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These bigger boss fights, though comparatively more extravagant, are also where Double Dragon Gaiden's balance seems to fall off an off-screen cliff. Not every boss has such a dramatic late-game transformation, though, and it’s disappointing to fight Duke and see that it goes almost identically no matter when you fight him. For example, fighting Anubis early involves waiting out his magical staff attacks and then wailing on him in the down time, but if you wait to take him on last he’ll have fully become one with purpley ghost god, teleporting around the map and spitting poison at you. I purposefully tailor my runs to include the worst offenders, Killer’s Fortress and Okada Clan HQ, as early as possible so that I can avoid as much of their later mission nonsense as possible, and it doesn’t feel great to choose my path to avoid annoyances rather than to work toward a desirable goal.īosses themselves do evolve when you choose to fight them later in the sequence, though. Besides the fact that jumping between the background and foreground is always awkward, enemies can spawn in places you’ve already passed, meaning you’ll have to work backwards through the bad sections and it just extends the painful experience. These are mostly trivial, like some spiked floors that are easily hopped over, but almost any extended stretch of platforming feels awful. I understood the vibe it was chasing, but I don’t know that it was worth the hard time I had keeping track of the enemies who were chasing me.Īside from how they look, levels are littered with obstacles that hinder your progress. Sometimes a level goes for gimmicks that would have been better left in the realm of theory than practice, like a full stage in the Pyramid gang’s mission that is covered in darkness save for a little spotlight following you around.

It’s fun to fight on a casino floor between rows of slot machines, but moving on to lifeless back offices right afterwards is disappointing. Visually, the four locations feature some creative backdrops, but those are often stand-outs in otherwise less impressive maps.