Riot City is an obscure 1991 arcade game made by Sega and Westone (the same guy behind the Wonder Boy series), and one of their lesser-known, obscure titles... for good reason.
Developed during the arcade Beat 'em Up craze of the late 80s' and early 90s, the game wanted to be the next Final Fight so much that... they kind of just ripped off the premise of Final Fight.
We don't mean, in a Follow the Leader kind of way. We mean, "let's recycle everything from a two-year-old game and ersatz our way through enough materials to avoid copyright infringement" kind of way.
Like Fight, the players assume the roles of two narcotics agents - named Paul and Bobby, the former being a rather blatant stand-in for Final Fight's Cody - at war against a drug cartel called the MID. When the MID kidnaps Bobby's Love Interest Catherine as intimidation, Paul and Bobby decide to lead a two-men raid into Riot Island, the headquarters of MID.
Nope, the premise isn't really the most original out there, even for it's time. Even the introduction cutscene is a frame-by-frame remake of Final Fight's, with the villain making a video call threatening the protagonist to stay out of his operations because he's got their girlfriends. Before the hero and his bestie decide to suit up for their solo rescue mission.
Impressively enough, Riot City managed to earn itself a console port on the TurboGrafx-16, distributed under Hudson Soft, and it was - for the most baffling reasons ever - promoted as a completely different game... while recycling the old premise. And somehow only available for single-player this time.
Re-titled Riot Zone (Crest of Wolf in Japan), the second game follows the exact same "rescue-the-girlfriend by punching mooks" plot as City before it, but with the character's names swapped around. This time, the heroes are renamed Hawk Takezaki and Tony Aldus, the kidnapped Love Interest renamed Candy, and MID's Island Hideout, Riot Island, is now a city named DragonZone. Most of the assets, including backgrounds, enemy designs and some snippets of the background music, makes a comeback, though some graphics for mooks were redrawn, and that Bobby from the original went from a Token Black Friend to a punk with a shaved head.
Riot City / Riot Zone / Crest of Wolf / whatever SEGA wants to call this game contain examples of:
- Bar Brawl: Both games have stages set in a Bad Guy Bar filled with thugs, who drop their drinks and start throwing fists the moment the players arrive. Both bars have basement hideouts that the player(s) get to infiltrate too. Unsurprisingly, they're the same graphics recycled twice.
- Battle in the Rain: The second stage of City and first stage of Zone takes place in the middle of heavy rain as Paul and Bobby / Hawk and Tony attempts infiltrating the villains' compound. And yes, both uses the same background graphics and animated shower.
- Bruce Lee Clone: City have a boss enemy, an Asian man who fights barechested and swings nunchucks at Paul and Bobby, with a face that looks close enough to Bruce Lee... and is named "Lee". What a stretch...
- Captain Ersatz: Paul and Hawk, player 1 hero of (respectively) City and Zone are both blatant CEs to Cody, the Final Fight protagonist. Two blonde white men whom are tough-as-nails brawlers, single-handedly fighting a crime syndicate to rescue their respective girlfriends, and Hawk even dresses similar to Cody!
- Covers Always Lie: There's an alternate cover for Zone that shows... wait for it... The Grim Reaper. Yes, really
. Needless to say, players looking forward to fighting grim is going to get very dissapointed... - Crate Expectations: Wooden crates appears in warehouse areas of both games, which can be smashed for points and bonuses. And yes, they're recycled graphics.
- Damsel in Distress: Catherine from City and Candy from Zone, the girlfriends of Paul and Hawk whose abduction kickstarts the plot.
- Dark Action Girl: While the first game doesn't have any female mooks, the second game does have ass-kicking ladies who can deal quite some damage to your health. They seemed to be based off "Poison" from Final Fight.
- Delinquent Hair: The thugs in both games have several punks in their ranks, all of them sporting mohawks to emphasize on "we're gangsters!" nature. Tony from the second game, Zone, sports and orange mohawk that matches his jacket, but he's one of the good guys.
- A Dick in Name: The Final Boss of the first game and leader of the MID, Dick.
- Dual Boss: Lee and Chan from Zone, a Battle Couple martial artist duo who fights together.
- Elevator Action Sequence: Both games has levels where you fight enemy mooks on top of an ascending elevator. Using the same background, no less...
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: City have the player(s) falling for some five storeys down a building before landing in a heap during an unskippable cutscene, but that doesn't leave a single dent in their health bars.
- Gratuitous Foreign Language: In City, the game's ending congratulatory text randomly lets out a Xie xie (谢谢, "Thank you" in Mandarin Chinese) for no reason. The game's made entirely in Japan and set in the west...
- Go-Go Enslavement: Towards the end of City, the heroes managed to rescue Catherine, and she's revealed to be all chained up in her undergarments and wearing fishnet stockings for... reasons. Zone averts this trope however, when you rescue Candy she's wearing her pink shirt and pants.
- Gratuitous Ninja: Some of the stronger enemies in Zone are obviously based on ninja, despite the setting being nowhere near Japan. They use a pair of kunai for stabbing you up close.
- Grievous Harm with a Body: Both games have a special move that allows you to grab enemies and fling them into each other for extra damage.
- Island Base: Riot Island from the first game, used as a hideout for the MID. The opening cutscene before the first stage shows Paul and Bobby reaching there on a boat.
- New Work, Recycled Graphics: Riot Zone, which recycles assets from Riot City, from the background to the backstory, and even the lead's animation.
- Only Known by Initials: "MID", the drug cartel occupying Riot Island from the first game. It's never revealed what those initials stands for.
- Palette Swap: Most of the enemies in both games are recycled swaps of each other. You have punks in green, white, blue armor, fat guys dressed as cowboys wearing blue, brown and white hats, knife-wielding commandoes wearing orange, purple, grey fatigues...
- Royal Rapier: Dick, the Final Boss of City, uses a rapier to slice you up, in comparison to mooks who fights unarmed or with knives. Getting hit directly by said rapier costs you a third of your health.
- Samurai: Tora, the Final Boss of Zone is a huge brute dressed in samurai armor and swings a katana. For unexplained reasons other than Rule of Cool...
- Slouch of Villainy: Tam Tam, the first boss of City, is depicted seated in the background of his arena, slouched lazily as he watches you fight his mooks. When you defeat his men, he then gets up to attack.
- Token Black Friend: Bobby from the first game is one of these to Paul. The sequel have him replaced by a punk named Tony.
- Unusable Enemy Equipment: Oddly enough for an arcade punch-em-up, neither City or Zone allows your character(s) to pick up weapons for bashing heads. Especially in City which has knife-wielding mooks - you can't collect even their knives after defeating them.
- "Wanted!" Poster: In Zone, before the start of each level you'll see wanted posters featuring the stage's boss(es), alongside the bounty they had on their heads. followed by Hawk pulling a Stab the Picture. Doubles as a neat Boss Tease along the way.
- When Elders Attack: Elderly mooks appears in Zone, and they're not afraid to attack you with their walking sticks.
- Wolverine Claws: Chan from Zone has metal clawed fingernails which allows her to slice you up.
- Wrestler in All of Us: H. "Bull" from the first game is a wrestling-themed boss which you fight in a ring.
