River City Saga: Journey to the West Review

River City Saga: Journey to the West (Switch) Review Mini

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

River City Saga: Journey to the West is the latest in a consistent flood of beat-em-ups in recent memory, likely sprung from the success of the well-regarded River City Girls series, a fresh, complex brawler with plucky protagonists, and a well-developed soundtrack. This game, however, is a roguelike, one in a long series of roguelikes aping the wildly popular Hades series. This is my genre—something I’ve grown alongside dating back to the arcade cabinets of old. If this is the direction my cherished games are heading, then we may be in for a bad time.

Journey to the West slavishly follows the Hades format, to a fault. Gameplay is structured in rounds of trying to climb a proverbial ladder of stages leading to a series of different bosses. Stages are comprised of rectangular play field where waves of enemies spawn until you beat them all down, and sometimes the areas contain traps like spikes and exploding barrels. After completing a stage, a string of power ups and new abilities can be chosen from, and much like Hades they summon a powerful being who bestows them to you and provides an upgrade track through them. The action is competent, with a toolset of moves that chain well together and let you dispose of waves with little effort, even in the face of bosses. The action feels a tad too weightless for my tastes, and leaves punches & kicks with a lack of oomph. I do, however, enjoy the juxtaposition of the story card art style against the blocky River City characters.

When you die between rounds you’re sent back to an ever-expanding base, complete with permanent upgrades, missions to complete which give you resources to make purchases, and characters to have a friendly chat. Lots of chatting. Way too much chatting. And what might seem like a small quibble balloons into a big problem with how pervasive the multi-page conversations are. Hades has way more dialogue than this game, but that’s a best-in-class experience. This game does not have the writing chops to carry on that much, and it breaks up the action horribly each time. The characters with their ever-so-anime dialogue and expressions feel flat. The music is repetitive—you’ll be hearing it a lot, and while it’s inoffensive, it will eventually grate on you.

River City Saga: Journey to the West’s skeletal structure should work, but the adherence to the subgenre without the knowledge of how to pare back and adapt it to this type of game makes the gameplay carry too much water with a lopsided play-to-dialogue ratio. Someone might crack the code on this mash-up, but River City Saga isn’t the one to show how it’s done. If you enjoy any brawler you can put your hands on and have a fondness for this style of storytelling, it may be worth a look. Otherwise, this time investment is too much in an ocean of better games.

Summary

Pros

• Comfortably smooth combat.
• Fun art style contrast.

Cons

• Repetitive, mundane music.
• So painfully verbose it stymies the action.
• Uninspired characters.

Talkback

Worldwide Releases

Related Content

• River City Saga: Journey to the West [Switch]

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