I truly love retro games and video game history. That’s the main reason I started this blog, after all. It’s also one of the reasons why I’m always advocating for emulation and video game preservation. There are just so many great works of digital art/interactive media out there, you can’t possibly even enjoy it all.

The thing is, we don’t generally do a good job of preserving old games. For the big video game companies—large development studios and console manufacturers alike—games are seen primarily as commercial products, and not so much as works of art. So each game’s worth is more or less determined by its viability in the market.

A company like Nintendo, for example, might look at a game in their back catalog—say Mother 3 on the Game Boy Advance—and consider various factors in order to answer the ultimate business question: Can we make money with this game today? If an old game’s revival or rerelease is expected to be profitable, then the company might pursue the venture, bringing the game back in some form or another. If not, they definitely won’t bring it back.

Thus our modern capitalist system never actually values preservation of video games for the games’ sake; the incentives simply aren’t there. It is only when profit motivations align with preservation endeavors that video game companies suddenly care about their own cultural relevance and history.

With all of that said, we are living in surprisingly exciting times when it comes to video game preservation. Because apparently the current video game market has a real soft spot for classic games. Many of us are genuinely excited to buy new releases of old games. And not just the familiar titles either, those games from our youth that exude pure nostalgia. Plenty of players these days appear eager to snatch up obscure items of gaming’s past, and even titles that have never been released in the United States before.

With that in mind, we’ve seen some interesting developments in the commercial video game industry recently. The first example that springs to mind is the Hamster’s Arcade Archives series, which has brought emulated versions of arcade classics to modern consoles like PS4 and Nintendo Switch. Between the original Arcade Archives series and the SNK-specific sub-series “ACA Neo Geo”, Hamster has made over 300 arcade games convenient playable today. Similarly, the SEGA AGES series from M2 has brought a bunch of SEGA’s arcade classics, like Space Harrier, Shinobi, and Out Run, to Switch.

Then we have modern sequels to classic series which have been lying dormant for some time. Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection appeared to create real buzz for a series which most old-school gamers either love or hate, and younger gamers have probably never heard of. Even more obscure, Konami released GetsuFumaDen: Undying Moon, a sequel to a Famicom action game that no one in the US has ever played, and Ganryu 2 - Hakuma Kojiro, a sequel to Visco’s 1999 action game for the NEOGEO, just came out as well.

We even have long-lost games being resurrected, like Clockwork Aquario. Apparently this one was developed for arcades in the 90’s but never released. Until now, that is, finally playable 30 years later.

We have old pixel-art classics being remastered for modern consoles, like The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors, Wild Guns: Reloaded, and (soon) Pocky & Rocky Reshrined. The pinnacle of this kind of rerelease might actually be the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, which brought updated versions of Finals Fantasy I-VI to Steam.

Continuing with JRPGs, we got Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition earlier this year, which included the Radical Dreamers text adventure never previously released in the west. And shockingly, this summer will see the release of Live-A-Live, a SNES era role-playing game which wasn’t translated for audiences outside of Japan until present day. It finally makes its stateside debut with a new—and legitimately cool-looking—“HD 2D” visual style.

Speaking of SNES era games finally getting a release outside of Japan recently, that brings us to today’s main topic: River City Girls Zero. I think this title is an especially interesting case.

A new localization port of a Super Famicom beat’em up that we never got in the west, River City Girls Zero brings 16-bit brawling to the Nintendo Switch. The original game was called Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, part of the long-running Kunio series, which also includes River City Ransom and Super Dodgeball.

Since the characters of Misako and Kyoko, main protagonists of the recent River City Girls, were first introduced—and are both playable in—Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka, WayForward found an interesting way to localize the game and finally release it outside of Japan: They would turn it into a River City Girls prequel! It’s actually a pretty clever idea.

And much like River City Girls before it, the presentation of the game is stellar. The new opening animation is beautiful and slick as hell, accompanied by a new theme song which is also pretty kick-ass. From the outset, I was pumped to throw down in more River City-style mayhem. But while the presentation is super polished and satisfying, the gameplay remains completely unchanged from the original Super Famicom game. And man, it is rough…

It brings me no pleasure to say this, but the actual game presented in RCG Zero really sucks. I don’t want to sugarcoat it, lest anyone think I am recommending this game, because I just can’t. Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka is really rough experience and I simply don’t enjoy it…like, at all.

This Kunio game is extremely text-heavy, especially for a beat’em up. The game has a story to tell, with lots of characters and plenty of dialogue. It’s great that WayForward did a full translation, because that was definitely necessary. But there’s so much talking, in fact, that the actual gameplay feels secondary.

The brawling gameplay itself feels painfully stiff, restrictive and kinda lifeless. Despite being incredibly simple, it also manages to be incredibly difficult (at least when played in single-player), so the overall experience is just a lesson in frustration. The 16-bit visuals are serviceable, but not particularly appealing. And everything looks pretty crude when compared to the excellent visual style of 2019’s River City Girls.

Then there is the sound design, which I can only describe as hateful. I’m a huge fan of the Super Nintendo’s audio, and generally tend to enjoy music and sound effects with a distinctly “SNES” flavor, so it’s certainly not the original hardware’s capabilities that I’m complaining about here. This game just sounds absolutely terrible from stem to stern.

For example, the story starts with Kunio and Riki thrown in jail, and the first level of the game is escaping from prison. During this escape scene, there are spotlights moving about the playfield and alarm sirens blaring. The siren sound effect is pervasive in this scene, and the sound is so utterly grating to the ears that I had to mute my TV in order to play it. Just truly awful.

So the west gets this game about 28 years after its initial release in Japan, and after all that time, it just kind of sucks. That seems like a disappointment, right? What does this mean for the overall trend of localizing niche/obscure older titles, or reviving old game series for modern system? Well, I actually consider this to still be a positive development.

For one thing, WayForward really went out of their way to craft an impressive intro video and generally good presentation for the game, whilst faithfully preserving the gameplay and overall experience. Sure, they were probably too faithful in preserving the gameplay so directly—since again, I really don’t like it—but I still appreciate the recreation of the original work. Sometimes the changes developers make when reviving an old game can end up being mistakes in and of themselves. So I applaud the effort to just port the game as it was, warts and all.

Moreover, I’m happy to see a game receive this kind of revival when it’s arguably just a bad game. The video game community tends to sit up and take notice when the games that we love—or those outright masterpiece classic titles—are at risk of disappearing forever. But realistically, there has never been a need to worry that the Marios and Zeldas or Mega Mans or Castlevanias or Finals Fantasy are at any risk of being lost. It’s the small fry games that are much more likely to be lost to history. And a bad game, especially one presumably played by less people, is in an even more perilous position still.

Sure, River City Girls Zero (Shin Nekketsu Kōha: Kunio-tachi no Banka) is a bad game. But that’s ok. Bad games deserve preservation too.