River City Saga: Three Kingdoms Next Review – Review

Despite being a devotee of the beat-em-up genre, I had been eluded by the River City series until 2019’s River City Girls. Beyond the punk rock attitude and characters bursting with personality, it helped me better understand what’s under the hood for that lineage of games. While much of the category’s gameplay is thin, there was a robust slate of skills to unlock, combos to execute, and a leveling-up system tied to purchasing items that quickly accelerated the characters from underpowered to complete wrecking balls. River City Saga: Three Kingdoms Next is a fascinating mish-mash of old gameplay systems with a fresh art style.

The game follows GuanYu, a general placed in a world akin to the ones in a Dynasty Warriors game (largely based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms). The story is mostly presented in a chipper tone, with character profiles drawn in still frames as anime figures that have large, exaggerated emotes. It’s an airy approach to storytelling that has the writing and character interactions laced with humor. The art presentation is a blend of different styles. Specifically, besides the aforementioned character design, in action the characters are drawn in the typical style you’d expect from a River City game, albeit with clothing and style that’d befit the time period. These pixelated characters are then juxtaposed onto a background that has a more modern looking animation, and strangely enough, they all mix together well! The inconsistency somehow adds charm to the presentation, maybe partially because of how unserious the affair is. Unfortunately, the music doesn’t have that same quality. The bulk of your time with this game will have one music track, with a limited melody of about a 20 second track on loop. It will be grating by the time you’re finished.

The gameplay will feel familiar–with some twists–if you’ve been to the River City rodeo before. GuanYu is much zippier moving across the screen than older entries, but still has that very basic punch, kick, grab set of tools. In addition, there are tactic power moves that emblazon the screen with magic or elemental attacks. Going back to aesthetics, firing one of these moves off will trigger a small cutscene with the character models shooting bombastic attacks that look outright silly. On top of that, GuanYu gets a motorcycle early on which lets you temporarily trample over the enemy mobs, sending them flying. As you level up through the game, there are ultimate attacks, stats to level up, equipment, and items galore. It makes for a surprisingly modal experience, which gave the gameplay more legs than I expected. The world traversal is where the fun train comes to a screeching halt. Missions have you jumping from town to town on a world map, but the different settlements aren’t diverse enough to be interesting. Each section of map is also overly long, and even with GuanYu’s speed feels like a slog moving back and forth through. There’s also an issue of directionally where to go on a map. There’ll be door icons showing where you can exit an area, but they don’t clearly correspond to directions on the map, making for a frustrating trial-and-error figuring out where to go. While you do get fast travel options after finding a new destination, there continues to be a tedium to exploration that keeps slowing the action down in a frustrating way.

River City Saga: Three Kingdoms Next starts with the baseline understanding of what makes a River City game, then plays experimental jazz with the rest, to varying levels of success. There’s a lot of good in its presentation and core combat elements, but the dings of bland music and the slog of traversing the world are glaring and kneecap the experience. There’s still plenty of fun to be had for fans of a good beat-em-up, but expect to be playing this more as a curiosity than your next favorite game.