Having poured hours into Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons at this point, I can without a doubt say that Secret Base has taken the utmost care with the Double Dragon franchise. Seeing Secret Base as the developer on this new project was an instant green flag, as the company previously worked on Streets of Red: Devil’s Dare Deluxe, a wonderful permadeath beat’em-up with some interesting twists on the genre.
Just when all hope seemed lost, we learned of Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons, a brand-new title from developer Secret Base. While Double Dragon Neon gave fans hope for a bright future, we instead got another decade+ of lackluster Double Dragon games. There’s no doubt that success helped pave the way for their titles like River City Girls later on, which has plenty of ties to Double Dragon as well. WayForward managed to find something that worked for the Double Dragon franchise, getting things back on track. The gang at WayForward took a crack at the Double Dragon franchise and came out with a mostly classic-style beat’em-up that was filled with goofy jokes, over-the-top moves, and an absolutely killer soundtrack.
There was one bright spot in the series’ later years Double Dragon Neon. Sadly, after the original trilogy of games and early spin-offs, the Double Dragon franchise not only fell off in terms of popularity, but quality as well. I was there for the numbered sequels, spin-offs like Battletoads & Double Dragon, even the odd experiments like the one-on-one fighting game, confusingly titled Double Dragon. I stuck with the series from those early days through the decades that followed. Long story short, if you owned an NES back in the day, the odds were very good that you owned, or at least played Double Dragon. This was a time when game boxes and word of mouth were the main ways we learned about games, and somehow those two factors resulted in Double Dragon being a title a ton of kids added to their game libraries. The original Double Dragon was one of those NES games that pretty much everyone had in their collection. That game released all the way back in 1987, so yeah…I’m an old man! I’ve been a fan of the Double Dragon franchise since I played the very first installment on the NES.
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