You can heal on the fly with food from your inventory, and you have a variety of ultimate moves that allow you to take out at least a few enemies in a hurry. If you hit a peak of difficulty, you have a number of useful tools to even the odds until your stats are up to snuff. For most of the game, I rarely encountered an enemy that could deal more than 1 point of damage per hit, as I was usually way ahead of the game’s intended power curve. Playing on medium, moderate difficulty, you easily end up outplaying any threats you encounter, assuming you’re fighting that you don’t strictly have to. That’s the theory, anyway, because RCS has a weird undercooked quality, where you can see what’s going on and even have fun, but it can be tedious work. When lots of people are competing to punch you, someone is going to land one, and it’s your job to cheat as hard as you can to avoid that. You’re encouraged to mix up your tactics to come up with the most degenerate nonsense possible to murder an entire mob before they have a chance to kill you. Once you have skills, Kunio can smash through a handful of enemies at once, and if he has a save, a fight can escalate into a frantic mess of pixels and numbers. ![]() The general idea behind RCS is that it’s Kunio-kun’s version of the frenetic you versus an army gameplay in Koei Tecmo’s various Warriors games. Then he just gives you the dropkick, and suddenly you’re the pro wrestling champion of ancient China. Much like Ransom or Girls, Saga is arguably its hardest in the first 10 minutes, before you’ve unlocked any decent moves. You can spend these coins to buy meals, equipment, or skill books that quickly increase your combat potential. Enemies come towards you in groups of half a dozen or more and turn into bouncing pieces when you knock them down. There is an open map of China, where every path through the countryside is mostly bandits in volume. If you’ve played River City Ransom, or more likely River City Girls, Saga is an intentionally retro game in the same vein. It’s pretty silly, even before you unlock the ability to kick so hard you create a tornado. The famous Red Hare horse is represented by a motorcycle. This is a version of Three Kingdoms where three guys, one of whom is objectively a jerk, regularly defeat entire military battalions, and where Guan Yu invented the dropkick, powerbomb, and elbow in 220 AD. It’s a weird look overall, like a Saturday morning cartoon adaptation of the Warring States period. This draws all three of them into period conflicts as volunteers, mercenaries, captains, and finally generals. Kunio himself stars as Guan Yu, who joins forces with Liu Bei (Gouda) and Zhang Fei (Godai) to fight the Yellow Bandit Rebellion. It is a chaotic and turbulent period in Chinese history, with many warlords vying for power, which was immortalized in an influential classic Chinese novel. If you’ve played a Dynasty Warriors game or the latest Total War, you know how RotTK goes. Instead of the Japanese urban setting more loosely associated with those games, RCS tells Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with all the big name roles filled by recognizable Kunio-kun characters. It’s set as an entry in the long-running Kunio-kun franchise, which is best represented outside of Japan by River City Ransom and, more recently, River City Girls. After that initial, bizarre roadblock, I found RCS comfortably familiar. I spent my first minute with the game trying to figure out which button started the game, and neither Enter nor the spacebar worked. ![]() ![]() While you can freely remap hotkeys, RCS also doesn’t specify what its default keys are. It’s like using an old emulator to play a forgotten SNES beat-’em-up. By default, you use WASD to move, with K/I/L as attack buttons. I might have tried to play with the keyboard instead, but it was a failure. I haven’t had issues like this with a Steam game in ages years. Instead of being able to plug in an Xbox pad and get to work, I had to bully RCS into playing nice with a DualShock 4. The first issue I encountered was the Steam version refusing to recognize my wired Xbox controller. River City Saga: Three Kingdoms Review Different Streets, Same Fight River City Saga: Three Kingdoms Review – The Bottom Line.River City Saga: Three Kingdoms Review Different Streets, Same Fight.
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