River City Ransom (1989) quietly invented something special: a beat-'em-up crossed with an RPG. You roam an open city, pummel gangs, pick up the coins they drop, and spend them at shops on food and books that permanently raise your stats.

The stat sheet is real and it's deep. There are around a dozen attributes, from Strength and Defense to Stamina, Willpower, Agility and Throwing, and different items move different numbers. Eat a burger and your health refills and your Strength ticks up. Read a book from the shop and you learn a technique outright: Stone Hands, Dragon Feet, Grand Slam, the Acro Circus. Those aren't upgrades, they're new moves with new inputs, and a fully built Alex plays nothing like the one you started with.

The city is open in a way almost nothing else on the console was. Shopping malls, a school, a park, a river, and streets you can walk back through whenever you like. Enemy gangs respawn, which turns any block into a place to farm money if you're short, and the shops persist, so there's a loop of fight, earn, buy, fight better.

Two players roam together and share the world, and they can hand items back and forth, which is unusually civil for a Technos game. They can also hit each other, which is not.

It's the third game in a series we mostly didn't get. In Japan it's Downtown Nekketsu Monogatari, part of the long-running Kunio-kun line, and the localization replaced a Japanese high-school delinquent story with American street gangs and gave everyone new names.

And when you knock someone out, they yell the immortal "BARF!"

Funny, deep, and decades ahead of the brawler-with-progression idea everyone copies now.