Kawa no Nushi Tsuri 2 (川のぬし釣り2), released 4/28/1995, developed and released by Pack In Video

This is the first post where I revisit the Super Famicom to pick up some games that I skipped in my initial runthrough. This game was skipped because it’s not really an RPG.

Fishing games are a (somewhat?) popular genre of video games; they’ve been around since at least the NES era and many games have fishing minigames as well. I’ve never really liked them that much. I don’t know if the River King series was the first one to have a storyline and some RPG-like elements in it, but I think it’s certainly the best known. The Japanese name includes the concept of the “nushi”, which is like an old, big fish that lives in a certain lake or stream that everyone wants to catch to prove their fishing skill. I have no idea where this idea originated — whether it has some basis in actual fishing or is just a concept for games and shows. In any case, the “River King” (as it was known in English) has around 8 games along with 3 “sea king” games; some of these were brought out in English but not this one. The first game was for Famicom (with a PC Engine remake).

At the beginning you choose which character you want to play as in the family. I don’t know for sure what this affects, perhaps it’s just cosmetic. Then you begin the game.

The graphics are pretty good, which is maybe not surprising given the 1995 release date. You can walk around and talk to people to get information, buy bait, sell fish you’ve caught, and such. Going down to the river is what lets you fish.

The fishing part is pretty familiar if you’ve played fishing minigames in other RPGs. You choose a bait, then let the rod loose. When a fish picks up on it, you have to alternate between holding down a button to reel the fish in, and letting go when it starts struggling. If you mess up it will run away. What fish you can catch depends on the bait you use as well as the rod.

The RPG element comes in when you meet random encounters wandering around. They are various animals like bats and squirrels.

The combat system is rather interesting. When you attack, a white dot will start moving around on the animal. You want to hit the button when it’s on the spot that will do the most damage (which is different from animal to animal). However, the longer you wait, the faster the dot will go and the more it will move into the “miss” areas of the picture so you can’t just sit and wait as long as you want.

The unfortunate thing about the combat is that I believe the only effect it has on the game is to increase your HP when you gain EXP. It has absolutely no effect on your fishing ability. So the only real purpose of fighting is to increase your HP so you can survive longer when you need to walk to other rivers.

There also aren’t any weapons, armor, or anything like that. Perhaps the developers were assuming that the primary audience of the game would be fishing game fans rather than RPG fans, so they intentionally kept the system simple and streamlined so it would add something to the gameplay without overshadowing the fishing.

The game doesn’t really have a developing storyline; the goal is just to fish the 4 “kings” (nushi) of rivers to win. Talking to people can give you hints about how to best catch the fish, but you also have to do a lot of experimenting.

I’m not a big fan of this kind of fishing game so I didn’t play it all that much. It seems like about half of the games were localized so it must have had some degree of popularity in the US. The last game was released in 2007 for the DS (in both Japan and the US); I’m not sure why no more games were released after that.