The greased machinery of nostalgia selling attacks again. For a long time we did not know much about the Double Dragon franchise, starting point of a genre in low hours that needs a saving hand as soon as possible. In few occasions it is more justified to call a video game pioneer, as this smash in the arcades makes a whopping three decades launched a glove that
Capcom and others would collect with Final Fight and his fabulous successors, emperors of the Beat em upduring years. Great achievement without a doubt,
although the truth is that things never finished on track for the saga of Technos, protagonist of numerous swings since 1987. After a couple of sequels in recreational, including a third delivery rather
disastrous, fighting games for Neo Geo, which were not bad but did not end up being portents, as well as the logical galaxy of mobile conversions and remakes
, now we come to the complicated moment in which we find ourselves: the celebration of the thirty anniversary of a mythical franchise, yes, but of which not everyone remembers at this point.
A couple of years ago we heard about a news that seemed to indicate, a priori, that the time had come to witness a Beat Em Upof entity, that
retakes the style of the mythical Double Dragon, Final Fight or Streets of Rage . Arc System Works acquired the rights to several intellectual properties of Technos, including brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee in the deal. Taking into account
the history of the studio and its creatives, magicians in the update of the two-dimensional, pioneers in many technical aspects with the saga Guilty
Gear, capable of updating more than respectable of old sagas, as was the Hard Corps Uprising, it was the ideal moment: the time of a Beat em Up that
really evolved what made the genre great in the past, with updated graphics that did not use the visual minimalism of titles like Castle Crashers or Viking Squad.
A genre in search of new heroes
Unfortunately, we were wrong with a lot. Someone must have thought that if an indie company (Yacht Club Games, of course) manages to sell more
than one million copies of a game with graphics that make the NES imitation its standard, or a miniature reissue of this The same console sells a million and a half machines in a few months, it’s not worth risking much .
Therefore, instead of trying to evolve the saga with something new, dare with an improved and updated remake of the first games of recreational, or
take as a basis the fantastic forgotten that is Super Double Dragon for SNES, the three decades of the brothers Lee they are going to celebrate finally with a title that continues with all the subsaga that were the old games of 8 Bit in the console of Nintendo.
The first Double Dragon stood out very visually in the halls of 1987 . The game was far from the reach of the consoles of the moment (until the arrival of the Megadrive with its almost perfect conversion), so Technos took out of the sleeve some
new designs that did not pretend to be totally faithful to the original for the inevitable step by the NES. Alternating the combats of a Beat em Up with phases in which the stage lacked depth and we went to the plataform, the Double Dragon saga
left very good taste in the console of Nintendo, to such a point that the second and then magnificent delivery has been included in the NES Mini itself, and it is not rare to see it in the typical lists of the best games of the system that appear every so often.
Encouraged by these other successes that we have already referred, Arc System Works offers us a radical journey into the past, with the risks that this entails. Argumentally, the game continues the story of a trilogy that was better read with the brain in some way of disconnection, raising again an absurd script and riddled with all possible clichés to current eyes. Visually, Double Dragon IV looks exactly like a game that ran on an idealized NES. With this qualification we refer to a hypothetical machine of the third generation, capable of displaying a widescreen aspect, moving many more characters simultaneously than was possible in the time of the 8 Bit. This hypothetical NES ideal also has more than two action buttons in its control, and smiles satisfied to the camera exempt from the scrolling and flickering problems so typical of a real NES. Out of this, everything remains the same. Too much the same, and here is, on this occasion, the origin of the evils for the new installment of the saga.
