The Righteous - A Kowloon Tale

The Beat-Up "The Righteous" seems like a traditional old school game as there were many of those made at the beginning of the 21st century right after RPG Maker 2000 was released. Expect wildly mixed up crappy graphics, boring standard interface, empty mapping and many more that was typical for RM games about 10 years ago. It may be nostalgic, but does this kind of game can still be enjoyed by the player nowadays? Let's have a closer look at it.

Story:
The intro starts in the 1970's with a Hong Kong police detective called Bei Mao Xiong whose family is obviously burned due to Xiong having killed a mighty gang leader before. The police though consider Xiong the killer and arrests him for 15 years. In prison he learns the art of fighting by studying tons of martial arts books to become a fighting machine. So if you thought you need any kind of training partner or teacher to become a master in Kung Fu, this game will teach you a lesson. Also we know cops have no idea of martial arts, because their training to become a cop just includes writing reports and check driving licences...


Well, let's put the sarcasm away and take a look at Xiong getting released from prison after 15 years. Oh yeah, he looks as fresh as ever. No single grey hair, no wrinkle in his face. On his last day he quickly kills an enemy in prison (who for some reason dies in the same cell Xiong was in all the years) and then finally starts searching for the murderer of his wife! On his way he often uses various techniques to kill his opponents by pressing specific points of their body so that they die about 5 seconds later.

The differents ways of death in the game were quite interesting. Still this way of killing makes the story quite ridiculous. However it is one of the game's few good points. Therefore...
3 out of 5 points

Gameplay:
This may be the games weakest point right after the graphical weaknesses. The real time action battle system is a nightmare! I started cheating at a point when you have to fight 4 enemies at the same time, because it became frustrating as hell. In addition to that the system is quite buggy. So don't be surprised, if you lose HP at the start of a new battle, because an enemy hit you after the end of the previous one. Just to say this is only 1 out of a million bugs in the game...



Save points are a rare thing in the game. You can try a battle as often as you want, but what does it bring as long as you can't beat a fight anyway? I think I understand how the battle system was intended to work, but fact is: It doesn't work that way. And the amount of fights in the game is nasty. When the first fight started I thought "Cool! This will be Street Fighter like!", but then it was just... nothing but annoying.

Outside of the fights there is... still no real gameplay. You run around and have to talk to all (!) people on the map to activate an event to make the story continue. This is old school gameplay, even more worse than simple key searching, and it shouldn't be in any game nowadays.

The only nice thing were the 4 little challenges between the tournament fights (yes, there is even a tournament in the game... for all those who think the game hasn't enough fights yet) which weren't too hard and quite funny and interesting, but very short unfortunately. Can't raise the score for extremely lousy gameplay. The crappy fights were just too bad.
0,5 out of 5 points

Graphics:
Intended or not, this game has exactly ZERO eye candy. Or was it more lazyness? Whatever, some edits were made, nevertheless you recognize them immediatelly, because they don't even fit.

Also crappy graphics are no excuse for lousy mapping. This game has both.



There is nothing more to say about this point. For all the blood I still give...
o,5 out of 5 points

Sound:
This at least was very nice. I didn't like the standard battle music, because it was way too funny and caused a ridiculous atmosphere, but the rest fit quite well. Also the sound effects worked. Screaming, car doors, etc.
4 out of 5 points