all the negative criticisms just reflect how toxic the mainstream are these days and they don’t even judge retro style masterpieces fairly.
Double Dragon IV is literally the greatest game in the whole series. it surpasses its predecessors in every way, and even graphic wise, artistically, they present a charismatic essence not felt before , they even preserve the hardcore challenge and raises the standards for overall features and replay value incentives.
but yea, there are a lot of underrated masterpieces across all genres,
even if this is underrated by the masses, it’s still a videogame treasure for Double Dragon/beatemup fans that appreciate it
it is the greatest and MOST WORTHY anniversary creation for the whole series legacy and opens greater ideas and possibilities
even if they don’t make much use of the brand afterwards, Double Dragon IV establishes new inspirations and game design qualities that are priceless and there is much to learn from.
I’m gonna buy and try, but right now, looking at these complaints, a little voice is telling me “these niggas probably forgot how to play nes-era beat em ups, specifically dd2”. I’ll see how valid that thought is…
Just cleared mission 4. This is dd2 on steroids. Loving it…so far.
The biggest issue with Kunio-kun in my opinion is that most devs who touch it are so focused on preserving the tradition that it doesn’t feel like the series is capable of moving beyond the first game on the NES. Now don’t get me wrong, that game was really good, and I LIKE the art style of RCR, which is more than I can say for any Double Dragon game, but man I really wish that at some point it felt like the series would go somewhere and do something. Underground feels like the first time that someone has tried to really do something more with the series. Weird how it took an American/Canadian team making a sequel to the Western translation to do it. I hope it’s popular in Japan and we get a sort of Mario USA thing with that game.
RCR was so revolutionary for it’s time. Often it’s hard enough to recapture those games and developers get scared when people cry cause it’s not the same game anymore… . Just as you mentioned; Finally a team who tried to further the genre with some modern additions. The look, feel and combat all seem to be intact. With some great advancements. Heck, I love some the taunts and animations. Did anyone notice the AI knocking him down and doing push-ups lol. I think sometimes it’s finding people who are truly passionate about the game and knowing how much more it could be without the limitations of old gen hardware.
Yeah the Roids gang are workout themed and the pushups are their OTG attack. It used to be much more bullshit than it is now, I think they stop after one it. They used to be so pumped that they would literally push up you to death after any knockdown.
I kept getting the vibe of “this game is more like 3 than 2”, then I got to level 30 of the tower. I see why now.
Takuma Sakazaki is is top tier by the way, along with Sonny(long lost Lee brother in yellow).
Shadow Boss Jimmy would have been better than the default Lees, but he lacks the grab. Abobo, sumo, and wrestler guy are high tier due to either one hit kills, or very powerful attacks that come out in about one frame.
Kunio never grabbed me. Maybe it’s because of the stubby ass characters and labyrinth like stages. The GBA game was fun, but it never felt as polished as DD Advance.
The appeal to RCR at the time was more really smart design choices given the limited hardware and technical things you didn’t really see at the time. It was before the RPG genre was even a genre, Dragon Quest had been out for less than a year and the idea of “stats” that get better over time was a really new concept, but even then it wasn’t a DQ-like because it took those elements and put them in an action game. Additionally it was emulating arcade beat em up gameplay on a home console, which was also pretty new at the time, and it did a pretty good job. There was a story, a pretty big world you could explore freely, and something you didn’t get very much of at the time, expressive characters and personality. That’s the part that will turn some people off such as yourself. It was a decision made to work within the limits of the hardware, they decided to put more emphasis in the spritework on character faces rather than making them proportional, which allowed for a lot of distinct character looks and the goofy faces they’d make when getting hit that everyone loved. That’s a big reason why the Kunio artstyle is so loved, it was chibi before chibi was a trend and it was giving you personality you never got on the NES, it was incredibly memorable. It was also a physics sandbox, which was absolutely unheard of. Objects reacting to being hit, balls and tires rolling, ice sliding independently of other objects, it was crazy. You could play baseball with the items you pick up off the ground, which led the way to Crash and the Boys and Nintendo World Cup.
Basically it was very ahead of its time in a lot of ways, Kishimoto is often attributed as the father of the beat em up genre, but Kunio set a new standard for action games at the time and created a foundation for the future. Hell, you can trace back design elements in games that still come out today all the way back to Kunio. Final Fantasy XV is just Kunio with 30 years of technological advancements and pushing technology to its absolute limit, which is exactly what RCR did on the NES back in the day. It’s not stuff that everyone cares about and it’s certainly not impressive anymore, but when you look back at the games that were coming out at the time and the limits they were put under, it’s an incredibly sophisticated game for how relatively primitive it is. That’s also why I’m really bummed by the direction the series went, they focused on one aspect that people really liked, the goofy expressive characters, and ignored everything else that Kunio did. It was one of the most technologically complex games on the NES and made huge strides in game mechanics that other games and developers had a hard time competing with, but that basically got frozen in time. Had the series kept trying to make these big pushes to be on the bleeding edge of technology, it might have been more than just a novelty, we might have been playing Kunio XV instead of Final Fantasy XV.
