River City Ransom is one of the most iconic brawlers of the NES era, with players fighting their way across the titular River City to save one of the main characters’ girlfriends. Along the way, they do battle with the city’s many color-coded gangs, like a low-rent version of The Warriors, pausing only to learn new fighting techniques from books (how studious) and wolf down convenience store food to restore health. River City Ransom came about at a time when similar beat ‘em ups dominated arcades and consoles alike, but a follow-up just a few years ago brings some of that old magic back in a much different form, and it’s free now on the Epic Games Store.
If it weren’t for the name, you might not think River City Girls had anything to do with the NES cult classic that inspired it. Its main characters, Kyoko and Misako, don’t appear in River City Ransom, but they are recurring characters in the Japanese series Kunio-kun, of which River City Ransom is just one entry. But despite a different visual style and a focus on two different heroines, River City Girls is a modernized version of the classic it spun off from.
