River City Girls Zero is out and I finished it, and then kept on playing for a second loop besides, and the reasons why need contextualizing in terms of what this release even is.
For the game that was Kunio-tachi no Banka, despite its packaging in this hybrid form I would rather keep criticisms and commentary of the source work separate. In that light, this is a breezy beat 'em up of high dramatism, concerned with a narratively-driven and rhymed expression of the genre contrary to the freeform roamer associations the wider series calls to mind. There is no room to breathe here, as each environment feels enclosed and aggressively looming over oneself; the tradeoff is that for the limited player agency huge gains have been made in setpiece direction and atmospheric definition. Sure, you canvass much of the same kind of backdrops as many others in the series and genre, but Kunio and company are always barreling through the locales with grim locomotion and cause that makes these stock proceedings feel momentous and urgent, because this is the tone of the game as communicated in its title: an eulogy for the cast and world, the last of the hot-bloods, acted out with a heightened sense of melodrama and a drearier tonality. It's a game where the scariest thing you'll face aren't super-charged martial arts techniques or supernatural energy projectiles--it's just going to be folks with knives, or a single gun. A sense of melancholy and groundedness permeates the game throughout, to its great benefit.
The nature of the game as described perhaps found meaning in its original context as a farewell to the series, but it cannot reconcile with its rebaptism as River City Girls Zero. It's a marketing angle to tie a much older work to a new series that means to celebrate its roots and inspirations, and there is no doubt that that is what's happening; the only thing in doubt is how it seeks to create those connections between them, across decades, cultures and creators. The best segues available are the aesthetic footprints imported and newly fashioned for the game from its adoptive progeny, with the opening and closing bookend animations with music by Megan McDuffee and DEMONDICE hitting the homeruns that justify the newly adopted framing device the best they can; this both retains the original work largely as is while lending it additional context externally. What does not work as well in them is the odd sentiment expressed through Misako and Kyoko in their contemporary fourth-wall breaker characterizations in that who would conceivably care about some old game--if not for all this bonus material around it to sweeten the deal. It's not an attitude that's particularly interesting in a vacuum to begin with but has absolutely no place to come out of a WayForward production, the way I see it--acting self-deprecating about pixel art and retro games does not create an endearingly jovial mood but a weirdly self-conscious and apologetic one from a studio that is entirely defined by the medium.
You get this kind of tonal whiplash increasingly in playing the game, as it presents an option screen when starting a game that I've never seen in any other video game: in addition to the expected language options, English is divided into what are termed "New" and "Literal" options, affecting the entirety of the original game's script in the process. This is why I jumped into another playthrough after finishing, because the choice in the first place baffled me as far as what it suggested, and I had to see the differences in action. The "new" script is done in a writing voice compatible with the game's new branding; there are more inserted jokey-jokes and "self-aware" asides made in the process of the game's narrative despite the content of it not changing along the way; the byproduct of this looseness is also a more lively and generally better-reading script in moment-to-moment phrasing and conversational flow, both important to the game's focus. The "literal" script, on the other hand is like a ghost of fan translations past, embodying the linguistic stiffness and unadventurous verbiage that powerfully sucks the tension, levity or whatever mood evoked from any scene it's adapting. Its other facet is that for this supposed adherence to authenticity, it also retains instances of slurs or at least thinks that's how one ought to preserve the intent of the Japanese counterpart words used; settle in for Misako and Kyoko being called "bitches" by their significant others, for instance.
I cannot conceive of what lead to the inclusion of both script as options in the game. Of the two, the new script is my relative preference for its general treatment of the text, even if I do not relish the transformation of lines like "that was fun! I'm really hyped up now" to "that was cool, though it served no gameplay purpose" when witnessing a rollercoaster cinematic where the original developers show off their sprite scaling technology for a bit. But that is just one extreme, with the literal script sitting at the other end and possessing its own advantages and foibles. It's again difficult to ascertain why both were included, but in any creative process one should think a treatment that so prominently includes gendered slurs in its vocabulary should never have been integrated into a game, as an option or not. The presentation of both as equally valid options creates an uncomfortable push and pull between localization practices and approaches without really explicating or grounding the decisions beyond the raw text, creating a sense of legitimacy for whichever ends up being the point of preference for the player, with neither really serving the game's stated tone nor treating the text with equal care and attention.
It's a decision inextricably tied with the game's uneasy relationship with its new moniker that it cannot accommodate at all, and choosing to dress it up as such results in about as significant tonal dissonance as River City Girls proper's narrative pitfalls did. Selling an idea of this game--a game where Misako and Kyoko never possess parity with their boyfriends, mechanically or narratively (less moves, treated as hangers-on and eventually completely victimized and sidelined by the plot)--as the origin of a supposedly women-centric brawler renaissance is a frustrating approach to take because the way to make Eulogy work as part of its larger series would be to recognize its historical context and what kind of pop culture it sprung out of, with its inherent sexism. To dress up a very stereotypically masculine and straightlaced even for its own series delinquent melodrama as the secret origin of girl power while actively elevating the "aren't video games funny" tonality of the new brand with one script, and at the same time capitulating to demands--real or imagined--of preserving old and shitty media as flawed and bad as it's "supposed" to be with another... there is a possibility to do one of these things, perhaps. River City Girls Zero is only true to one aspect of its lineage, and it is that most recent one--it still doesn't know what it wants to be or say.
