River City

No, I'm-

Or, as I've gotten older and more mature and understandable, Kunio-Kun and friends, the anime.

I mean, all three-

Sorry, everybody

I love that vibe.

So I'm a big fan of games like Double Dragon and Kuno, Kunio-kun, whatever.

They all come from that.

And so I love that he's that kind of character because...

That's the initial release.

And then we're also going to talk about River City Girls.

Yep.

Which is another side-scrolling beat-em-up from 2019.

I believe you reviewed River City Ransom and it probably like the mid 50 episodes a bank it was.

And I think you give it an eight out of ten.

So pretty lofty heights for a NES game.

It would have been.

And I played a little bit on the stream, too, and it's good.

You know, I felt like that was kind of like what catapulted Kunio-kun back into the mainstream.

You know, because it was

just...

yeah because i mean like you start out and you kind of play as like the normal like alex character and it's just like nes style you know river city ransom and then when when you're done with that then all of a sudden it's like and then there were new students and you have these new different characters you can play as i have different you know abilities and attributes and i'm like oh okay now we're getting in depth it's not just nostalgia at this point but um Yeah, I feel like there was a time that beat-em-ups were kind of...

Nobody was really playing beat-em-ups.

And then I felt like when River City Underground came out, I felt like that was that right special moment because then we started having a lot more Double Dragon and Kunio-kun stuff coming out afterwards.

I felt like that underground...

but it's something like Tough Guy Cooney, or something on that line.

And that series, the Kunikun series, or as it would be later known in English regions as the River City series, has its own sequels, its own spin-off series, so to speak.

And the Renegade and Kunikun series would carry on in their own countries, and the way that we didn't have the internet back then, nobody really knew.

this whole weird story.

It would probably be really strange back then if you'd seen a Kunicon game.

You'd have probably thought, what's this rip-off of Renegade? Yet rarely nowadays, only sad old farts like me will know what Renegade is, whereas the River City games, they keep on coming.

The River City series was originally made by Technos Japan, but the series is now handled by Arc System Works, who purchased all of the intellectual property rights from Technos' successor, Million Corp.

But, I need to talk a little bit about River City, because the story of this game is based on a sort of semi-autobiographical story of...

Not a lot of actual punchy kicky shit.

Kishimoto wanted fights that felt like real fights, so his enemies in Kunio-kun would take multiple hits to go with that before they went down.

You were just walking across, karate chopping an endless supply of assholes.

legendary gaming progress that we all kind of take for granted now quite frankly that is his contribution to the arcade world he also changed the way you move through the environment instead of being restricted by left and right you can move up and down to the battlefield which basically create a little combat arenas but it also created another problem you can't push up the jump which all these games did at the time so instead you had a jump button he made a jump kick and punch button which is a three button setup which then became the foundation of all these freaking games you That is another one of his legacies.

It was a very different looking game.

So for the Western version, it got changed, not just by the name, which I think it was Kunio-kun or something, to Renegade.

And it gave more of a Western version, which got really influenced by this.

And then obviously then Double Dragon got influenced by Renegade and Final Fight, Streets of Rage.