River City Ransom

So I finished River City Ransom on Stream a few days ago and despite it being my second time to finish this game I've never said anything about it on this blog, which is weird considering how good it is.

On the off chance that you're not familiar, River City Ransom was a game released in 1989 for the NES and you play as a dude called Alex, and maybe one other guy if you're in two player mode, as you go around the town beating up thugs.  The game is actually the third entry in the "Kunio-Kun" series preceded by Super Dodge Ball and Renegade before that.

Gameplay involves walking around a town, beating up dudes until you find a boss dude, then beating him up and getting a hint on where to find the next boss dudes.  When you beat all the boss dudes you go to a school and beat up the final boss dude on the roof and the game ends.  As you beat dudes up they drop money which you use to go to the various shops and buy food items to increase your stats.  I have no idea what most of the stats actually do but you should just aim to get big numbers so you can relieve dudes of there cash in one punch rather than multiple.  It's got a small but open world so it's really up to you to explore and while this can be a little confusing your first time round you'll never really get truly lost.

Despite the NES being famous for having hundreds of really hard games, River City Ransom is kind of on the easy side.  It can be a little challenging at first but once you start to get your stats up and your head round the combat the game becomes an absolute cakewalk.  Late in the game you can pick up some cowboy boots that make your kicks strong enough to kill most enemies, including bosses, in a single attack so once you buy those it really is just game over from there.  My only complaint about this game is that occasionally the enemies will go absolutely crazy and just bully you in a corner until you die and you can't do shit about it.  However this is only really a mild annoyance because in this game death doesn't mean a restart, it just means you lose half your cash and go back to the last shopping area you visited.

So if you've somehow gone your whole life not having played this, go grab it.  I'm sure it's been released for virtual console or whatever given it's legacy and failing that I'm sure you could use some slightly more dubious methods to play it if you were that way inclined.  This series is actually still going too with some of the most recent entries being released for the PS4.  Go get to know good ol' Kunio-Kun, he's a stand up lad