Kunio no Nekketsu School FIghters (version 0.5) - Arcade Mode (Kunio)
11Download the game here: https://usagiru-orochi.itch.io/kunio-no-nekketsu-school-fighters
Originally developed by Technos Japan (before the rights were transferred to Arc System Works), the Kunio-kun series are staples of the beat-em-up genre. The series, which started in 1986 (1987 in Europe) with the release of Nekketsu Koha Kunio-kun (localized as Renegade outside of Japan), features high school deliquent Kunio, his friends, and the conflicts between him and rival gangs, both within other high schools and criminal gangs.
Like any other gaming franchise backed by moderately successful developers, the Kunio-kun series would receive multiple spinoffs, including River City Girls, developed by WayForward and released around September 2019. The game stars Misako and Kyoko (the girlfriends of Kunio and his ally Riki respectively), who begins searching around River City after their boyfriends were kidnapped. River City Girls features a modern pixel art style used in the game's artstyle and spritework, which one UsagiRu Orochi would later use in their own fangame. Originally released around April 2023, Kunio no Nekketsu School FIghters is a homebrew fighting game released by the aforementioned UsagiRu Orochi, for use in the Sega Genesis (or the Mega Drive in Europe and Japan).
Kunio no Nekketsu doesn't have much in terms of game mechanics. You have one bar of meter that could be used for rage arts (effectively super attacks) and a guard cancel mechanic that knocks the opponent away from you to give you extra space (which only works in blockstun, as otherwise you get a taunt that slightly builds up meter). There's also a invincible roll that could both be used in the ground for evasive movement and to recover from knockdowns, and the ability to short hop (i.e. make a smaller jump), which is useful for throwing out aerial attacks faster and overall giving the opponent less time to react due to its speed.
IMO, the real meat and potatoes comes from the game's juggle system. You can only recover from knockdowns on the ground, and due to how the game seemingly has no damage scaling (in addition to how jank the game is), some juggle combos could even defeat the opponent in one combo. Kunio could TOD the opponent in the corner, either from looping his 214HP as one of the hits from this multi-hit attack launches the opponent regardless if they are in the air or not, or from using his 2141236HK rage art to relaunch the opponent mid-combo and then sealing the deal from there on out. I primarily did the latter throughout this playthrough.
While the movement system does feel a bit weird to deal with (trying to run feels a bit off from my experience, which is why I relied on jumping as my primary means of approaching the opponent), combos in this game are still pretty fun to do due to the juggle system and the unscaled hits, which makes this game really good for labbing out combos. It's a bit of a shame that UsagiRu has seemingly finished development of Kunio no Nekketsu, because I personally wanted characters like Sabuko to be added...