River City Ransom

released on Jan 31, 1990

Play as Alex and Ryan and cross River City to fight street gangs and save your girlfriend from the hands of a bad guy named "Slick." Improve your fighting experience by powering-up your characters in River City's shops, picking-up items for bonuses and using the trash bins and pipes you will find in its streets.


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The closest thing we had to an open world RPG at the time.

Retro Yearly List #16 [1990: River City Ransom]

For the first beat 'em' up game in my personal list, I've chosen what is considered a hidden gem.

RCR offers a different approach for the genre, adding elements of RPG and almost an open-world experience, since you can walk through the screens back and forth and skip the enemies if you want, but you wanna beat them to collect coins and upgrade your character, otherwise, you will have a hard time beating the bosses, that's the overall system of progressing here, and I kind of like it, but there is a chance you will get stuck with all options you have.

Some bosses are optional but there are a mandatory few to reach the end, they look all pretty much the same, there is no big difference between their attack patterns, in fact, all enemies in the game use just punches, kicks, and weapons to hit you, so there is no diversity on this point.

I liked both the graphics and the music, which are really catchy, with a little great reference towards the end.

The game offers several options of items to purchase which will give you different abilities, which are just buffed versions of the basic attacks. You will also increase your HP and your status by purchasing them, but the game does not provide details of what you are getting until you do, this can be annoying if you don't know the game, I used a little guide for it and it helped me a lot to not making bad deals.

Difficulty is ok if you know what to do, since you can overpower your character with the right items and farm points. But in any case, if you die you just respawn at the next already visited mall, with half of your cash.

Overall, it's a beautiful game with an innovative approach and a good blend of different genres.

And by the way, wtf are these passwords?
BARF!

A great beat 'em up and an NES classic.

A huge achievement for the NES library: a beat'em up/RPG hybrid...wish the framerate was a little better.

Literally the best simultaneous 2-player game on the NES, because it's very fun, and because there's jack and shit for 2P games on NES

Bir NES oyunu için harika içeriklere sahip. Hem dövüş oyunu, hem RPG elementleri var, hem harita keşfi var, yaşayan kasabalar ve mağazalar var ve upgrade'ler de var. Rahat 5 yıldızlık bir oyun olabilecek bir oyunmuş aslında ama tek bir kritik sorunu var; çok grind istiyor. Oyunu sıkıcılaştıracak kadar grind istiyor ve grind yapması zevkli de değil. O zevkimi baltaladı işte.