Just wrote an email to a friend about this game, and decided to share it here too:
Played some River City. Pretty cool.
Controls much like on NES, except Jump gets its own button.
Stat progression is different--you straight up gain levels by experience. Restaurant food just seems to heal or revive your CPU ally. I did once earn a special item that gave me permanent Agility +1 boost. Characters can also wear three pieces of equipment to boost various stats.
Special moves are still bought from books. If late in the game for some reason you want them off, they can each be toggled once learned.
You can attack people in the non-fighting areas. Some just have a funny response, but one girl's yakuza brother and his friends arrived and kicked my ass.
The world is interconnected, but differently. There are many neighborhoods which will loop through 3-4 screens each, and you take a train to travel between them.
Graphics kind of mixed. They use retro sprites, and during story scenes they look exactly right. Once fighting starts they zoom in slightly for some reason, and the sprites get blurry.
Clearly meant to have elements that play on nostalgia, not just from RCR but also Super Dodgeball and other games in the series, including ones never released internationally.
When you buy a free smile, it says you get one but doesn't graphically show it. Cut corners!
Story mode doesn't seem to have multiplayer, but other modes do. One is dodgeball, the other a versus fighting mode. Haven't really touched either.
The leads never talked in RCR, but here their characterization as sort of do-gooding delinquents comes across pretty strongly.