Title: Super Double Dragon
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $6.99
Release Date: 11/09/2023

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Story

In this reissue of the SNES entry in the classic brawler franchise… Uh… There isn’t really a plot at all. A vague outline was provided in the original instruction manual, and there is a brief bit of text at the end of the US version, but otherwise the entire plotline was cut out as this game was heavily rushed to market.

Fights just randomly happen and vaguely connects the stages, making this game one you really turn your brain off to as a result. What could have been would have been outstanding, however.

Presentation

While some standalone Double Dragon reissues came out a few years ago, they were just slimmed down portions of the Brawler Bundle. Super Double Dragon and Double Dragon Advance on the other hand, sport a slightly updated, better wrapper that is much cleaner and easier to use, with your typical screen size, scanline and save state features available, along with some bonuses in the form of a region select and even doubling the game speed.

In a surprising sign of love and care for this port, the double speed option doesn’t change any of the music or sounds at all, making the increased speed feel much more natural. That’s a good thing, since the original speed setting is horrendous with very clunky controls and laughable slowdown, and was one of the more infamous aspects about this game. Now with double speed, the whole game looks and plays a lot smoother, too!

The sound emulation is top notch here as well, though the soundtrack is vastly different in tone than the prior Double Dragon games. The Japanese version completely shuffles the song list and adds new tracks to stages which lacked their own, but even this improvement doesn’t help the fact that most of these songs are very generic and barely fit the setpieces they take place in. The US version really likes to reuse several of the most annoying ones, so I’m at least glad the Japanese version cuts down on the repetition.

The music feeling off stems from the fact that the songlist is just completely out of order in general; when the game was cut back after being rushed through development, a bunch of songs either got cut entirely or were put in different stages, so while the JP version is a bit closer to what was originally intended, (and indeed, some stages like 5 and 7 have outstanding music) a lot of the songs present here just do not fit or are very generic.

Did you know that the US title screen theme was meant for the missing cutscenes? Or that the first stage of the JP version was meant for another final boss phase? Well, you do now, and while the JP version helped a bit with the song placement, it really is a shame that the game’s overall OST is lacking. There’s not even any boss music! (despite a final boss and normal boss theme being composed and planned)

Gameplay

Like the prior installments, Super Double Dragon is a beat em up, and unlike most other games in the franchise, there are actually pretty big regional differences between the two versions available here. The US version, Super Double Dragon, is essentially the reason why the entire game is a rush job, due to being forced for a holiday deadline. it has very spongy enemies, they hit stupidly hard, especially if they’re using a weapon, and a lot of your moves, while effective, don’t seem to be that fun to use if the enemies let themselves get hit over and over again.

You start off with a weird control scheme, but it does work pretty decently once accustomed to. You have a punch on Y, a kick on A, and the B button is your guard, which when used on smaller enemies can be used as a parry to catch and throw the enemy in the middle of their attacks. X of all things is the jump button, but you don’t need to use it for platforming too often, so it feels just fine as another attack move. Holding the L or R buttons will charge up the dragon meter, and when halfway full, it’ll do a powerful spinning kick, though it doesn’t really last all that long and is pretty terrible to use. Fully charging it will boost your main attacks, which is helpful, as this powered up state will easily knock down enemies in a single blow, helping you to deal with the spongy nature of foes.

Still, Super Double Dragon is relentless, and the original game also had irritating slowdown dragging down the experience as you tried to force yourself through the game’s horrible enemy variety and beating the same looking guys over and over and over again. It gets to be pretty frustrating and with you not being all that strong plus the limited continues on hand, Super Double Dragon ends up a frustratingly unbalanced mess, even though the double speed setting does at least fix the slowdown issue and make the general flow a lot quicker.

Luckily, that’s where Return of Double Dragon comes to save the day, at least as much as that original dev team could. It doesn’t finish the missing stuff or add the cutscenes back in, nor does it fix the enemy variety problem, but it does make the entire experience much, much more balanced and a lot more fun to play. The weapons dropped by enemies are way more useful than previously, your spin kick now multi-hits enemies in a super satisfying manner, and the enemies actually duck and fight back a bit more than they previously did. You can also choose between varying difficulty levels, along with the amount of continues you have to start with, making this version a lot more appealing to go back to compared to the US original.

Some stages get some slight tweaks as well, with usually a couple of enemy placement changes at most, but the final stage gets a huge extension tacked onto the end of it, plus it goes with a far superior background song to the US version, making the final stage feel more epic and climatic than the super short gauntlet of the US version. The biggest downside to Return is that this version gets rid of the ending text scroll completely, with the game just cutting to the staff roll upon defeating the final boss.

Alas, even this extra polish and great QOL pass isn’t enough to save Return of Double Dragon from feeling incomplete, but the playability here is so much better that Return almost feels like an entirely different game. Hell, with the slowdown removed thanks to this port’s speedup options, I can even say that about the US version to an extent, but combining both the JP version and the QOL speed toggle? Yeah this is a very smooth belt scroller, and an incredible ride to go through. It just feels so, so good to spin kick and counter everyone non-stop, and with that awful slowdown minimized, this Switch port is easily the best way of playing this 16-bit gem.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Super Double Dragon got a pretty stellar port, with a huge QOL feature that I argue makes the game play better than it ever has before! Combine that feature with the superior Japanese version being available here, and you have an excellent brawler that manages to be quite a lot of fun, despite having so many hallmarks of a rush job.

No story, nonsensical stages, and low enemy variety really makes this one a bit of a downer in the series, but the QOL additions and the JP version’s own tweaks still makes for a great, fast-paced co-op brawler worth playing. While I don’t think anything could have brought back the cut content without a full blown remake, this port is really damn good, and the QOL is the next best thing a brawler fan could ask for, pretty much making this SNES gem control as well as it should have from the start.

I give Super Double Dragon an 8 out of 10.