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All of these powerful moves have the effect of making the early stages feel fairly boring, since you can crush right through them, but the later stages are more difficult due to the vicious AI.
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There are a few new attacks too, like a leaping, spinning torpedo attack. Enemies never duck under the cyclone attack like they used to, and the knee attack is so easy to use that you can just keep hitting the kick button over and over, rather than needing to time it right. Some of the moves are easier to execute, and generally more powerful. There isn’t any boss music, which make the stage ends feel like they come out of nowhere, and even the little “go” arrow is missing sound effects. The soundtrack uses some blaring synth that sounds terrible – there’s an option for an NES-style rendition, which is much more appropriate, but it should’ve been the default.
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The backgrounds are drawn in an 8-bit style, but still more complex than the NES could ever handle, both in their tiling and their color scheme. It uses a modern widescreen presentation, but many of the sprites are simply ripped from the NES games, so they feel small against the gigantic playing field. The penultimate villains here are Casey and Shannon Okada, sisters who are sort of like evil female counterparts to Billy and Jimmy.Įven though the basics in place are fine, there’s a lot about Double Dragon IV that just seems…off. There are lots of classic enemies, but plenty of new ones, including some masked goons, a sumo wrestler, and some ninja ladies. It looks and feels very similar, though it ditches the forward/back command scheme for the typical punch/kick, and finally has a separate jump button. Much like Mega Man 9 hearkened back to Mega Man 2 (perceived by the developers to be the best / most popular entry), Double Dragon IV patterns itself most closely after the NES version of Double Dragon II. The game begins in the desert before heading to a Vegas-like casino, before they hop on an ocean liner to head to Japan. Like some of the more modern Double Dragon games, there are cutscenes at the beginning and between levels, detailing Billy and Jimmy Lee’s trek across the globe to save Marian. And it was primarily developed and published by Arc System Works, known for their line of high-quality of fighting games (and also tied into the history of Double Dragon, since their SMS port of the original game was one of their first projects). It was directed by Yoshihisa Kishimoto, with art and music by Koji Ogata and Kazanaka Yamane, respectively, two of the guys from the old Technos days.
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(After all, the SNES game was technically never called “Double Dragon IV” and Double Dragon V didn’t come out in Japan.) It was released for Double Dragon’s 30 th Anniversary, with a staff that makes it seem like the most authentic entry since Double Dragon Advance.
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It’s a “new” entry in the series that disregards everything that came after the NES games as spin-offs, and presents itself as a true sequel in the style of the retro games. Double Dragon IV takes the same route as Capcom’s Mega Man 9, released almost a decade prior.
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