izigame.me

If you liked RCG, this is more in pretty much every way. More characters, more meta referential humor, more enemy types and locations, and a whoooole lot more bugs.
On the whole this one is quite a bit easier than RCG. I started one step up in difficulty - the main thing I noticed was more enemy spawns at once, usually 4-5. Money comes in faster but it felt like I was taking less damage than the first game, at least most of the time.
There are a few quality of life improvements as well. The main one is experience sharing. You get 100% experience for your active character, but all the other characters, who you can swap between in safehouses, earn about half or so of both XP and money. This means you can generally swap in whoever you want, maybe being underleveled and underdeveloped, but not starting at level 1. You do need to buy food items for everyone individually, but it's usually not a big deal mid-game. Busses are typically near the stores, so you can gather most of your food within four screens of a bus stop. You also have equipment shared between all characters, so you buy it once and you're set. For example of how this goes, after I beat the game I figured "Eh, lemme see what Kunio does while I loiter". He had a wallet of about 6700 bucks and was level 15, I guess because I got the two main girls up to 29ish and Marion up to about 24. I popped out to the mall bus stop, grabbed all four restaurants' whole menu, went left to the dojo and bought his entire moveset, bought the other two Midtown restaurants' stuff. Ran back the couple screens, hit the bus to Downtown, etc. Every enemy you've friended is also hanging out in your safehouses, so you can always go back and get effective buddies once you'd found em.
Main gameplay is fairly normal combo beat-em up stuff. Maximize combos, do crowd controls. Enemies provide decent variety and are spawned randomly from those you've seen after predetermined entry points, it seems - you see LARPers and zombies after the woods, you get catgirls after Technos. This means you start with a fairly small pool of things to watch for, like cop gas grenades or Linda's air whip, and gradually move to watching for the zombie going into shadows or cat lasers. In the end you mostly do the same thing, kiting them into a group and wailing on em all at once. Some enemies wake up slower, though, so combined with wakeup danger it does slightly force more movement. You can equip two buddies instead of one now, and get some more powerful paid ones, and they also act as your combo break usually; they take the hit and you roll back, but some enemies like the kung fu guy can catch your buddy and you on stand-up.
Anyway, just like the previous game, two dojos, lots of shops to increase your stats plus an XP level gain, fight through a series of gradually unlocked areas and complete side quests as you wish for more XP, money, and usually a bonus item. Bosses have three health bars to start, new attacks opened with each one, and have a super that usually kicks at the end of each bar, and sometimes in the middle.
You start with four character unlocked (the girls and their boyfriends), and unlock two more during play. Each has more or less the same number of moves, though Marion (unlockable) can get one more. Everyone can buy the knockup, diagonal knockback, standing knockback heavies and start with a pretty terrible basic knockdown. Normals are just combo extenders on the front - your endgame "bread and butter" is normal X 5 until knockdown starts, down heavy (knockup), normal X 3-4 (more if you got deeper while they're airborn), and up heavy (diagonal knockback). This takes awhile, and you might be better served with the normal launcher (jump after any normal hit) and aerial normals with a special finisher, or an air grab, which does huge impact damage to them and anything on the ground below. Walls bounce them on anything but a throw. so you can recapture really easily.
Since most all characters have the same basic normal/heavy strings their special moves are the most different thing between them. Misako's air grab is a piledriver that takes her to the ground, while Kyoko does a volleyboll spike that seems to do less damage but keeps her a little safer. Marion is probably the most brutal character, since she can actively grab with her forward and down specials, create a 360 damage area or head smashing/arm lariat for the other and generally has more options, while Riki is the most finesse-like, using stuff like a weird energy ball he can move into position and knock enemies into it.
And... the bugs. It's 2024, a good long while past the FPS fix patch, and I had serious framerate issues on my dual-screen setup. It would be hanging at a very erratic 15-20FPS on my QHD monitor, and 60 on my FHD. Once I settled on using the FHD I found plenty of in-game bugs, mostly not affecting gameplay... but sometimes there's some weird geometry stuff going on (dudes on your plane that are actually up and to the left as far as hitting/being hit goes), plenty of minor visual glitches (transparency panels bugging out), some occasional unresponsiveness to Heavy inputs (kept giving me headbutt instead of knockup for one session). Lots of little things like this that make it seem less polished than the original.
And my totally negligible gripe is they seemed a little more "heroic" in this game. My headcanon with the first was they were basically spoiled punk chicks out to fetch their boyfriends. This, they get kicked out of school, but then it's all about saving the city and getting back to school and videogames.
Anyway. Still a good game. Still not as good as Fight'n Rage, but it's pretty high grade, and the music is stuck in my head here and there. Lots of rehashed stuff but nothing really taken out, and more added. If you liked the original, you'll probably like this one too.