River City Saga: Journey to the West brings Kunio-kun and his crew to mix with the story of Journey To The West, wrapped up in a single-player rogue-like formula with a structure inspired by the Hades games. Some funny writing, good performance on the technical side of things, and decent beat-em-up combat is to be found here, but can it be more than just “Chinese mythology beat-em-up Hades?”
River City, and by extension the Kunio-kun series in general, has a long, storied history in the gaming sphere, existing in Japanese arcades all the way back in May of 1986. Since then, it has built up a stable of over 50 games released across various regions, some of which have received massive attention and strong critical reception. And most recently, we have River City Saga: Journey to the West to dig into, putting a fresh coat of paint on a classic beat-em-up franchise and injecting some modern roguelike mechanics to keep you playing one run after another.
River City Saga: Journey to the West dares to ask the question: what if we made all of our main characters Kunio Kun? This game adopts one of the most famous figures in Chinese mythology, the legend of Sun Wu-kong, by injecting the series’ characters into it in every way it can as we journey to the goal, Tianzhu, to retrieve sacred texts and bring salvation and peace to the world. They play up the absurdity of having one character often play all 4 main characters, and some of the dialogue made me chuckle a few times, but it sometimes overstayed its welcome. I’ve played a few games in this franchise, so maybe some in-jokes were lost on me, but occasionally I just wanted to skip through the dialogue that felt like it was calling back to interactions I am not aware of in the River City series.
When it comes to the gameplay, you can expect some pretty fast and frantic beat-em-up gameplay while you dodge normal enemy attacks and larger, telegraphed attacks; you will have to use your dodge to get away from or dodge through them thanks to some invulnerability frames. The 3 playable characters are Sun Wukong, who focuses on speedy movement and attacks given some range by his powerful pole he wields, Zhu Bajie who is the powerhouse of the characters who is also the slowest of the crew, and finally Sha Wujing who has the most ranged attack options out of the crew, but isn’t going to be get into the middle of a brawl like the other two.
Where things get a bit more interesting is where the clear Hades inspiration is: the various “Blessings of the Gods” you can obtain through your runs. These have you communicating with various characters from Chinese mythology to grant you power-ups to your character, as well as tying signature properties to all of your different buttons, from your dodge dropping damaging fields, all the way to making your attacks put status effects on enemies, ultimate screen-clearing moves, and even more. Of course, these gods are also Kunio-kun coded, and crack their fair share of jokes too. These blessings will be among the biggest drivers of your build and often offer really awesome synergies.
Your character has a normal attack, a strong attack, a dodge, and a magic spell that often invoke transformations into bosses and using their big ultimate attack against other enemies. You can get upgrades that totally change some of these; in particular, your strong attacks can be changed into some wildly different styles, making a simple charged pole poke into a flurry of blows that end in a flaming wheel of damage, absolutely decimating enemies if you can pull it off. Of course, during your run and in between them, you can also spend resources you find on the run for permanent upgrades that carry between them, giving you a nice gradual ramp-up in player power if those player skills aren’t quite paying the bills on your runs.
A big highlight for me was the boss fights; many of them had really fun patterns to learn to dodge, while having big, bombastic ultimate moves that kept you on your toes in a much more engaging way than the normal fodder enemies you fight leading up to them. It was a nice treat to get to use those myself, if not a little scaled down for balance, with the transformation magic. The combat feels a little too loose during the fodder enemy stages, so I think it was all designed with a little bit more focus on the boss fights, which I think paid off.
Average
The Final Word
River City Saga: Journey to the West is a fun little expedition into something different for the franchise, but it never really hit the heights I was hoping for. If you need a decently priced roguelite adventure to tide you over until the next big thing, you could certainly do worse than picking this up. Franchise fans will get a bit more mileage out of it than others, I think, but I would like to see more things covered by “River City Saga,” and hopefully we get co-op then.
