I can’t believe it’s only been three years since Kyoko & Misako burst onto the reinvigorated brawler scene, cracking skulls and taking down River City’s interim Yakuza boss, Sabuko, before finding their boyfriends, Kunio and Riki. Now they’re back, in a game that is bigger and better than its predecessor while incorporating key elements of River City Girls Zero, which I appreciated. You might recall that I did not care for RCGZ itself, but was delighted to see that characters from RCGZ have big roles in RCG2. For the most part, RCG2 is exactly what it says on the tin with some new features and quality of life improvements that I really dug.

The game starts by reminding us that at the end of the first River City Girls, heroines Kyoko & Misako punted katana-wielding Sabuko–daughter of imprisoned River City crime boss Sabu–out a window. She is soon discovered by her adopted brother, Ken, who you may remember from RCGZ, and the two visit their father, Sabu, who promptly punches a hole in his prison wall and says he’s going to take care of things himself. Meanwhile, Misako & Kyoko’s school is taken over by Ken and his goons, and they forcefully expel the gals, who wind up playing video games on Kyoko’s mom’s couch for six months.

You can choose to play as the four characters available at the end of the last game: Kyoko, who’s secretly my favorite; Misako, who’s the best brawler (IMHO), or their boyfriends, Kunio and Rikki. I never bothered to play as the boys in the first game, as they didn’t become available until beating the story. After playing a bit with them here, I found both to be fun characters with just as many beautiful, unique animations as the titular girls, but I stuck with Kyoko & Misako out of familiarity…but also it’s their game.

The first difference you’ll notice in RCG2 is that River City itself is greatly expanded. Maybe too expanded. The town is divided into several sections (Crosstown, Downtown, Uptown, etc.), and each of these sections is broken up into a dozen or so single areas–what we called “screens” back in my day. As in the first game, your troupe will be regularly targeted by troublemaking mooks, most of whom you’ll recognize from the first game, and you can either just run away or beat the tar out of them. In some cases–usually tied to completing missions–a chain will appear around the screen’s border, and you’ll have to clean a set number of clocks before moving on, or beat up a piece of scenery until it breaks (or is miraculously fixed) while fending off goons.

While each of the four–eventually six–characters has an overwhelming number of melee attacks at their disposal, most environments also contain plenty of weapons, and the sheer breadth of implements remains astounding. You’ve got everything from yo-yos to wrenches to enormous fish, old couches, and everything in between. Each weapon has a certain number of uses before it breaks, and it’ll flash red before it does–just enough time to toss it at one more mook, Breath of the Wild-style. Crowd control is a challenge in RCG2, though some characters are better at it than others. And as before, you can recruit some of these baddies to your cause, summoning them with a tap of the L2/R2 buttons. They’re handy in a pinch!

Provie & Marian have been heavily touted in the game’s PR, but are both unlockable characters tied to specific quests, and you have to beat them in rather difficult battles in order to gain their confidence. Provie, a Capoeria-centric (Brazil!) brawler who’s fun to play as, is actually a stowaway from the PC game River City Ransom: Underground, but you may recognize iron-fisted Marian as the oft-kidnapped girlfriend of the Double Dragon dudes. She’s barely recognizable here, with white hair and muscles that would put Billy & Jimmy to shame, and has an aggressive heavy-hitting fighting style.

As in the previous game, Kyoko & Misako are given a large number of subquests in between main story missions which often involve running around the overly-large map, talking to characters, beating up mooks, finding or smashing things, and playing entertaining minigames. I must admit that running around the enormous map did get old. Despite the presence of bus stops (fast travel points), you’ll be doing a lot of running from place to place, and three things make this a hassle:

1. There is no minimap, so you’ll be going into the map screen a lot. 2. The map’s layout isn’t always intuitive, as if there are more screens in a given area than could realistically fit onto a single area of the map. 3. There are weirdly-long load times in between every screen.

That last point is the real killer–we’re talking five-ten seconds of loading time every time you move from one screen to another. This was my main complaint about Shantae and the Seven Sirens, too, and I wonder if this loading issue is present on the other consoles. Not game-breaking by any means, but given that you’ll be traipsing around every corner of the map multiple times, it's omnipresent.

Minigames are new to RCG2, and in pretty much all instances are fantastic diversions from the main curb-stomping gameplay. One early minigame has you playing dodgeball against a whole team of opponents (which may be easier to win with more people). A later minigame has a fun version of Dance Dance Revolution. In all cases, they are over too quickly and there aren’t enough of them.

Yo’ girls still level up, but as before, stat increases are purchased in various shops. River City has a healthy number of restaurants, street vendors, boutiques, and specialty stores, all of which sell items that you can either eat, store for later, or wear as an accessory. Any time you visit a new food-centric store, if you’ve got the green, you should sample everything on the menu–the first time you eat any dish, that character will get a stat boost. Oddly enough, books and video games can also be consumed in this way. You can eat the food right there or store it for later use. My strategy was to eat everything right away, then buy seconds for boss fights.

Each character must boost their stats separately, but money is not hard to find in River City, and spending even a modest amount of time grinding goons will produce a surplus of casheesh. Accessories haven’t changed either: they produce certain buffs and two can be worn at a time. Some are defensive, some are offensive, some balance out, and others are ridiculously specific (for example, do more damage per cat rescued). The sheer number of accessories will allow you to find just about any combination to suit your playstyle.

RCG2 looks gorgeous, with the same 16-bit aesthetic that its predecessor had, but there’s just more of it now: more characters, more varied locations, and lots of eye candy to ogle in the environments. You’ll want to pay attention, too–one quest asks you to rescue a bunch of cats, and those little rascals get into the strangest places. The environments have more verticality now which is a nice change of pace. It’s not quite platforming, but I always appreciate environmental exploration in video games and you're usually rewarded for your effort.

One big change from RCG is the multiplayer options: up to four players can jump on locally, or two players online. One of the reasons this review isn’t up on launch day is that I wanted to try out online play, and I wound up pretty impressed. Hosting is easy–you can start playing as normal and when somebody joins, they seamlessly appear. I didn’t experience any slowdown during online play, although I wasn’t exactly sure what the rules were for entering/exiting shops. Surprisingly, it was local multiplayer that caused a performance hit. I was only able to get two other people in the room for my couch co-op experiment, and that caused a framerate dip when everybody started punching things. It wasn’t dramatic (see: Samurai Maiden) but definitely noticeable.

I can’t let you all go without mentioning the writing, which remains hilarious, and the voice-acting, which is extremely good. In my review of the first game (and RCGZ), I heaped praise upon Megan McDuffee’s transcendent soundtrack. When RCG2 was announced and that McDuffee would be returning, I found myself anticipating her new tunes more than any other RCG component. Well folks, the new tracks are amazing and exist side by side with tracks from the first game. If the theme of RCG2 is “more RCG,” that also extends to the soundtrack, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

So, to use some old video game magazine review lingo, River City Girls fans rejoice! If you liked River City Girls, you’ll probably like River City Girls 2. It’s mostly the same thing, just way more of it. The new characters are fun, the city is much larger, there are way more quests, and the story has higher stakes. The minigames are a great new addition, boss fights are tough but fun, and oh man, that soundtrack.