Double Dragon Gaiden - Max Difficulty, Full Game 1CC (The Mayor & Marian / Ending B)

Double Dragon Gaiden is a brand new Double Dragon game from Secret Base. I'm not familiar with this developer, but the good news is they did a great job!

This game has a pretty unique structure for a beat 'em up: you can play the stages in any order, but every time you clear a stage, the difficulty and length of the next one increases. There's also a roguelike reward system in place - each time you clear a section, you can buy a random powerup with the money you earned throughout the stage. You can even tweak the difficulty before you begin playing, by adjusting your HP, the cost of the powerups and continues, and the enemy's stats and aggression level. They had some fresh ideas, and thankfully they executed them very well.

The combat is pretty fun with some tag team mechanics that encourage you to constantly swap between characters. They do this by limiting your use of special attacks and tags - both are tied to your special meter, but you can only start using them when your bar is full. Once you use a special, you can chain a couple more into your combo and tag out at any point, but once your attack ends, you're locked out of specials and tags until you completely refill your bar. So ideally you'll want to use a special or two, then tag in your reserve character. It flows really well and is quite fun to play with.

I wasn't sure if I'd like this game based on the preview videos, but I'm glad I bought it. It's really good, and I haven't played another beat 'em up like it. Give it a shot, I recommend it.

This run was done with all of the settings set to their highest difficulty. Honestly, Marian is so broken that it doesn't make that much difference. Her mine makes almost all of the bosses a non-issue, and most of the regular enemies aren't very threatening to any of the characters I've tried. The last boss fight just being a mess makes Marian (or any character who can safely loop them) practically too valuable to not pick for your team. The other character can be just about anyone you find fun. So this time I picked The Mayor - I only used him briefly before, but I thought he'd be a bit stronger than he ended up feeling in this run. His attacks do a decent amount of damage, but they drain a ton of meter, so getting the power up that reduces the cost of special attacks by 50% feels pretty essential. His psycho crusher seems like his best move as well, but it takes a moment to start up, and if you get hit out of it, it just feels like a big waste. But The Mayor isn't bad, I still like him. I just played Lady Okada a couple times before using him and I felt like she was better though.

I've had this video uploaded for a few days but I've just been too busy to finish the rest of the YouTube work. I might just stop here with this game for now; I think the only other thing I'd like to try is this same run without Marian, but that just comes down to figuring out something for the last bosses tbh. Fun game though, I've enjoyed it.

Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:48 Okada Clan Headquarters
7:04 Killers' Fortress
20:04 Royals' Hideout
42:01 Triangle's Junkyard
1:03:46 Town Hall
1:11:33 Last Bosses
1:16:41 Ending & Credits
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Beat 'em Ups (e.g. Final Fight):    • Beat 'em Ups  
2D Action (e.g. Metal Slug):    • 2D Action  
STG/Shmups (e.g. Dodonpachi):    • STG Replays