River City Ransom

"Oh barf."

Nes is one of the systems that has a lot of games on it that everyone who grew up with it have played, but those who didn't and then tries to be a retro dude just never plays. One of this games is River City Ransom, which actually did get successful in Japan, but the rest of the world didn't care much about it. One reason why it did so great in Japan might be that Techno's most well known character Kunio is in it, but the western world almost have no clue who that guy is. Most of us knows on the other hand who Billy and Jimmy are from the Double Dragon games, and this game is really similar to those games.

In both the Northern American and European version, Kunio is known as Alex. He looks like any random tough school boy from any typical anime. He is a high school of River City. The game never tells what he has done in the past, since he has a few enemies. One of them have kidnapped his girlfriend and taken over the River City High School as his headquarter. Kunio can't let that to happen so he and his friend Ryan (I don't know what he's name is in the Japanese version) has to get to the school and save Kunio's girlfriend.

River City looks like what us from the western world expects a typical Japanese city to look like. The villain in this type of games usually have payed a lot of street fighters to beat down the heroes, however in River City Ransom, it's instead different street gangs that will fight our two heroes just because they walked on the gang's ground. They will do their best to beat the crap out of the two heroes, but if they gets defeated instead, they will drop money which our heroes can pick up. When any random punk gets beaten, he will say the famous quote: Barf!

When you are trying to get to the school, you will pass a few market places where there are a lot of different stores. Most of them are places where our heroes can eat. While it costs some money, you can upgrade your character's skills while you are eating something. Eating some things will make your character better to take damage, while other food will make him a better kicker. This means that it's important to build up your character as much as possible if you want to beat the game.

That's one of the things that makes River City Ransom very different from most of the other games in this genre. Another things is that in many of the other beat em ups games you go from one stage to another, but you can go anywhere you want in River City when ever you want to. The only bad thing I found about this is that there are no alternative ways to take to get to the place you want to go, so this might mean that you have to go from one side of the city to the other.

In this game there are four different ways to kill an enemy. You can either punch him with one of the buttons, or kick him with the other button. But in every street where you meet enemies, you can pick up different items that you can either use as a weapon or throw it at your enemy. This includes anything from something as simple as a whip or a pole to things like a trash can or even another enemy. You can also jump by pressing both of the buttons.

As you might have guessed, it takes some time to build up your character so he can survive the streets of River City, which is a pain when you play this game with a friend. Now you and your friend have to share all the money you find, which means that it will take twice as much time to build up your character. This can be really boring if you also have no idea which kind of food increases which status. And sadly, this game also has a many slowdowns when you are playing with a friend.

There's a password system that you can use in this game, but personally I think that these games should be cleared in one session. This can take awhile when you don't know how strong you have to be before you can take on every street in River City and you don't know where all the bosses are that you have to defeat before you can go to the High School. I guess it took me about 3 hours to beat the game the first time I beat it.

The building up system is something I actually don't like as much as many others do. It makes the game a little more unique then the rest of the beat em ups, but on the other hand this can make the game very easy. Since you can carry items that will bring your health up, the game will not be that challenging. And the two things I want a beat em up to have is a good challenge and a great multi-player mode, River City Ransom has neither. But it can still be a fun game to play alone.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/07/07