Despite taking the form of a beat-em-up, the River City Ransom experience is far closer to that of the prototypical JRPG. It has a kickass soundtrack, you grind to level up your stats... and if you know what you're doing, it's "press A to win". Seriously, you get access to a technique early on that triples the speed of your regular punches. Also, the button to punch is the same as the button to block, which means once you get your defence stat high enough you can just spam A to ATATATATATA your opponents to death and also guard against any counterattacks they send your way.

Despite how shallow and easy to break the combat is, it's also pretty satisfying, with the hit detection and moveset as good as can be expected for a NES game. And while some purists may dislike RPG elements in action games as replacing 'skill' with 'grinding', I rather like them here - they function as a customizable difficulty setting, where you decide how difficult you want your experience to be by how much you raise your stats. In fact, because the penalty for getting KO'ed is very mild, merely sending you back a few screens with a money penalty (and all stats intact!), the game actually subtly encourages the player to grind less and take more risks, and in doing so increase their skill level at the game.

Of course, its age means can get very janky at times. But this is still an excellent game that deserves lots of credit for its decent combat, sheer ambition in its hybrid genre and open world, and its meme moments (BARF!)