Folks, I’m not bad at video games by any means, and I can generally succeed with these tougher NES games with some tenacity and practice. Double Dragon 3 has no continues, and players get a single life. Of course, relying on a single move quickly turns the game into a boring, repetitive mess, but it was that or start over. That’s right: the first room.Įventually, I realized that the order of the day was to keep jump kicking and pray that I didn’t get knocked down. In fact, there were multiple times that I died in the very first room of the game. The life bars drain way faster this time around, and it’s easy to go from full health to standing at death’s door in an instant. This goes double if you get caught in a corner or between two enemies. In Double Dragon 3, the Shadow Warriors do the video game version of kicking the hero in the stomach while he tries to stand up. That may be more realistic, but in the older games the enemies would back up just a bit when a player got knocked down. The enemies are merciless, savagely pummeling the Lees while they’re down. Not in a satisfying “learn the game and overcome” sort of way, but rather a “this game was poorly programmed and never play tested” sort of way. Make no mistake, folks- Double Dragon 3 is ridiculously difficult. Pressing the required button too soon will cause enemies to duck out of the way and punish the foolish Dragon, while pressing it too late does nothing besides ending in a similar beat down.Īh, yes… the beat downs. Now I realize that it’s not all that useful of a move, since it requires perfect timing. This awesome technique-where the Lees jump towards an enemy and grab his hair, flipping him over as they land-was admittedly one of the reasons I loved this game as a kid. There is a new move in the form of the hair flip. The cyclone kick remains, but it’s still as finicky as it was before, and always seems to fail when it’s needed most. Gone are the rocket knee and hyper uppercut from Double Dragon II, which added some nice strategy to the combat when they worked properly. If any one of these elements saw any type of enhancement I might forgive the pint-sized characters, but instead it’s an across the board downgrade from the previous Double Dragon games.Ĭontinuing this baffling reduction, the Lees have fewer moves at their disposal this time around. The boring, miniscule characters don’t translate into any noticeable improvement anywhere else in the game, either the backgrounds aren’t as interesting, the number of characters on-screen remains the same, and the animation is less fluid than before. The Lee brothers have an awkward fighting stance that causes the heroes to look more like they really need to pee and less like they are fearsome martial artists. The character sprites are positively tiny now, smaller than they were in the first game, and somehow they feature less detail. It’s hard to keep the story for the Double Dragon games straight from one to the next, but who cares? You walk to the right and beat people up.įrom the moment the game begins, it’s clear that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong since Double Dragon II. I guess the post-apocalypse didn’t take, because the world seems pretty much normal compared to the Mad Max-inspired setting featured in Double Dragon II. It’s been a year since Billy (or is that Bimmy?) and Jimmy Lee defeated the Shadow Warriors. Now, twenty years and thousands of games later, I can say that Double Dragon 3 now ranks as not only my least favorite title in the series, but it may also be one of my least favorite NES games. I based this on the fun that I had with my cousin when I was 12, playing the game for a couple weeks in a futile attempt to beat it. I see now the error of my ways."įor years, I’ve told people that Double Dragon 3: The Sacred Stones was my favorite installment in the series. "I spent so many years of my life convincing myself that I loved Double Dragon 3. Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones (NES) review
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