BrianC wrote:
edit: I tried the SMS one again and wasn't feeling it this time. Some moves like the elbow and holds don't seem possible to do consistently. Sometimes an enemy will fall down after jump kicking you after a punch seemingly misses. It's possible to beat the first Abobo by just standing there and punching.
I'm not too fond of the SMS version myself either to be honest. It seems to be praised mostly by Sega fanboys who go "OMG! 2-PLAYER DOUBLE DRAGON! SEGA DOES WHAT NINTENDON'T", even though the SMS version is mechanically worse than the NES version in every way. That's not to say the SMS version doesn't have merits over the NES version, like the fact that it can display up to three different on-screen enemies at the same time (as opposed to two clones of the same baddie like on the NES), but even these merits are offset by the constant flickering and the fact that only one weapon is allowed on-screen. If an enemy uses a throwing knife or dynamite in the SMS version, he actually has to go off-screen to pick up another weapon to use against you.
To do hair grabs in the SMS version, you have to damage an enemy up to a certain point and then walk up to them, Final Fight-style. It takes about three or four knockdowns, which kinda makes hair grabs pointless in this version though.
Wow. Read that manual scan of the Genesis version and I was like "what the heck?". They just made up their own story for the sake of making Jimmy the villain. Or maybe they just lazily copied the NES version of the story and made up their own explanation for player 2.
Apparently the fact that Player 2 is a palette swap wasn't enough of a hint that he's supposed to be Player 1's twin brother. Although to be fair, it seems all the licensed PC/console versions of Double Dragon based their backstories on the Famicom/NES version in some form or another, but at least some versions (like the PC and Atari ports) had enough sense to realize Jimmy was a good guy in the arcade game and rewrite their plot synopsis accordingly. It's almost as bad as Battletoads & Double Dragon renaming Machine Gun Willy to Roper.
I used to believe that Technos never really wrote any backstory or named any of the characters for the arcade version of Double Dragon, since even the foldout poster that came with the arcade version's OST tape reused the manual/flyer art from the FC version that came out around the same time (Chin was not an enemy character in DD1AC, but he's listed among the bad guys instead of the head-swapped bosses that were actually in the arcade version). The manual for the Mark III version features text copied verbatim from the FC version and while the artwork they used for the enemy characters for their version was all original, they still copied the same poses from the FC art (including Jeff's, who is doing a jump kick like Chin).
However, there's a Famitsu review of the arcade game where they actually mention some of the enemy characters by proper names before any of the console ports were ever made. Not only do they mention Abobo and Willy, but they also give a name to the mohawked head-swapped version of Abobo exclusive to the arcade game, whose name is apparently ジック/Jikku. Not sure what kind of name is that though. Maybe they meant ジャック/Jack and forgot the small ャ. The same article also refers to Player 1 as Jimmy, while leaving Player 2 nameless. Go figure.
https://twitter.com/chou_nosuke/status/ ... 7777931264
As for other manuals, the back of the SMS version's box refers to Marion as "Mary Ann". I just looked up the SMS manual and it mixes up Jeff and Willy (as well as having "Mary Ann" like the box). There was one manual (may have been the DOS version) that says that Billy and Jimmy have the nicknames Hammer and Spike (their names on the US arcade version).
edit: Checking the SMS version manual again, it does mention that Billy and Jimmy are nicknamed Hammer and Spike, only it says Billy is "Spike" and Jimmy is "Hammer", the reverse of the US arcade machine.
Mary-Ann and Marian are both possible romanizations of マリアン. Same deal with Roper/Lopar/Rowper, which are all possible romanizations for ローパー (although that one is a bit more baffling, since they clearly spell it Rowper in-game in the NES version). I think it was a cool touch that they combined Taito USA's nicknames for the Lee brothers with the canonical names that Technos gave them. That's another reason why I used to believe that the names Billy and Jimmy were given later to the duo.
GSK wrote:
DD4 was made by a team roughly half the size of the first couple NES games--most of them were OGs that worked on those games but when, say, one guy has to handle the entirety of the game's art, a task originally assigned to three or four people, things are going to suffer.
That said, Kishimoto in particular doesn't seem to have any passion for DD anymore and treats it as a paycheck.
The DD4 team consisted of Yoshihisa Kishimoto (director), Koji Ogata (sprite designer) and Kazunaka Yamane (composer), plus two new guys I don't remember at the moment. I'm surprised Yamane was even alive, considering he hasn't worked on anything else since Technos went out of business all those years ago and unlike the other two, he never had any active social media presence. I haven't heard of Kishimoto in a while, but Ogata is pretty active on Twitter and seems desperate to do a new Kunio or Double Dragon game.
Now that you mention that about Kishimoto, I've seen a Kunio fan-blog bring up the same criticism you have about him, saying that the newer Kunio games released on Nintendo DS and 3DS seems to be more about pandering to Famicom nostalgics over actually making the franchise relevant to a modern era.
It feels kinda weird that there were more effort put into western-developed revivals like Double Dragon Neon and River City Ransom Underground in the last few years than anything made in-house by ASW.