River City Girls Zero

Overview

Shin Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun: Kunio-tachi no Banka (New Hotblooded Rowdy Kunio-Kun: The Eulogy of Kunio's Friends) is a brawler released in 1994 for the Super Famicom by Technos Japan. The game was one of the last games in the long-running Kunio-kun series to be developed and published by Technos Japan. Notable for being a dark, gritty reboot of the then incredibly popular (in Japan) Kunio-kun franchise, Kunio-tachi no Banka has players fighting their way through a murder mystery.

Story

A young couple is murdered in a brutal hit-and-run accident and juvenile delinquents Kunio and Riki are falsely accused of the couple's death. Thrown into a juvenile crime center for a crime they swear they did not commit, Kunio and Riki must escape incarceration and beat the crap out of everyone they can in order to find out who was really behind the hit and run accident.

The story and feel of the game is overwhelmingly dark, a stark contrast to the lighthearted whimsy found in other Kunio-kun titles. The main characters use swear words often, the violence is less cartoony and more gritty, and the characters seem a lot edgier than in past Kunio-kun titles.

Gameplay

Kunio-tachi no Banka is a standard beat-em-up. Players get the requisite punch, kick, jump, and block buttons, plus can access a special attack by pressing block and any attack button at the same time. In addition to this, players have a "back attack" button which allows them to attack enemies that get behind them, and by pressing select players can cycle between different playable characters. The game contains four playable characters: Series mascot Kunio and his girlfriend Misako for player 1, and sometime Series antagonist Riki and his girlfriend Kyouko.

Bike racing scenes are sprinkled throughout the game to give the player a break from beating stuff up on foot and play somewhat similar to the video game Road Rash.

Legacy

Kunio-tachi no Banka would wind up being, for the longest time, the very last original non-sports game in the Kunio-kun series. The game was not released in non-Japanese territories and was followed by two more titles, the food-themed puzzle game Kunio no Oden and a King of Fighters-esque remake of Super Dodge Ball for the Neo Geo. Neo Geo Dodgeball would become the company's last game, and members of the Kunio-kun would later go on to form Million, who would eventually buy the rights to the games back and remake/re-release many classics from the series's heyday.

An English translation was released by fan translation group Aeon Genesis in 2002.

Also, the action racing game Super Mad Champ was based on the motorcycle levels of Kunio-tachi no Banka.

The game was announced for a 2022 western release for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 under the title River City Girls Zero, with a fully new English translation and tweaks to link it to WayForward's River City Girls spinoff series, including new music from series composer Megan McDuffee, voice acting from Kayli Mills and Kira Buckland, an anime-esque intro sequence, and comic-styled cutscenes.

Soundtrack