Internal Vs External Logic, and how they relate to this game's story and ending.

[Professor Fairfield]

With all of the griping about this game's ending, and all of the defenses made in response, I am reminded of a video made some time back that is still relevant. Probably not coincidentally, when I think of questionable game writing, I tend to also think of recent Sonic the Hedgehog games. That series is the focus of this video, and knowing Sonic stuff will help understand it, but if you finished River City Girls and have followed the plot controversy, you can probably get an idea of where this is going.

https://youtu.be/KcN5r9LlFW4

Don't feel like watching a twelve minute video with Sonic trivia and some sped-up speech? The gist is that internal logic is the logic that conventionally governs the plots and characters of the story; for example, the thief is stealing money because he's a cocaine addict and feels a need to to buy more quickly. External logic is the logic that governs the people making and consuming the story; for example, the thief is stealing money because he's the villain and if there wasn't a villain, the hero wouldn't have anyone to stop and then there wouldn't be a story.

Here's why the way they ended River City Girls (counting both endings) bugs me and many other people: The game spends most of its time using internal logic, and at the end swaps to external logic so it can riff on the history of this series and inconsistencies between its games. If the vibe the whole thing projected was "It's just a game, made to make fun of other games", then a twist ending where there was no real in-game reason to go through the quest might have been funny. Or at least, apropos. But that's not what was presented to us.

The intro suggests Kunio and Riki actually were kidnapped, or at least that someone wanted to create the impression that they were. The flashback that plays before Yamada's battle showed that Kunio was a good person. The flashback that plays during the broken elevator sequence shows that Hasebe and Mami were jerks even before a love triangle entered the picture, and also that Misako was heroic back then. The flashback that plays before the Noize fight shows that Kyoko was a good person. Then it went to a joke (maybe not a very funny one) where Kyoko screwed that up out of what looks like some mental disorder, and yes; the game does drop some hints that these girls a bit delusional throughout, but a lot of the in-game dialogue also makes them out to be decent people, if a bit extreme. At least the friendship they had with each other was sweet.

But then at the first ending, in the face of all of this, boom: Kunio's a jerk in love with a jerk, Misako and Kyoko are the butt of a delusional stalker joke that never explains why they're delusional, and it just ends with them bored in class, as if now that their rescue quest was a bust, they have no more motives to do anything. The secret ending gives players only one real reward; it explains why they did that: In essence they switched to using external logic. They give no in-game reason for why Misako and Kyoko have the delusions of being Kunio and Riki's girlfriends; they defer to out-of-game reason that they were depicted as such in one game and this detail was inexplicably dropped in all other games. Then we get almost exactly the same anticlimactic ending as before, with three characters basically destroyed despite the preceding game depicting them as good people.

Still not seeing how awful this is? Here are some things to consider.

1) This isn't Sonic. That's the series where this whole internal vs external logic theory got brought up, but Sonic is popular well-known throughout the world; this series isn't. The external logic that it uses to justify its ending is rooted in a series and a game most people outside of Japan aren't familiar with. We shouldn't have to go to blogs or forums or wikis to explain to us what on Earth Hasebe is talking about. It's usually an axiom of comedy that jokes aren't funny if they have to be explained. Most people who play this game are going to view the ending through the lens of the game that preceded it, because that's all they know of.

2) Their external logic actually stinks, and people more familiar with this series have explained this. Granting that Misako was only Kunio's girlfriend in one game, she appears in more games than that, so even if her declaring to be Kunio's girlfriend would confuse him, Kunio should remember who she is. Meanwhile, while Hasebe is in more games than Misako, she has never been overtly stated to be Kunio's girlfriend. She's just the default girl character most of the games use, but she's not the only one. Then of course, there's the way many characters acted in those other games--not like this. Hasebe was not a jerk in other games, and even if their point here was that she's only a jerk because she was subjected to the delusions of crazy stalkers, that conflicts with the flashback manga that made her and Mami jerks before all of this before. Plus, even if Misako and Kyoko are crazy, teasing crazy people is still a jerky thing to do. Moreover, if the theory is true that Hasebe and/or Mami sent the text just to send the girls into fights against people to take them out, that is outright reprehensible! That's bad against anyone; against mentally ill people who are more gullible it might actually qualify as a hate crime!

TL;DR: They made Hasebe an irredeemable jerk in this game just to riff on a bit of series inconsistencies that they, themselves, didn't even understand well.

3) With as many people as fell in love with this game and these characters, demand for a sequel is going to be high. But if they make that, it gives them the task of pulling out of a quagmire they created. How do you salvage characters whose reputation as heroes you tarnished? Make no mistake; I want a sequel too--preferably in the form of DLC--and I want it to address that. With how well-written the rest of the game was, I think they could, but I'm wondering if they're too smug to bother. Hopefully fans raise enough of a stink.

So there are my updated thoughts on this game's ending. I have looked at it from the perspective of people who defend it, and I still find it terrible. And to the people who say I care too much about this, push off. I've been into this series for over a decade, wanting to learn more about it convinced me to start studying Japanese, I've been doing various things to raise awareness of it since before this game's creators had even heard of Kunio Tachi No Banka, I wrote the series' original TV Tropes page, and I've come too far and accomplished too much to feel ashamed of myself now. In fact, I've met more than enough people who agree with me on this that I feel more validated than ever before.

[Professor Fairfield]

İlk olarak HeuristicFailure tarafından gönderildi:

İlk olarak Professor Fairfield tarafından gönderildi:

Adam Tierney constantly made clear his love for Shin Nekketsu Koha: Kunio Tachi No Banka; he's played multiple games in this series but that one in particular convinced him to make this one. Yet this game's fidelity to that one is quite questionable and vague, because again, it operates on external logic and sees SNKKTNB the way Adam did. They allude to the game existing, even in the RCG dialog, but don't explain the degree to which it happened in the memories of its characters, which is their excuse to wiggle out of delivering on what they seem to promise. This wouldn't be a huge issue if they approached this game as a new canon that exists unto itself, but when their heroines' whole motive is tied back to their roles in that one game two and a half decades old, it gets lopsided.

With all the little details and all the work poured into this game, based on an obscure entry in an already niche series, I don't doubt that there was real love for the source material. I just can't figure out how that energy translated to the ending that we got...

My only guess Is that somebody in the writing room enjoyed being the one to know about Kunio-tachi no Banka so much that they decided to ultimately make the main characters of River City Girls a footnote in there own game. That way they could toe the line between celebrating these heretofore unknown characters while still having the satisfaction of being the cool kid who's aware of this niche within a niche.

Yeah; that's about the size of it, although the writing makes me wonder if Tierney played the whole game before being inspired to make this one, given weirdness like the girls not knowing who Sabu is. It would be interesting to ask and find out at what point in development they decided to include the characters they did in this game; did Wayforward have clear ideas of who would be in besides Misako and Kyoko, or was it after meeting with ARC that they picked from a list of characters and opted to feature them? That might explain such plot holes.

However, while a lot of the choices made on this game might be controversial to preexisting Kunio series fans, most of the game's plot, dialogue and characters will still make sense to people who have no prior knowkedge of this series. There are a lot of references they won't get but they're the sort that they won't even recognize as references so it won't bother them. The endings, though, are extra levels of controversial because of how they suddenly rely on obscure trivia to make sense.

[HeuristicFailure]

I suppose if you haven't played many/any other Kunio games the ending isn't terrible. Definitely could have been handles better, though. Had those couple flashbacks not shown the girls being reasonably good kids, for a town full a violent morons, It'd have been easier to swallow them being crazy stalkers types. And had they not made Hasebe and Mami so antagonistic, or if they only come up at the beginning and the end of the game, instead of reminding you in every single stage that they're dating the boys, it could have been a decent "brick joke". But what can you do?..

If nothing else, River City Girls has attracted a new audience. I've seen a lot of people playing this game on twitch who don't seem to have any experience with any of the Kunio-kun series outside of maybe RCR, and it's always nice to see new people being made aware of these games.