River City Girls 2 is a great game, but there are a few small things that could be done to make it even better.
River City Girls 2 is a pretty great game. It improves on the fighting and structure of the first game, which were already good. Combat is even more intense, with a nice focus on juggling in the air. The map is bigger, but it’s easier to get around, and different quality-of-life changes, like being able to use items right away, make the game much more enjoyable. Oh, and of course it’s still funny.
Almost anything bad we could say about the game would be nitpicking, but even the best games could use a little nitpicking from time to time. After all, if the second game in the series was this good, just think how good the third game could be with a few small changes.
Recovery Moves
Even if you’re very good at River City Girls 2, you’re likely to lose a lot of fights by getting knocked down. When you get knocked down, you can only stand back up or roll to the side by quickly pressing the buttons. It’s a little annoying to always have to smash your controller into dust to get back up, only to be knocked down again right away.
This could be fixed with recovery moves that can be learned, like an air recovery or a ground ukemi. Such moves both reward players for keeping their heads in the game and keep the fight going instead of stopping when someone gets knocked down.
Greater Mobility
When it comes to moves or moving, River City Girls 2 has a lot of going backwards. This isn’t always a problem, especially since there are fewer parts in this game that require accurate platforming than in the last one, which this game isn’t really made for.
The most frustrating part is when you want to move fast around the map but have to keep turning and reorienting yourself. You can only dash left or right, not up or down, so you have to walk if you want to get to an exit in the north or south of the room. Some kind of contextual vertical dash would be nice here, maybe one that you can only use outside of battle to keep things fair.
Four-Player Online
River City Girls 2 does have four-player co-op play, but it only works if you play nearby. When you play online, you can only play with two other people at once. Wayforward says this is to make sure people have the best experience possible, which makes sense, but it seems like a very easy problem to solve.
Technically, you could use an outside service like Steam’s Remote Play Together to force four-player online, but that seems kind of pointless. The best way to play these games is with a big group of friends. These days, people do this more online than on a couch.
Puzzle-Solving Privacy
This is a bit of a vague request, but it’s something we often wished for at different points in the game. In River City Girls 2, you sometimes have to do certain things in certain places or do some platforming. This is especially true if you’re hunting down secrets. This can sometimes be a bit of a complicated process, which is why it’s so annoying to have random mooks breathing down your neck while you’re doing it.
Even if you kill them, more will come in through the room’s openings, so you’ll always have to watch out for them. There are some ways to fix this, like turning off enemy spawns after you clear a room or stopping them from going to certain places. We just want to be left alone.
Minimap On Your HUD
The map for River City Girls 2 is pretty detailed. It shows where you are on the overworld, where the exits lead, if there are any shops in the room you are in, and where your goals are. But it’s a little annoying to have to keep opening and closing the map screen on your phone to figure out where you are.
This could be fixed with a simple minimap, like the ones you might find in a dungeon-crawling game like The Binding of Isaac. You don’t need to waste time opening the full map as long as you can see where you are and what places are close by.
Adding Contextual Dialogue
When you start River City Girls 2, you can choose from Misako, Kyoko, Kunio, and Rikki to play as. As you move forward in Spacebar Clicker game, you’ll also be able to add Marian and Provie to your group. All of these characters are fully voiced in conversation and cutscenes, which is great, but they also share dialogue, which can be confusing.
No matter who you play as, they always talk and act like Misako and Kyoko. If you are playing as Marian and talk to Skullmageddon, he will talk about an earlier meeting with her while she is standing right in front of him. If the dialogue changed based on who you were playing as, these times would happen less often and be less distracting.
Including Manual Saving
River City Girls 2 has a method that automatically saves your progress every time you move from one room to another. But your place isn’t saved, even though your progress is. If you leave the game and come back to it later, you will be sent back to the last Hideout you were in.
Even if you’ve already finished a goal, you still have to walk all the way back to where you were before. This can be a huge pain if the last Hideout you went to was in a different district. It would be very helpful to be able to save manually or at least save your place with autosaves.
