River City Girls Zero

My first few minutes with River City Girls Zero had me nodding along. The new animated opening is genuinely slick, Megan McDuffee and DEMONDICE contribute fresh tracks that punch above what the original 1994 Super Famicom cart could dream of, and the motion-comic cutscenes do a solid job of framing what is, honestly, a more gripping story than you expect from a belt-scrolling brawler. Kunio and Riki get framed for a hit-and-run, bust out of juvie, and spend the rest of the game trying to clear their names alongside their girlfriends Misako and Kyoko. The narrative is darker and more dialogue-heavy than other Kunio entries, with realistic character proportions and a tone closer to crime drama than anime slapstick. For about ten minutes I was into it. Then I had to actually fight somebody. The combat in River City Girls Zero is a faithful port of the original 1994 gameplay, and WayForward made the deliberate choice to leave the mechanics exactly as they were. That means you get punches, kicks, jump attacks, grabs, and a handful of character-specific special moves that the game barely bothers to explain. Switching between all four characters on the fly (or passing Riki off to a second player in local co-op) is a genuinely interesting party system, and keeping four health bars alive under pressure adds some tension. What kills the fun is the underlying engine. Hit detection is inconsistent enough that you will regularly trade blows with enemies you are not visually aligned with, and trying to initiate special moves mid-fight feels like shouting at the controller. Boss encounters demand a level of precision the input response cannot actually deliver. This is not nostalgia-tinted old-school difficulty. It is genuinely clunky, and it was apparently noted as clunky in 1994 too. The structure is also more linear than the River City Girls games that followed. You move from scene to scene in a fixed order, no backtracking, no shop system, no stat upgrades or equipment to chase. There are motorcycle sections using Mode 7-style rendering that break things up nicely, riding down highways and kicking enemy bikers off their rides before the road curves kill you first. Those segments are actually fun. The rest of the traversal is point-to-point brawling across locations like a prison, a carnival, a casino, and dockside areas. Variety is there. Satisfying hits are not. Health only replenishes after clearing an area, so reaching a boss with your roster already battered is a real grind, and the Easy difficulty mode locks you out of the ending, nudging you toward Normal whether you are ready or not. For River City Girls fans specifically, the lore payoff is real. This is the first appearance of Misako and Kyoko in the series chronologically, and WayForward even provided two separate English translations: one close to the original Japanese script, one adjusted to match the River City Girls characterization. That dual-script approach is a thoughtful touch for a niche audience. The included image gallery, vintage box art, and original Japanese manual scans are also a nice bonus for Kunio-kun obsessives. Steam reception sits in mixed territory, and OpenCritic aggregates critics at around a 68 average, which tracks. The community of people who will genuinely love this is small but real. If you bounced off the original River City Girls or Streets of Rage 4 because they felt too smooth and modern, this is not going to fix that. If you are coming from those games expecting the same responsiveness, Zero will frustrate you inside of thirty minutes. At roughly three to four hours long with local co-op as its best mode, it is a short curio best appreciated by players already invested in the Kunio lore who want to see where Misako and Kyoko started. Solo, it is a patience exercise. With a friend on the couch making co-op chaos out of the four-character juggling act, it is at least an entertaining one-night session.

Fred · Scout Team

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