Double Dragon [ARC/1987]

System Played: Arcade

Year Released: 1987

Year Reviewed: 2016

Double Dragon from Technos Japan is a spiritual successor of sorts to their 1986 fledgling Beat ‘em Up, Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (or Renegade to us in the west), further developing the mechanics and formalising many of the elements of what we now recognise as the genre.


The setup is as simple as it is enduring. Punks have kidnapped your girlfriend in her incredibly short dress, and so street fightin’ brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee have to work their way along the street, kicking the shit out of punks to get her back.


A lot of the mechanics from Renegade are still recognisable here. Some have gone through a development, and the result is a mixed bag.

The most egregious of that game's issues, the controls, have received some much welcome changes. Specifically, the punch and kick buttons now, crucially, attack in the direction you’re facing!, instead of confusingly changing around depending on your direction (which resulted in a lot of punching thin air). This alone makes Double Dragon a much more playable game.

There is also a jump which can be transitioned into the obligatory flying kick (when it wants to), and pressing in conjunction with of the other buttons performs your back attacks, for enemies behind you, of the kick or elbow variety.

Additional moves include a (not so useful) headbutt, grabbing stunned enemies for a few knees to the face or throwing them, etc. similar to the standard moveset you’d later see in the likes of Final Fight and Streets of Rage.

Needless to say, this is a much more intuitive control system, but still not “great”, often feeling stiff and just less responsive than you’d ideally want.


It’s simultaneous 2 player now (which practically became a requirement for this type of game) and the levels are long scrolling stages which you work your way through, encountering enemies along the way, rather than the limited space you had to work with in Renegade.

Most of the time you’re taking on 1 or 2 enemies at a time, which makes for a much more relaxed experience compared to Renegade. And with a maximum of 4 enemies ever onscreen at once (half what Renegade could do) it feels like a bit of a surprising step back.

Maybe it is just because there are fewer of them, but the enemy AI in Double Dragon feels less aggressive, and just plain dumber. They are usually just quite content to line up and be knocked down repeatedly. And every enemy is apparently powerless against your back elbow attack, to the point where you can just win the game by using this over and over.


Another significant issue is the frame rate, which suffers to the point of frustration with just 2 enemies plus the additional elements like weapons being on screen at the same time. Sadly, this is the state for the majority of the game, with a few instances when it does manage to get back up to scratch feeling so much more responsive and enjoyable.


At 4 levels, Double Dragon is a short game.

Adding to the ease, you can continue from the point where you die with credits, unlike in Renegade where you had to restart the whole game! (not just the level). Talk about one extreme to the other!

This would become the norm for these kinds of arcade games, where developers looked to find that fine balance of giving the player just enough fun for their money, so that when they did, by design, die every minute or so, they wouldn’t think twice about pumping some more cash into the slot.

The game’s end boss, a typical jerk with a machine gun, comically called Willy, will kill you instantly with a single bullet, which I’m sure went down like a bag of shit back in the arcade when you literally just put your money in!

One novel idea which others have since flatteringly imitated has the brothers forced to fight it out after beating the boss on 2-player, to decide who gets the girl (she doesn’t get a say obviously).


Double Dragon practically invented the Beat ‘em up genre as we came to know it, so you can’t be too hard on it, but it isn’t that great a game when looking back today. The variety, AI and number of enemies ever on screen are all pretty poor, made worse by the constant frame rate issues, which I’m sure are the reason that the controls feel unresponsive a lot of the time. Lucky then that smacking punks with a baseball bat is just so intrinsically satisfying.

4/10