I've heard this game has been an absolute hood classic in South America, again proving they have superior taste to the USA due to the mainstreaming of piracy allowing them to develop really fine-tuned taste due to all the options they have available, and a good appreciation for the past due to using older consoles a lot, importing the newer stuff was often too expensive
They give us all the best homages to retro games because they know what makes them special due to having the whole library to play with (I love you Joymasher! What a great studio)
Anyway, do not sleep on this game, it's a 4 player arena fighter on the NES and it stars my sweet precious baby Kunio-kun who I would do anything to protect
Don't sleep on Kunio either, aka River City Ransom etc, I've been playing those games since I was a kid because despite living in the USA I stumbled into piracy and emulation and all that, boy he's done it all
If you only play two Japan-only Kunio games, play this and the hockey one, they have a knack for infusing every kind of sport with rule-breaking violence, like dodgeball, basketball, volleyball, hockey, track and field, baseball, soccer, falling block puzzle, as well as all the solo adventures like River City Ransom where they have to get their girlfriends back or the Like A Dragon Ishin-esque jidaigeki spinoffs or the Three Kingdoms spinoff or River City Girls from Wayforward where the girlfriends, obversely, has to get them back
A personal favorite of mine is Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, now known in the US with two official translations (localized and literal) as "River City Girls Zero" because you do get to play as the girls too, even with those two options of theirs I like the original fan translation I grew up with though because they say "fuck" and "shit" and "damn", I mean, they're high-schoolers and delinquents, so I guess they would talk like that
Just for the love of god whatever you do, do NOT play Stay Cool Kobayashi-san! A River City Ransom Story...worst mistake of my life
P.S. Yakuza is what happened when Shenmue's narrative aspirations and Kunio's bursts of dopamine split the difference
When will they follow in Kunio's footsteps and we get a Three Kingdoms Yakuza game where Majima is Lu Bu or something
Important information: if you want to play these games on modern platforms, M2 really went all out with the Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle, where they officially translated a whopping 11 games for the first time, including 14 total, including the subject of this review, even retranslating River City Ransom while keeping its Japanese visuals and script intact alongside the original, as well as "quality up" versions that remove slowdown, improve control, and remove NES flickering
And...they locked their roms with DRM so you can't play them on a CRT display like God intended, which is a shame
They give us all the best homages to retro games because they know what makes them special due to having the whole library to play with (I love you Joymasher! What a great studio)
Anyway, do not sleep on this game, it's a 4 player arena fighter on the NES and it stars my sweet precious baby Kunio-kun who I would do anything to protect
Don't sleep on Kunio either, aka River City Ransom etc, I've been playing those games since I was a kid because despite living in the USA I stumbled into piracy and emulation and all that, boy he's done it all
If you only play two Japan-only Kunio games, play this and the hockey one, they have a knack for infusing every kind of sport with rule-breaking violence, like dodgeball, basketball, volleyball, hockey, track and field, baseball, soccer, falling block puzzle, as well as all the solo adventures like River City Ransom where they have to get their girlfriends back or the Like A Dragon Ishin-esque jidaigeki spinoffs or the Three Kingdoms spinoff or River City Girls from Wayforward where the girlfriends, obversely, has to get them back
A personal favorite of mine is Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, now known in the US with two official translations (localized and literal) as "River City Girls Zero" because you do get to play as the girls too, even with those two options of theirs I like the original fan translation I grew up with though because they say "fuck" and "shit" and "damn", I mean, they're high-schoolers and delinquents, so I guess they would talk like that
Just for the love of god whatever you do, do NOT play Stay Cool Kobayashi-san! A River City Ransom Story...worst mistake of my life
P.S. Yakuza is what happened when Shenmue's narrative aspirations and Kunio's bursts of dopamine split the difference
When will they follow in Kunio's footsteps and we get a Three Kingdoms Yakuza game where Majima is Lu Bu or something
Important information: if you want to play these games on modern platforms, M2 really went all out with the Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle, where they officially translated a whopping 11 games for the first time, including 14 total, including the subject of this review, even retranslating River City Ransom while keeping its Japanese visuals and script intact alongside the original, as well as "quality up" versions that remove slowdown, improve control, and remove NES flickering
And...they locked their roms with DRM so you can't play them on a CRT display like God intended, which is a shame