River City Girls 2 (PS5)

Three years after the release of River City Girls (RCG), a game that I really enjoyed once I finally tried it out, WayForward released a direct sequel, simply titled River City Girls 2 (RCG2). The lead-up to it felt exciting, with some hype centered around the six playable characters and, later, the ability to play as Jimmy and Billy Lee from the Double Dragon series. There was even a Gallery Nucleus event that I attended where some of the people involved, including artist REM, talked about some of the choices they made for the game. However, my own enthusiasm waned as I had made the mistake of ordering the game from Limited Run (the version with the soundtrack), so I didn’t get around to finally playing it until recently due to other game releases and events coming up in the meantime. Now that I finally have, it feels bad for me to say that, in spite of the general improvements and positive reception the game received overall, it still felt like a letdown compared to the original in the places where it mattered.

Following Misako and Kyoko’s defeat of Sabuko in RCG, her brother Ken seeks revenge. After taking over River City High School, Ken has the girls expelled. Over the following two months, the yakuza take over River City while Misako and Kyoko veg out on the couch at Kyoko’s house and play video games all day. As such, they grow soft and lose all of their skills from the previous adventure. With crime on the rise, Kyoko’s mom gets them out of the house by telling them that a new video game has come out, motivating the girls to take back River City…so that the yakuza can’t stop them from playing more video games.

RCG2’s core gameplay is very similar to RCG, but with some much-needed changes and quality-of-life improvements. A big one established early on is the addition of Hideouts where you can take a rest to refill your ST and SP, manually save your game, store consumable items or swap out Recruits and player characters without quitting the game first. Unused characters still gain EXP, though not at the same rate as the currently selected one and the inventory isn’t shared, so being able to store things for later helps with this. Hideouts also potentially remove the money penalty on death by letting you instead restart from one with no money loss. The Recruit system not only lets you have a second one at your disposal, but now you can hire Elite Recruits found throughout the story for the low cost of $5 (this never changed, but I don’t know if playing on the lowest difficulty affected this at all). Combat also feels smoother as you buy more Dojo moves and there are some new enemy types that help mix things up a little. You can also replenish your ST and SP at Saunas for a price. A big change for me was that the shops now actually tell you what an Item does before you buy it and there’s greater variety instead of stocking multiple redundant items at different price points (for the most part, anyway). Plus, the level scaling was either removed or toned down, as it felt easier to go back to earlier areas at higher levels.

Redundant items aren't as bad, but still present.

One of the main selling points is the ability play as six characters and the game delivers. Kunio and Riki are both playable from the start, though Marian and Provie must be unlocked by beating their boss fights within the story. Although I only played as Misako throughout the campaign, I’m aware that the characters also have some variety in their move sets that keep them from feeling identical to each other, which helps with replayability and variety.

There’s also currently one piece of DLC that lets you play as Jimmy and Billy Lee from the Double Dragon series, with Arin Hanson and Dan Avidan reprising their roles. Although I didn’t buy or play around with it for this review, I’m aware that it not only has new voice lines for the two of them, but also full integration within the main game’s story, with some alterations to compensate, as well as an original song, “We’re the Double Dragons”, that sounds like a lost Starbomb song (for better or worse). If you like Double Dragon and want even more characters to play around with, this should help satisfy you.

Unfortunately, this is where a lot of the praise ends, as the game ultimately didn’t feel very satisfying to complete. When I say that RCG2 is very similar to RCG, I mean that it’s almost the same game in many respects, mostly with how it uses almost exactly the same map and tons of recycled assets. This isn’t too bad because it’s occupying the same space as the first game, but it’s very clear that RCG2 had some budget restraints compared to the original if it was going this far. There are some new assets, including the addition of Devil’s Candy characters and other NPCs, but even the music and effects sound largely recycled, even with the addition of 40 new tracks that don’t all stick as well.

It's fun seeing Kazu and Pandora in here.

Some gameplay annoyances persist from RCG alongside some new ones. For example, it can be surprisingly difficult to change direction at times during combat and some overlapping inputs make certain moves like Brick Breaker hard to pull off with any reliability (for this move, I would instead get a normal Headbutt). Boss fights are also rather gimmicky thanks to their unique mechanics, though they’re often more frustrating than necessary and can necessitate cheesing them with loads of healing items as you figure out their mechanics. Tsuiko was easily the worst, with minigames between phases, an unintuitive window of vulnerability and piling on mechanics that eventually turn it into more of a bullet hell with a lot of obstacles to track while trying to stay alive long enough to do chip damage and run away. Using the Hideouts is still helpful for getting a breather between attempts, but since you respawn at the last one you used, you may be in for a long runback (and I hope you like holding down that Skip button multiple times in a row every single time you try again).

Speaking of runbacks, the backtracking already present in the original is taken to more ridiculous extremes here. During the main game, you may be asked to run back and forth through the entire length of certain areas to make progress for no real reason other than to pad out the length. For example, reaching a club in Uptown requires you to go back through and obtain Y-Coins from three other areas, then go to the arcade and complete a rhythm minigame with horrible input delay before you can finally complete the quest and continue on to the boss fight. A worse example is that before you can return to River City High School, you have to run all the way back on foot through many forced combat encounters, followed by a point before the final area where you have to rescue multiple NPCs for the joke that the girls either don’t know or don’t care about them (but at least you can uses busses). Additionally, not only can more NPCs give you side quests with potentially useful rewards, but a lot of them require scouring the entire map of River City, to the point that I didn’t really bother with most of them in favor of ending the game as quickly as possible.

This early side quest will take most of the game to complete.

One side quest that is worth doing, however, is a hidden one where you can obtain cartridges in secret areas (I would suggest using a guide for this). Collecting all of them grants access to a somewhat underwhelming Recruit, Kebako from Cat Girl Without Salad: Amuse-Bouche, but collecting a certain number will also let you recruit Noize, who is absolutely busted. By summoning her, she’ll completely heal any player character within range and has a reasonable cooldown time, which almost completely invalidates buying healing items. This does, however, feed into a minor criticism I have of the Recruit system in that once you can access enough Elite Recruits, there is no real reason to collect regular Recruits apart from bragging rights, as the Elite Recruits cost so little that there’s no reason not to just hire the ones you like the most.

The biggest sticking point, unfortunately, is the writing. Where RCG combined drama and humor rather well with a story that evolved from the original motivator, RCG2 doubles down on the humor and meta jokes, which has a negative impact on the game as a whole. The dialogue outside of NPCs is a step down, with less subtle distinction between Misako and Kyoko and a need to shove jokes into every encounter to the point that some cutscenes go on for far too long with a delivery that doesn’t sound as invested (it didn’t help that I ran into an assumed bug where Provie’s defeat cutscene plays twice in two different styles). This approach gradually grew more frustrating by the end and came to a head during the final boss fight, where we don’t learn about Sabu’s plan at all or gain any context for his boss fight simply because Misako and Kyoko would rather make witty remarks. That’s not even getting into how Kunio, Riki, Marian and Provie have no relevance to the plot outside of their introduction or boss fight despite gaining playable status and having real motivations to help Misako and Kyoko.

Another area that suffers is the gameplay to a minor extent. I liked the implementation of Honkr, a social media app that tracks quests, though the quest descriptions are written in a way that some players may find off-putting (they’re in-character as opposed to a straightforward description). Surprisingly, the humor also affected my enjoyment of the music. The main theme is mostly referencing the fact that it’s a sequel, some of the vocal tracks are simple jokes that you hear on a loop (“Get Off My Lawn” got really old really fast) and, the worst of all, the ending theme is a lot more anticlimactic, with lazy lyrics about how you beat the game and thanking you for playing. Contrast with “Can’t Quit the RCG” from RCG, which leaves you pumped and wanting more while floating back up in your mind from time to time.

Honkr tracks your quests (at least the goose honk when you open it is funny).

As much as I would love to recommend more River City Girls, it’s difficult for me to recommend River City Girls 2. There’s plenty to like over the original in terms of combat, but where the original game left me wanting more and with a greater willingness to see everything it had to offer (in spite of its flaws), this sequel left me feeling hollow and just glad that it finally ended.