Though it didn’t loom as largely in its day, River City Ransom has become a huge touch point for the beat ’em up genre in the years since 1989. Its combination of brawling and RPG elements had something for everyone, and the melodramatic story of high school gang rivalries amused us all.
But I really wanted to explore what this entry meant in the wider scope of the Kunio-kun series of games, which it was really quite divorced from in the West, having gone from Renegade to this. Those two games were very unrelated in the West, but in Japan they had everything to do with one another! We can enjoy both egg rolls AND miso simmered mackerel over rice!
