Battletoads/Double Dragon (SNES)
The crossover Battletoads/Double Dragon is one where you hope one of the participating franchises is on its best behavior. Double Dragon helped to popularize the beat ’em up genre across the world and was better known to players of a wide range of skill levels, so having it cross over with Battletoads that is infamous for its brutal difficulty, reliance on memorization, and unforgiving design makes you think surely Battletoads will understand this game should have a broader appeal and thus tone down its intimidating features some for the Double Dragon fans. On some level, Battletoads/Double Dragon is easier than many Battletoads brawlers, but with the Battletoads team at Rare being the ones involved in designing this video game, it’s little surprise that some of that trademark toughness still makes it in.
Also known as Battletoads & Double Dragon – The Ultimate Team, Battletoads/Double Dragon sees the humanoid amphibians who love to fight shifting away from their normal battles across outer space as their nemesis the Dark Queen has set her sights on Earth. Disabling Earth’s military weapons and piloting a powerful spaceship known as the Colossus, the Dark Queen teams up with some earthbound ne’er-do-wells to further aid in her conquest, familiar Double Dragon foes like Abobo and the Shadow Boss teaming up with the strange rat men and monsters of the queen’s forces in their bid for power. It seems the toads are familiar with the exploits of the twins Billy and Jimmy Lee though, meaning they’re able to call them up for back up in this battle with their now allied enemies. What this ultimately means for this brawler is up to two players can play as any of the Battletoads or either of the boys known as the Double Dragons. Rash, Pimple, Zitz, Billy, and Jimmy are all playable, but beyond appearances, the true differences exist primarily between toads in the brothers in terms of how they fight.
If you choose to play as a Battletoad, you’ll end up with a character relying on heavy hits, the inexplicable ability of the three amphibians to transform parts of their body into things like massive spiked boots or enormous ram horns giving them punchier and more visually interesting attacks than the two humans. However, Billy and Jimmy make up for their more normal looking attacks by being able to string them together better, attacks feeling almost like combos despite the fact you’re mostly mashing the same attack button to execute them. There are situational attacks based on the foe you’re fighting and if you’re doing something like hanging from a rope or wielding a rod as a weapon, but most of the time when there’s a baddie to beat, battles are often about danger management as you want to lock foes up by stunning them with blows or know when to send them flying to better manage the enemy forces gunning for you. The Double Dragons getting aerial kicks great for sending foes flying makes them much better at crowd management even if they need to work harder for kills, something that does ultimately matter a great deal if you go the adventure alone since Battletoads/Double Dragon doesn’t really account for you fighting on your own in terms of how many enemies it throws at you.
Thankfully, there is a bit of a counterbalance present in how enemy attacks can register. There are definitely foes like Linda Lash whose whip will immediately take two chunks out of your fairly small health bar if she hits, but a good amount of common foes and even bosses have an interesting bit of mercy programmed into when you actually take damage from their attack strings. Only the final heavy hit of a series of blows will actually register on your life bar, and sometimes there is a brief window where you can potentially strike back to escape so you’re not doomed just because you’ve been caught up in a combo. There are times this isn’t the cleanest though, one time when I was playing a regular enemy just kept doing their basic blow without progressing the combo so I was stuck with an unusually long wait. However, in two player, the brawling sections can actually be quite enjoyable while being a reasonable level of difficult a good deal of the time. There are even bosses who can be juggled around well to prevent their powerful attacks from starting up, meaning positioning can really help you simplify the fight if you’re reactive enough, but the encounters with characters like Linda Lash do let it down a touch not because they’re too tough necessarily, but because the game is absolutely brutal in other areas.
Falling down a pit in Battletoads/Double Dragon is an instant death, and while you are given a good cushion of lives to start with and dying lets you continue on from where you fell so long as you have lives left, there are an abundance of pits and many chances to fall into them throughout the adventure. The first level even immediately encounters a bit of an issue during its otherwise entertaining brawling segment thanks to this. Battletoads/Double Dragon will sometimes switch between restricted 2D action to areas with more room to walk around and fight, but the opening area is fairly bad at conveying its perspective and walking off of the spaceship’s edge is an instant death. Playing conservatively can get you through this unusually sloppy opening area, but there are many portions down the line where you fight foes right next to a fall or have to do something like time your jump through a moving electric barrier that will knock you back and kill you if you get it wrong. Figuring out the timing on when jet engines in your path ignite or how electrical barriers move is something you can do on a first try though, meaning there’s no memorization and it’s more a matter of timing movement right with a sometimes drastic punishment for failure.
One of the most shocking elements of Battletoads/Double Dragon though is how the Turbo Tunnel inspired section is surprisingly easy and downright breezy. Battletoads’s Turbo Tunnel is infamous for being a fast-paced test of reflexes and memorization, but when you get on some jet bikes here and need to weave through the obstacles ahead, you are given ample warning, movement is easy, and it never strains how quickly you need to act. Enemies do attack during this segment but they’re also easily dispatched, the shocking twist being that this section is almost too basic that there’s not much too enjoy about it. Battletoads/Double Dragon does carry on the Battletoads’s series dedication to being a bit of a genre mix beyond just the inclusion of bike sections though. At points you’ll need to repel down a shaft and beat baddies along the way, but the most drastic divergence comes in an outer space section inspired by the arcade game Asteroids. With little ships that rotate based on the direction you press and need to ignite their engines to move forward exclusively, you need to shoot down just asteroids at first in a seemingly direct homage before real enemies and far too many other dangers appear. In a rather dragged out segment not helped by the weak controls you are likely to lose many lives since things just don’t feel manageable. The instant kill hazards in other areas and occasional enemies who hit way too hard too easily definitely frustrate, but this fourth stage of seven where the game becomes a sloppy space shooter makes investing training into mastering the battle sections elsewhere feel fruitless since you’re likely to lose so much ground in this ill-advised diversion. There is however a secret warp code you can enter at character select to take you to the level you want to play from, although if you clear the game using it prepare to be admonished for not slogging through a game that can feel far too merciless even when it’s not that stingy with extra lives or health pick-ups.
THE VERDICT: When Battletoads/Double Dragon sticks to the standard brawling, it provides a decently entertaining two-player brawler with some great music from composer David Wise to suit the cool factor of this beat ’em up team up. Occasional shake-ups like the rappelling sections and a fairly tame jet bike race stave off the repetition, but when it throws in instant death hazards that are hard to avoid, enemies who deal damage too easily, and the terrible space shooting section, you watch lives disappear in frustrating fashion to things that aren’t even exciting to overcome once you’ve mastered them. Solo play is even more lopsided in its challenge level, but overall the Battletoads brought a bit too much brutality with them when it comes to the difficulty of some moments.
And so, I give Battletoads/Double Dragon for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…
A BAD rating. Save for perhaps the chaotic frenzy that is the space shooting’s early parts, Battletoads/Double Dragon at least avoids the reliance on memorization or overly twitchy reactions found in the original Battletoads outing, but there is still an unproductive emphasis on throwing yourself against the game over and over not because you were outwitted or handled a situation poorly but because there are so many pitfalls and overly punishing dangers that you get worn down, often by the parts that aren’t even enjoyable. Some tough bosses definitely can be a source of trouble, the Robo Manus fight not just having perhaps the best theme in the game backing it but having understandable dangers like how him landing deals damage so if you mess up your attempts to juggle him with your attacks you understand why you’re taking damage and how to avoid it. Sometimes though Linda Lashes appear in number and get their whip out a bit too quickly while other bosses can break through your attacks to deal damage. It would be nice to give all the playable characters a little more to work with to spice up the fighting sections, but this game does feel like it’s at an impasse. Its non-standard level segments often keep it lively and introduce novel considerations and yet sadly come with punishing elements that lead to inevitable repetition or moments that drain your enthusiasm since what kills you often feels so puny compared to the cool fights and more bombastic dangers elsewhere.
Battletoads/Double Dragon isn’t as ridiculously tough as a Battletoads game but is a good introduction in a way to how rough the series can be to a player, it certainly showing Double Dragon fans what to expect should they check out the other beat ’em up franchise. Double Dragon can feel a bit like it’s putting in a guest star role here since the game’s most memorable elements and situations tie to the toads so it’s hard to say the game landed that middle ground, but it at least didn’t sink so low that it requires a desire for masochistic difficulty to try and appreciate the experience. It’s not marring particularly excellent play with its dips into overly punishing situations so it’s no tragedy, but there are moments that can be a bit nicer to play through without being too easy that ensure Battletoads/Double Dragon is not an absolutely brutal slog.