River City Saga: Three Kingdoms is tough to talk about because so few people have played the Kunio games that have led to it, so please bear with me as I try to fill in the gaps. RCS builds off of River City: Rival Showdown on the 3DS to take that gameplay and that entire cast of characters, strip out most of the talking parts, and throw you into a big China open world to reenact the Chinese ROT3K story, which most of you probably know from Dynasty Warriors. The basics are obvious, run here, run there, punch dudes, collect money, buy special moves. You level up like a normal game and distribute your stats, RCR's food stuff stays in the NES era, but what you are spending that money on is learning new moves. You begin the game with a basic moveset but you will soon be buying expensive move scrolls to learn an ever increasing variety of moves to replace your commands. Your punch becomes a double chop, your kick a headbutt, your sword swing an iai slash, etc. You can only equip one move on each action but you may swap them freely once you own them. All this extension of your moveset and experimentation is what you are really playing for long term. Each boss character usually has a few of these moves in their repertoire of their own to keep you on your toes. In addition, you have several metered super moves that which are usually your best source of damage, and a "tactics" move. If you've played Dynasty Warriors you know "tactics" are magic spells that guys with fans use to destroy the battlefield, and that is what they are here too, letting you call in fire, earthquakes, etc. Again, though, most of the gameplay here is spent collecting these moves from various shops, you are fighting to earn more moves to fight more. It is quite a lot of fun if you enjoy Japanese style grind.
Of course there is a story too, and despite the goofy art and a couple of jokes, the story is shockingly sober and straight-faced. River City Saga respects the Three Kingdoms story and tells it as straight as it can muster. Nobody says barf. Sure, Lu Bu is the freakishly huge ugly girl Misuzu, but most of her comedy is toned down and she is still portrayed as a wild threat. Every other character sticks to the script and stays in character for pretty much the entire runtime. You won't understand the casting decisions or why Cao Cao has such an issue with Guan Yu without having played River City: Rival Showdown* to recognize all the boss characters and their special attacks, but the Kunio part of the story is kept solidly in the background and you do not NEED to know it. There is even a lengthy encyclopedia that talks in even greater depth about the events of the Three Kingdoms story and characters.
*(Rival Showdown is an excellent game, by the way. A little rough around the edges, but it retells the original RCR story but with all the drama of a Yakuza story. Great stuff, and really establishes the personalities of the Kunio cast, and knowledge of that game is rewarded well here. The ex-final boss is definitely a throwback to the True End finale of Rival Showdown.)
The art is great, continuing to make these ancient sprites wonderfully expressive, the music is a bunch of great Kunio franchise theme remixes
The story is divided into a series of bite-sized chapters based on various periods of the Three Kingdoms story. Sometimes this works against the game, as you often find yourself running out to fight, running back to talk to people, then fighting again because that is how the original Three Kingdoms story went*, but the pacing still remains fairly quick, only about 10 hours for a first clear at a leisurely exploration pace. With fast travel unlocked, you can enjoy the game far quicker on repeat plays on the higher difficulties, where your level cap raises and enemies start dropping better equipment to help you tier up. Plus, each story chapter has two additional endings at the higher difficulty leading to tougher gimmick bosses: Depending on your reputation, decided by how you answered the text prompts and did the side quests in the chapter, you can open a "Comedy" route or a "Hot-Blooded" route for each of the game's chapters. This only changes the last few fights of each chapter, but the story then does not follow the Three Kingdoms story and you get extra, far more challenging boss fights for doing so. You get to take down Dong Zhuo yourself alongside Cao Cao in one route, for instance, and in another you decide to slack off and not do anything to prepare for Chi Bi so you get properly made fun of by everyone. These routes allow the writers to have some fun with the story and be cooler than ROT3K, reference the old games a bit more, or just be dumb and funny while giving you challenge boss fights. Having to manage reputation to unlock them sounds bad, but in practice it does not take very long on repeat plays as most side quests are marked fairly well and most dialogue options fairly obvious.
*(Notable, both DW and River City Saga appear to have an issue with the writing that I suspect stems from the original ROT3K story: Cao Cao is supposed to be the bad guy but the writing utterly fails to portray him as anything other than a bit of jerk at worst. RCS even includes a somewhat shocking murder by Cao Cao that DW never showed me and STILL cannot make him anything but "the bad guy by default".)
In addition, the game includes an arcade mode that allows you to play a simple hour long beat-em-up with almost every single boss character in the game and their moveset as well as a guest visit from the River City Girls versions of Kyoko and Misako (Who are already cast in the story proper as other characters in their original Japanese versions). This arcade mode ALSO includes alternate routes with unique bosses. It is unfortunately a little long for how simple it is but it remains a great deal of fun despite that, even if I usually quit most of my plays of it halfway through.
There are some issues though, and most of them will be obvious in the first hour of playing: The first move you get is the vintage Mach Punch/Kick, but the enemy AI counters it so hard it is almost useless; they block aggressively and the triple hit move is not safe on block. Until you can get some other moves bought to replace it, the early game will be a bit of a slog. In addition, the enemy count is fairly huge in a lot of fights; not that the fights drag on long, just that they swarm you so much you are often just trying to spam supers to get guaranteed damage without getting knocked around. You will have to work around it, again, until you can get some better moves. Also some side quests send you out looking for wood, straw, or iron resources which just ask you to punch some random trees or hay bales in a few specific locations; just use the Steam guide to find out how to get the resources per chapter. At the highest difficulties... eh, just don't play them. I will explain more in the comments. Also, you NEED to force vsync with your graphics card settings
River City Saga improves on Rival Showdown tremendously with an increased focus on gameplay rather than storytelling and a better growth curve even if the early game is a bit slow. The variety of moves and speed of the action captures the dumb fun of Kunio beat-em-ups better than the franchise has ever been, and it remains paced wonderfully to avoid wasting your time and never keeping you far from the action. Combine that with the variety of characters in the arcade mode and you have a solid product. Certainly not the best beat-em-up on Steam, but easily one of the best Kunio games out there and orth it to any fan of the franchise or... I'm going to assume most of you, people who vaguely remember playing River City Ransom as a kid once.