![]() ![]() You’ll want to collect them all, and go back home to pick your favorites.īetween the new shops, expanded areas, and quests that have you running all over town to gain access to the Sanwakai Crime Syndicate’s toughest leaders, a session of River City Girls 2 feels more like planning an expedition than getting to the next “level”. ![]() For example, most “Female Yakuza” characters throw a pattern of knives when summoned, but the special Zombie Female Yakuza stabs an enemy and poisons them, making them useful against tough enemies and bosses. Many of the enemies are palette-swaps, but a few use different attacks when summoned. River City Girls 2 deepens the system by giving each character space for two assists, and vastly expanding the selection of characters to recruit. This lets you swap characters, pick healing items from your storage, and crucially, select your preferred assist characters.Īs before, you can recruit an enemy to use as a recharging special attack. Going home is often the smarter choice, especially in the early going. However, you can instead choose to spawn at your hideout for no penalty. Getting killed in-game gives you the option to respawn from the last screen transition, in exchange for some of your money. The hideout is perhaps the biggest addition to River City Girls 2, as it changes the flow of the game from a long, rambling brawler into one more akin to a survival title. The only relief from an unending tide of baddies is to either duck into one of dozens of shops, or to retreat to your hideout (there’s one in every zone). All those areas, from your neighborhood in Crosstown to the heights of Sanwakai Tower, are teeming with enemies all eager to take a piece out of you.Ĭlearing an area of foes only gives you a temporary reprieve: Enemies respawn after a minute or two. It’s not an open-world title per se, but each of the eight playable zones of the city is comprised of at least a dozen distinct areas. It’s easily twice the size of the original in hour count, a mammoth game in a genre known for almost criminally short runtimes.Īs events start to escalate and the “RPG” part of this Brawler-RPG makes itself more evident, the scope of River City Girls 2 unfolds, revealing a much more detailed and realized rendition of River City. The initial burst of familiarity is WayForward’s way of letting you plant your feet on solid ground, because when River City Girls 2 opens up, it does so like a flower in rapid bloom. Thankfully, the feeling doesn’t last, and that slight suspicion is replaced by excitement. If you’re fresh off of River City Girls, you might feel like you just started a New Game Plus run instead of a sequel. Sure, there are narrative reasons for this kind of familiarity, but there’s a sense that maybe a little bit too much is being “recycled” at first. Even the initial maps are similar, if not identical, in layout to the previous ones, often using the same background music at first. Even the graphics, already brilliant, got some extra visual flair thanks to some particle effects, but you wouldn’t be able to tell which game is which from a random screenshot. The characters reuse many of their combat animations. You’re beating down rowdy students, local toughs, and yakuza thugs. You’re walking around River City as either Misako, Kyoko, or their boyfriends Kunio and Riki. In its first hours, WayForward’s River City Girls 2 feels a lot like a second River City Girls game.
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