676 - Double Dragon

Best Games - Double Dragon

Double Dragon is all about player expression. Before Double Dragon the variety of game character movements that you could expect might be a jump, maybe a shoot or punch action. Some games might even contain contextual action like climbing a ladder or interacting with part of the level. Never much more than that.

By comparison, Double Dragon blows the interaction doors wide open.

In a lot of ways Double Dragon hasn’t aged as well as some other games. It is plagued with terrible slowdown. Some of the jumps are designed to steal your quarters. Once you really learn the combat, you can get away with using only a few moves for most of the game.

Of course, when the game came out in 1988 (1987 in Japan) no one was thinking about any of that. No one had ever seen anything like Double Dragon, so it was easy to forgive its faults.

It is true that the only thing you do in Double Dragon is beat up gang members. But maybe that isn’t a problem. As the player, you have more say in the way that you beat all of these gang members than in any game before. Sure, you can punch and kick, but you also have combos, and grab moves, and jump kicks and attacks that aimed in front or behind you. You can change up the timing of your button presses to alter how certain attacks play out. Not only that, but you can move around the levels with amazing freedom. Your only influence on the game is to fight, but Double Dragon sure dos give you a lot of control over where and how you fight.

Double Dragon isn’t the first game to have hand to hand combat, or even hand to hand combat move sets beyond the one or two buttons available on your standard arcade cabinet. In fact, Double Dragon itself is the spiritual sequel to Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (adapted and released as Renegade in the west), a game with incredibly dynamic hand to hand combat.

The real advances of Double Dragon were in making all of that combat variety and player expression accessible and enjoyable. Aside from a few of the quarter stealing jumps and unavoidable hits, Double Dragon is just pleasant to play.

There have been so many belt scroll beat-em up games. Challenges where you walk a character from the left to the right punching and kicking every thug that crosses your path. A great many of them are objectively better games than Double Dragon. More refined. More accomplished. But without Double Dragon, it’s tough to say if those would exist.

Double Dragon took a nascent genre and catapulted it countless steps forward. The developers at Technos got so many things right, maybe not the first time but certainly the second.

Double Dragon is still very fun to play today. It is certainly one of the Best Games.