River City Saga: Journey to the West

Although I wish it had a co-op mode and more variation in its campaign, I ended up having a lot of fun with River City Saga: Journey to the West and I'm definitely looking forward to new and improved roguelike Kunio-kun games. This is a solid start! 🐒

River City Saga: Journey to the West is a fun little expedition into something different for the franchise, but it never really hit the heights I was hoping for. If you need a decently priced roguelite adventure to tide you over until the next big thing, you could certainly do worse than picking this up. Franchise fans will get a bit more mileage out of it than others, I think, but I would like to see more things covered by “River City Saga,” and hopefully we get co-op then.

Arc System Works played it a little safe with the usual roguelite difficulty curve in River City Saga: Journey to the West to avoid alienating its core Kunio-kun fanbase. Normally, that sounds like a recipe for trouble. This time, however, sitting somewhere in the middle actually works. Combining 80 Secret Skills to shape your favourite Kunio-kun character creates a roguelite comfort game that is fast, snappy and enjoyable, even if it never sets the gaming world on fire.

All in all, River City Saga: Journey to the West is a flawed but fun experience. I wish the translation was better, but the combat is far more interesting than the narrative anyway.

​Maybe it’s a mixture of burnout with the roguelike genre of late or the fact I went in expecting a fusion of two genres I really enjoyed, but River City Saga: Journey to the West just didn’t click with me. It felt too basic in all areas, and what was once a strong leader in the beat 'em up genre is now trailing behind the stronger releases from Dotemu. ​It’s still pretty serviceable without any particularly massive issues, there just isn’t that special sauce here that I needed to really enjoy my latest Kunio-Kun fix. It’s cheeky, it’s fast-paced, and it's chaotic, but sadly, it feels like a rare miss in the long-running River City series, eclipsed by its much stronger predecessors in the River City Saga spin-off series.

For raw action roguelite enjoyment, there are better games for sure. As it stands, this is a solid experiment from ArcSys with a beloved franchise. Where does River City Saga go next? Hopefully, the team has some cool ideas for us.

River City Saga: Journey to the West is a fun, charismatic, and solidly based roguelite beat 'em up, but it's limited in depth and ambition. It's a title that's more enjoyable for its personality and immediate combat than for the evolution of its systems, and it fits perfectly into that category of games that perform admirably without truly standing out within the genre.

River City Saga: Journey to the West won't convert anyone who's already burned out on the roguelike formula, and it doesn't offer the mechanical depth that keeps the genre's best entries endlessly replayable across dozens of hours. But it is a genuine, energetic tribute to a franchise that has endured for forty years through sheer stubbornness and a lot of punching.

Available for about twenty euros depending on your support, River City Saga Journey to the West is a “small” Rogue Like friendly, easy to take in hand and pleasant to play and follow

River City Saga: Journey to the West is a curious and fun experiment that manages to reinterpret the myth of the Journey to the West through the chaos typical of Kunio-kun.