City Hunter Reviews

I played the original fan translation when that originally released. I'm more of a Sunsoft fan than I am City Hunter, so in a sense I'm kind of a "tourist" when it comes to this game's content. So despite the low playtime and my issues with this game, I'll still recommend it, but it's only something that typically people who are REALLY into retro games or Sunsoft's back catalogue would be interested in. This Steam release of City Hunter is an interesting re-release. The presentation around the game is actually phenomenal and is really well done, complete with the rendered out 3D models of the game's original physical HuCard release, much like their previous "Sunsoft is Back!" collection's bonuses. Just like that collection, this game has the gallery/bonus content and it's not really gated off by making you play the game, which is appreciated. So what about the actual game? Well, to be honest, it's ironically the worst part about the collection. City Hunter PCE is just one of those games from the 90s that is a "forgotten game" not because of a mistake on the publisher or marketing and it's actually secretly a banger; but rather because it completely misunderstands how to be a good game. I wouldn't call it a kusoge, since it's not by any means a horrible game. But I would call it a bakage in the same vein as their other Famicom/Arcade title, Ikki, in that it's kinda just a silly nonsensical game for what it's trying to be. And in saying that, the gameplay is extremely tedious and just not very "fun". Every stage you're just going through random doors in an elaborate maze of hazards that aren't even thematically related to anything the IP has, and in most cases it's just endless waves of mercenary-type enemies that don't feel fun to really deal with most of the time. But once you learn the "maze" of a given stage, the stages... have absolutely nothing to them. There's no real meaningful reward for exploring outside of one-off ecchi easter eggs that happen once per stage, which are only useful because they're more or less the only time the game lets you restore health freely. Otherwise you're typically punished for exploring by basically fighting your way through countless hordes of enemies only to find a dead end or an empty room. This is compounded by the game's physics just feeling sometimes unresponsive, hit detection being a suggestion, and the basic act of jumping has some weird startup lag that the only way to deal with enemies is to either take the hit and run through, or spam return fire and hope you kill them first (and only if the game doesn't just refuse to spawn your bullet because it considers there being too many sprites onscreen) Perhaps the best thing about the game itself is the music; and the funny part is, this game only serves to muddy the waters on that a bit more. Namely, the game has no credits whatsoever. This is typical for a game of the time to either not have credits, or just random aliases that most people researching this stuff would need to spend a lot of time figuring out (such as "A.T" in various Sunsoft games standing for programmer Akito Takeuchi), except this particular re-release DOES have credits... kind of but not really. Let me explain it a bit more: The credits in this re-release on the Sunsoft staff side only credit the employees that currently work at the company and produced the re-release. You won't find past staff that were confirmed working on the game like Kenji Mori (Moriken) in there. Except for one credit, which is "Original Game Music", crediting Naoki Kodaka. This credit, at least to the Sunsoft nerd in me, makes no sense whatsoever. Naoki Kodaka's career at Sunsoft is incredible, but the music is not at all his composition style, nor did he ever score any PC Engine games other than the one claimed here. As far as the information is known, the primary composer for Sunsoft's PC Engine work is that of the late Masashi Kageyama, better known for his single Famicom game soundtrack (Gimmick, which was re-released on Steam quite some time ago now- go check it out, it's worth a look at least!) and City Hunter stands to be no different, especially as compositions resemble the same compositional style as Kageyama's other works. So I can't help but wonder why Sunsoft got this wrong? But all in all this is a solid re-release. I do wish the game this stellar presentation was built around was one of Sunsoft's more prestigious titles (eg: Metafight/Blaster Master, Batman, Battle Formula/Super Spy Hunter, Hebereke, Journey to Silius just to name a few) but I think this really does show that Sunsoft has respect for their back catalogue of games, even if it's the lesser ones.