River City Saga: Journey to the West Review

When Kunio meets the Monkey King: A nostalgic brawler that actually delivers.

There's something almost sentimental about watching a forty-year-old franchise refuse to die. The Kunio-kun series, which started life as a delinquent brawler on the NES back in 1986, has outlived its original developer, survived two ownership changes, and somehow kept finding new audiences across generations.

Technōs Japan, the studio that gave birth to Kunio and his fist-first approach to justice, eventually collapsed after the Japanese bubble economy did what bubble economies tend to do. The company had poured heavily into real estate at the worst possible time, and the creative momentum dried up right alongside the money. 

But the series carried on regardless, passing through different hands until Arc System Works picked up the rights in 2015 and began the work of actually revitalizing the IP rather than just keeping it alive on goodwill alone. Yoshihisa Kishimoto, the man who originally designed Kunio during the height of Japan's delinquent culture, returned as an advisor during this revival era.

His creation, a pompadoured student in a long school uniform who settled every problem with his fists and a heart full of justice, became one of the most recognizable characters in Japanese gaming history. The series built three distinct branches over the years.

Serious fighting games that many consider precursors to Double Dragon, the chibi-style beat-'em-up titles that established the franchise's signature look and feel, and sports games that reportedly ended more than a few friendships. All three branches survived.

And all three still carry weight with fans today.

Kishimoto passed away this April, and playing River City Saga: Journey to the West in the wake of that news gives the whole experience a particular resonance. His son's words, hoping people continue enjoying his father's work, land differently when you're in the middle of a run, watching Kunio launch enemies across a stage that's been dressed up as a scene from one of China's most beloved novels.

This is actually the second time Arc System Works has transplanted a classic Chinese novel into the Kunio universe, following their earlier River City Saga: Three Kingdoms. The approach is consistent across both: take a literary epic, deprioritize the philosophical weight, and rebuild the whole thing around chibi characters resolving every conflict through escalating physical violence.

For River City Saga: Journey to the West specifically, that means Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, Sha Wujing, and Tang Sanzang are all played by Kunio. All four of them. The legendary pilgrimage to retrieve Buddhist scriptures has been entirely recast as an extended series of brawls, and the game never once pretends that this is anything other than exactly what it is. That self-awareness is a significant part of why it works.

The story here doesn't demand prior familiarity with either Journey to the West or the broader River City catalog, though both will deepen your appreciation of what the game is doing. Characters from the original novel appear throughout the campaign, reimagined through the Kunio lens in ways that feel playful rather than dismissive of the source material.

The writing stays comedic from start to finish, and the premise is confident enough in its own absurdity that it never tips over into feeling lazy. You're watching a version of one of Asia's most important literary works where every major dispute gets settled by someone getting uppercutted into the middle distance, and River City Saga: Journey to the West is completely at peace with that being the entire concept.

Reaching the true ending requires at least two full playthroughs.

Characters from the novel continue to appear and develop across both runs, giving the story more room to breathe than the premise might suggest. Structurally, River City Saga: Journey to the West is a side-scrolling action roguelike, and the Hades influence is not subtle. You clear combat arenas, collect upgrades, fight bosses at the end of each section, and return to a hub between runs to spend currencies on permanent improvements before going back in.

The game doesn't attempt to disguise where it drew its inspiration, and it doesn't particularly need to. The loop is functional and familiar, and the Kunio presentation gives it enough personality to stay engaging through the early hours even when the structure is doing nothing you haven't seen before.

There are four playable characters, each representing one of the pilgrims and each handling differently in practice. Sun Wukong is the fastest and most mobile of the three, which ends up making him the strongest overall pick since boss encounters heavily reward staying in motion. Late-game speedrun builds tend to center on him, usually stacking magic-heavy setups with minimal cooldown to create overwhelming output.

Zhu Bajie brings heavier normal attack damage and stronger defensive tools, while Sha Wujing focuses on ranged combat and can create enough distance to kite certain enemies. Tang Sanzang's specialization is support and control; he trades damage for buffs, healing, and ability uptime that maintains pressure and survival in prolonged combat scenarios.

Each character has a basic attack chain that strings into combos, a unique special move tied to the yellow meter beneath the health bar.

Wukong gets a charged thrust, Bajie has a block, magic abilities on a separate button and gauge, and a dash that grants brief invincibility frames. That dash becomes increasingly critical as encounters get more demanding, especially on mobile characters where the gap between getting hit and not getting hit often comes down to timing it correctly.

Mid-run upgrades arrive as magic tricks that persist across stages, alongside deity blessings that drop after clearing encounters. These include things like lightning effects from Li Jing the Pagoda-Bearing Heavenly King and pursuit modifiers from Maitreya Buddha, and the right combination can meaningfully shift how a run feels.

Outside of runs, the currencies you collect feed into a permanent upgrade tree where systems are interconnected enough that opening one branch tends to create momentum into adjacent ones. There are also over eighty achievements to work through, most of which are accessible rather than punishing, and completing them generates additional rewards that fold back into the upgrade economy.

The layering of these systems gives you a consistent sense of forward progress across multiple sessions, even when individual runs don't produce anything spectacular. The combat is where River City Saga: Journey to the West earns the bulk of its goodwill, and it delivers. Enemies get launched across arenas, special attacks paint the screen with effects, and every encounter runs on the same slapstick, high-energy frequency the series has always operated on.

It's chaotic in exactly the way it's supposed to be.

The kind of chaos where the screen is completely full of things happening and you're somehow navigating through all of it, and by the time the room clears, you're genuinely not sure how you pulled it off. The game has a very precise understanding of what experience it wants to provide, and it pursues that without hesitation or qualification. It's loud, over-the-top, goofy by design, and fully committed to that identity in a way that gives it real personality.

There's joy in it that you don't always find in games that take themselves more seriously. That said, River City Saga: Journey to the West has some genuine problems that are worth going in prepared for. The game limits you to one equipped move at a time, which means you're regularly faced with the choice of swapping out a move you like in favor of something new.

The issue is that many mid-run pickups are actually weaker than your default, making the system feel more restrictive than the size of the skill list implies. Builds overall are more rigid than the genre usually offers; one property per button doesn't create much room for the kind of escalating, transformative combinations that make roguelikes feel endlessly replayable.

Runs take roughly half an hour to complete, and without builds that snowball into anything spectacular, that runtime starts to feel long before the end. Encounter design compounds the issue. Rooms respawn enemies multiple times, and ranged enemies consistently position themselves just outside your field of view, often behind traps you have to navigate around before you can even reach them.

Attrition damage accumulates steadily because of this, and the problem intensifies in the back half of runs when these patterns become the default rather than the exception.

It reads as a way of stretching modest content further, and the friction it creates makes the experience more aggravating than it needs to be at precisely the moments when the pacing should be building. The bosses are a different story; they're better designed than the standard encounters, with consistent patterns, readable tells, and defined damage windows that make them satisfying to work through even when they're difficult.

The gap between boss design and mob design in River City Saga: Journey to the West is noticeable, and the game would be tighter overall if the regular encounters had received the same consideration. Enemy AI is readable once you've spent time with the patterns. Most movement behaviors become predictable after a first encounter.

You can work with the environment rather than just through it, luring enemies into traps and letting the stage deal damage is a legitimate strategy throughout. The game mixes enemy types to create difficulty, pairing ranged attackers and summoners with melee opponents, and learning to target the right enemies first makes a real difference in how cleanly rooms go.

Elite enemies and stronger variants appear as progression continues, and while they hit hard initially, the permanent upgrade system ensures that failed runs contribute to future attempts rather than just resetting your progress.
Visually, River City Saga: Journey to the West takes care of its legacy.

The pixel art is vibrant.

Character animations carry the same expressive personality they've had for four decades, and combat effects are flashy without making the action unreadable. The presentation feels confident and celebratory rather than just nostalgic. The soundtrack fits the tone and keeps pace with the on-screen chaos throughout, though it doesn't leave much of a mark once you've stepped away from it.

Performance on Switch is a legitimate concern. The game appears to have been built in Unreal Engine, and for something that looks like an early 2000s release, the strain it puts on hardware is disproportionate. The Steam Deck sees similar performance issues.

On top of that, basic quality-of-life features - n-run saves, borderless fullscreen, graphics options - are absent, which is hard to justify at launch pricing when smaller games with no legacy IP behind them routinely ship with all of these included.

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.

For Kunio fans, it's a straightforward recommendation. For everyone else, it's the kind of game that earns its price at a discount; there's real fun here, a lot of personality, and enough of the series' DNA intact that it feels like more than just another roguelike wearing a familiar costume.