River City Ransom EX enhances a remembered favorite, but some unwanted tweaks tarnishes the memories.
The structure of the GBA version is identical to the NES original. You start out at your own school of Crosstown High and must work your way through River City to River City High beating up various gangs during your progress. You start out with basic punch and kick attacks, but in the EX version, they've been kind enough to start you out with the Dragon Kick technique, an ability that lets you kick three times in quick succession. As you beat up thugs, they drop coins, and each tougher gang member drops more coinage. Bosses will appear in certain areas after you've mopped the streets with its occupants, and each boss will tell you where to go to face your next challenge. Only after you've beat every boss will you be granted access into River City High.
You can pick up and use weapons along the way from lead pipes to chains to trash cans. The EX version has also introduced new weapons such as longer chains and ladders, introduced by new gangs such as The Eagles and The Entrees. You can swing or throw each one, and you can also learn techniques that will bestow upon you new fighting moves. The EX version has included several new techniques, such as Bicycle Kick and Helicopter, but for the most part the old techniques of the original still work the best.
If you've been doing a good job of picking up cash from defeated hoodlums, you can spend your dough in a number of different shops in several malls that you'll pass through. You'll remember all sorts of items and books to learn techniques from, but unfortunately it's a lot more irritating to shop now. The EX version has included many more items for each shop, but the list of items is randomly generated, and you do not have access to the full stock all at once. You might need to enter and exit a book shop more than twenty times until you see that wonderful Grand Slam book that teaches you the ability to swing your weapon three times in succession; it's a royal pain.
Speaking of royal pains, your AI partner is one. Since there is no two-player option (no link support), developer Million included a computer controlled character, but he's no help at best and can kill you at worse thanks to friendly fire. If he throws his weapon and hits you, it can hurt you or even interrupt your attacks to the point where the enemy can get the upper hand and kick your butt. You can tweak his AI behavior to make him less accidentally hostile towards you, but since he's still dead weight, the game's simply better by getting rid of him completely.
There's also an options mode that lets you practically debug the game. You can increase or decrease the power of your punches, kicks, weapons, etc., or you can even play around with the physics and gravity to make the game play wonky. Of course, this would be considered cheating but since it takes some grinding to become strong enough to beat the end bosses, it is a nice feature for those who just want to rush through the game (although the game takes roughly two hours to beat anyway).
The new save system is a double-edged sword, however. Gone is having to write down a 33 character password; you can now save on the spot. The irritating thing is that you cannot save over an existing file, so the game will just keep creating new files each time eventually clogging up the menu until it starts deleting the oldest file. It also only saves your current stats and amount of money so when you turn on the GBA again and resume, you'll be started at the beginning of the game, having you beat each and every single boss all over again. This in conjunction with other convoluted menus and navigation makes the EX version a little more irritating to play versus the original.
The 8-bit graphics of the original have been given a 16-bit face lift. For the most part, the environmental art hasn't been reworked, so every street scene should be instantly recognizable. There were some liberties, however, with the characters as Alex is now in all white and Ryan is now in all blue, instead of a mix of white and blue tops and bottoms like in the original. Gone also are some of the glitches of the original, such as characters stuttering in and out of existence.
The audio of the game has been improved somewhat as well. It still retains all those classic sound effects of punches and kicks and weapons being flung into enemies. There are a couple of sound effects, though, that aren't quite as good as remembered, such as when rocks and brass knuckles fall on the ground. The soundtrack has been preserved, so if you have fond memories of the music, you'll enjoy revisiting the game. Plus, the pinnacle moment when you hear the Double Dragon theme when you encounter the Twins makes that something to look forward to again.
Depending on how cheap you can find River City Ransom EX, you may want to consider buying the NES version off the Wii's Virtual Console for five dollars instead. The problem with playing EX on the Game Boy Advance is that if you own an SP, this is one of those games that unfortunately does not utilize the system's sleep mode. Unless you want to start all over from scratch, (aside from saved stats), River City Ransom EX is something you're going to want to slot yourself a couple of hours to play through. Besides, the purity of the original game is better cherished if you really want to reminisce with River City Ransom.