#75 - Battletoads & Double Dragon

Even the cover bears great potential...

... but with great potential comes great responsibility.

 
How is this not a good idea? Two of the best brawlers for the NES team up in an epic showdown to see who can out BA the other! Here's my opinion: instead of making this a cooperative effort against evil, Rare should have taken this opportunity to pit the two groups against each other. Billy and Jimmy could think the Toads are an invading alien force come to earth, and the Toads could mistakenly view the Dragon duo as working for the Dark Queen. In 1P mode, you switch off between the two groups, and in 2P mode, each person takes control of the different team. How wicked awesome would that be! Yes, it's high time for a "re-imagining" of this series. Rare, if you ever feel like making decent games again, shoot me an e-mail.

The bulk of this game is sadly sub-par brawler fare, which is to say, it's at its best with two-players. Unlike the first Battletoads where two players strangely worked against each other, this game is only made fun with another person. Again, unlike the first Battletoads, the majority of the action is brawling, which is fine if that's all you want. It's a definite step backwards for the Battletoads series, though, as the first game prided itself on variety within its thirteen levels. In B&DD, any variety feels forced and most of the gaming mechanics - rappelling down a long corridor - are recycled from the first game. Some outer-space shooting sequences in level 4 are particularly uninspired, boring, and hard - the three adjectives you don't want assigned to a game.

The game's difficulty is lessened a bit compared with its predecessor. The five-lives code - so crucial to completing the first game, according to many hardcore Toads fans - makes its triumphant return, along with a new code that gives the player ten-lives and allows them to warp between stages. The latter is probably a cop-out to the aforementioned players, but to those who don't desire to play through the same monotonous levels, it was a godsend. And anyway, they are codes. You don't need to use them, you crazy toad lovers. Even without these codes, the game isn't as face-smashingly hard as its predecessor, but it is a lot more dull.

Do you see a pattern in how I'm describing this game? I'm calling it a Battletoads game instead of a Double Dragon game. This is the sad, complete truth. Battletoads & Double Dragon is a Battletoads game with Double Dragon characters and enemies haphazardly placed inside. Besides the straight-up brawling segments, nowhere does this ever feel like a normal Double Dragon game. I understand that Rare developed the game and that their focus are the Toads, but c'mon: at least attempt to combine the two awesome at-the-time franchises in some relevant, interesting way (see first paragraph). I'm not sure how the SNES and Genesis versions play, but this NES version reeks of being phoned-in (see release date: 1993, near the NES's death).

Some of the fighting animations on the characters are cool, but I can't not recommend this game enough. It's the sophomore slump of a promising series on one hand, and the all-too-obvious death of another series on the other. Yes, this game should have been made, but more time, effort, talent, and time (yes, even more time) should have been placed into considering the game's potential for totally awesome righteousness to the max. Rare, I'm serious: get off Microsoft's payroll and bail your Toads out of gaming purgatory.

D