Double Dragon (Arcade) - No Elbow, No Death Clear

Double Dragon is a 1987 beat 'em up developed by Technos Japan. It's a spiritual successor to Technos' previous game, Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun (Renegade), and is commonly viewed as the starting point for the beat 'em up genre. This is a no death clear of the game, without making use of the back elbow attack. It's strong, safe, and just overpowered, so I thought it'd be more fun to play without using it.

That said, I still didn't like this game very much. Kunio-kun is vastly superior in my opinion. I'm willing to cut Technos some slack for being trailblazers, but the combat isn't very fun, the constant slowdown is annoying, and the last stage is horribly designed. The game does become a bit more fun once you understand how to read the AI, though. When you fight multiple enemies at once, one of them will eventually try to move behind you, and they won't attack or try to avoid anything you do to them. You can use this to your advantage to get a full combo in, or a quick smack with the baseball bat.

But even then, there's no saving the last stage. The first part with the extending bricks isn't that bad; you can react to everything until you have to move up onto the narrow path. Just hope the last section doesn't pop out right in front of you. The real garbage is in the next area with the statues. Their attacks are random - sometimes they'll spam attacks repeatedly, other times they'll wait a few seconds in between. The problem is if they attack as fast as possible, your window for getting through might not even exist. And they can kill you instantly, in just one hit (the damage also seems random). After practicing for a while, I found this to be the safest way through. Standing on this exact pixel, then jumping forward. There's still a chance you'll get hit and die, but I had more success with this method than anything else, at least.

The rest of the stage isn't bad. The battle against the final boss can be pretty tense too, because if he shoots you, you're dead. So I did have some fun with this game, but hopefully the sequel is significantly better.

Chapters:
Mission 1: 0:00
Mission 2: 2:45
Mission 3: 5:36
Mission 4: 13:44
Ending & Credits: 21:49

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