in the store or buy the item and then check your bag, which you can’t do while in the store. This is not the case for equipment items, instead, you don’t see the description of the item until you buy it. Not only does this run the risk of wasting your money, if you happen to be low on money, but once you know what items from a specific store provides the best benefit in terms of health, there is no point in purchasing the other items that any other store has (unless you don’t want to backtrack, which is made easier thanks to fast travel points). So what they’ve should’ve done is create more items that have multiple effects to increase variety, because there are only a few items that do have multiple effects. At least from what I know because I’m not buying every item and I can’t see what every item does. Also, why is it that when my health is full and there is a health pickup on the floor – I can’t pick it up, but if my health is full and I BUY AND USE AN ITEM IN A STORE, I’m not told that I CAN’T DO THAT? It will still buy the item and use it on me as if I wasn’t at full health.

At this point, I think I’ve fully expressed a lot of negativity about the gameplay. Sadly, the gameplay also suffers even more thanks to the River City Girls’ presentation.

PRESENTATION:

The presentation was one of the major things that I was expecting to succeed in this game. In terms of general presentation, it does extremely well. I love the character designs, especially of shop owner Reika. The sprite work is absolutely amazing and vibrant, I enjoy the visual feedback from attacking an enemy or grabbing them and continuously punching them. The music, although not completely memorable, is enjoyable when playing the game and makes for a decent listen to while walking through New York City. However, this game does also have visual issues that hindered my playing experience.

To start with something I mentioned earlier, the theatrical style aspect ratio that the game was given definitely cuts off what is visible to you in some instances. There were times in boss fights that I didn’t notice an enemy had dropped a health pickup or that I was close to the edge of a roof when trying to avoid an attack by jumping away. Another weird thing is that in River City High, the opacity of the pillars in the foreground are lowered so that you can see behind it, in case if you need to see behind it during a fight. I find it strange that they didn’t also program objects or foreground details in other stages, like this fence on the beach, so you could see what’s always going on while you’re playing.

One thing that soured my experience with playing was a lack of draw distance or shadow overlapping. Most of my time playing the game was full of instances where I couldn’t tell if I was close enough to my enemy so my attacks would hit. Seeing where you are while grounded is easy sometimes, but seeing where you’ll land from a jump hasn’t worked as much, especially for the boss fight on the rooftop. Lastly, playing this game on a TV hurts my eyes as the font for the pause screen is very small.

FINAL VERDICT:

My judgment of this game is very mixed. I don’t want to hate it and I don’t feel like I hate it either, but the issues with this game are so abundant and confusing that it discourages me from wanting to continue playing so I can 100% it. While I would love to fully recommend River City Girls, I would say wait until the game is on sale for about $15. I beat the game in about 10 hours or less and with a 71% completion rate. Veterans of the 2D Beat-em-Up genre may enjoy this, but I had trouble with fully enjoying the game. With that being said, I’m giving River City Girls a 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Once again, thank you to WayForward and Arc System Works for sending us a review copy of River City Girls for Nintendo Switch. Here is the purchase page of the game, in addition to the Limited Run Games physical edition. I’ve been PhantomZ2 and I will see you guys in the next review!