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

We might have to wait a little while longer before we can ora ora ora our way into River City Girls 2, but beat ‘em up fans can satiate their hunger by time-warping into the rerelease of a much older game from the ‘90s, now retitled River City Girls Zero.

River City Girls Zero, put together by WayForward, is a localization of the Almanic-developed 1994 16-bit Super Famicom game Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka.

Thanks to the success of 2019’s River City Girls,  Shin Nekketsu Kōha is officially playable in the West for the first time ever.

Read More: River City Girls Is Like River City Ransom But With Girls.

This made the gameplay less like a frenetic beat ‘em up and more like a methodical game of kiting and micromanaging enemies at a chess player’s pace.

Read More: River City Girls Sequel Aims To Perfect That Juicy Fusion Of Anime And Wrestling.

This isn’t to say that RCG Zero is bereft of its own fun beat ‘em up segments, it’s just that they proved more tiresome than exciting after a while.

Suffice it to say, although RCG Zero is a fresh coat of paint on top of Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, the rote preservation of the old-school beat-’em-up’s gameplay does a disservice to the game