This Week In Retro: Double Dragon Neon (Patreon)

September 11, 2012: Brothers don't shake hands. Brothers gotta HIGH FIVE

by Diamond Feit

Do you remember the 1980s? I certainly do, and those memories have fueled many pages of this column over the last few years. The decade gave us scores of major pop culture milestones to fondly look back upon, especially when it comes to video games. I know some people legitimately feel like the 80s has unique properties that make it superior to other eras from the past or the present, but I can't accept that. They were good to me but not good for many other people, and no amount of pink or turquoise nostalgia will convince me otherwise.

I'm not surprised that remembering the 80s has become big business, but I am surprised at how long this period of fondly looking back on that decade has lasted. When I was a child in the 80s, loving the 50s was hip. In the 90s, the 60s got groovy again. Even the 70s, long a laughing stock of my youth, got its moment in the sun at the dawn of the 21st century. Yet once 80s nostalgia hit the mainstream, it feels like the decade dug in its (British Knights) heels and refused to surrender the spotlight.

This week we're double-dipping into the past as a game very much about 80s nostalgia made its debut 10 years ago. It did not represent the very first time a modern video game took inspiration from the past, but it did lean into the then-25-year age gap to wink at the player as if to say "wasn't the world silly back then?" And as depicted within the world of Double Dragon Neon, the 1980s were indeed a very silly time.

The original Double Dragon, as covered in this very column a few months ago, found huge success in arcades and rode that wave of fame onto home consoles, personal computers, comic books racks, toy store shelves, television airwaves, and eventually movie theaters. Even though I hardly ever played the coin-op version, I knew the name by reputation alone, and later spent many hours on my NES fighting my way through Double Dragon and Double Dragon II: The Revenge. In fact, in the arcades, I only really threw myself into the world of Double Dragon 3, easily the weakest of the original releases.

Yet even though Double Dragon came to dominate the late 1980s, creator Yoshihisa Kishimoto built its legend from a litany of older influences, particularly 1973's Enter the Dragon and 1979's Mad Max. I don't know if the games even take place in the 80s at all, given the setting of a post-apocalyptic New York City, though I suppose the idea of gang violence running wild in urban centers was a very popular fear reflected in the media at that time.

Double Dragon Neon first launched in 2012, 25 years after the original game made its arcade debut. Since both the property and the beat-em-up genre had long fallen out of fashion by that time, Neon pitched itself to players as a love letter to both the original Double Dragon series and the 1980s as a whole. The launch trailer makes copious usage of dated slang like "tubular" and "radical" with on-screen text in bold colors evocative of the time period. In-game power ups include bright pink cassette tapes, luminescent extra lives, and bottles of soda to refill players' health. Curiously, a "crystal" variant completely restores all stats, even though Crystal Pepsi was very much a 90s creation.

Double Dragon Neon imagines the protagonists, brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee, as living throwbacks to the 80s who cling to the past. Their voices carry the cadence of surfers from the valley, a common stereotype in 80s films, and they frantically strum air guitars a la Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted "Theodore" Logan whenever they clear a stage. Holding two buttons will make the Lee brothers breakdance. In two-player mode, dubbed "bro-op" in-game, they can high-five each other to share resources. Neon mines all of these affectations for laughs, and at no point are the heroes' antics treated as cool in any way.

The villains fare no better in Double Dragon Neon, with their limited voice clips painting them as incompetent, imbicilic, or horny. While Billy and Jimmy retain their same basic look from 1987, the enemies sport exaggerated outfits to invite ridicule from the player on sight. Generic street tough Williams now wears bandanas on his ankles, while an African-American variant appears with a comically-large afro (complete with hair pick). Once the mission takes the Lee brothers into outer space—more on that in a moment—Williams shows up wearing a space helmet atop his regular clothes. Abobo, originally depicted as a muscular bald man in the first game, must be on HGH in Neon as his size has tripled and he delivers his lines with Frankenstein-like grunts.

There's no better time to turn our attention to the master antagonist of this entire affair, the ridiculous Skullmageddon. While the original series slowly transitioned from street criminals to supernatural threats over the course of three games, Double Dragon Neon does so inside of two stages. Luring the Lee brothers into his dojo, Skullmageddon launches the entire building into orbit, and he greets them sitting upon a giant throne where the kidnapped Marion is held aloft like an ornament.

Despite his large frame and larger sword, Skullmageddon is just as goofy as his underlings, as he taunts players with a variety of puns and speaks in a high-pitched voice reminiscent of Skeletor in the old He-Man cartoon. Defeating Skullmageddon brings only a temporary victory; he escapes with Marion, forcing the Lee brothers to continue fighting their way through his spaceship before returning to Earth, eventually confronting an even larger version of him at game's end. Should the Lee brothers manage to best him, he plummets through space while singing a very Weird Al-esque song to the heroes as the credits roll.

Perhaps the only element of Double Dragon Neon not treated lightly is the nuts and bolts of combat, giving the quarter-munching beat-em-up concept a 21st-century overhaul built around advancing skills. The original arcade games wanted players to reach the end by inserting more coins; at no point did the Lee brothers gain any strengths or techniques they did not have at the start. Neon offers persistent collectibles like cassette tapes that unlock new moves and increase player stats, money for purchasing power-ups in shops, and mythril for raising the ceiling on cassette upgrades. Unlike the one-way trip featured in the arcades, Neon gives players the freedom to revisit any cleared mission at any time in order to bulk up their inventory.

Replaying early levels also serves as a great way to practice the Lees' expanded repertoire of martial arts moves. Neon takes full advantage of the many inputs on modern controllers, giving players dedicated buttons to punch, kick, grab, jump, run, and duck. There's no block button, but ducking and moving at the same time lets you dodge roll out of most dangerous situations. As a bonus, properly evading attacks with a duck or a roll grants the Lees a temporary attack buff called Gleam (another 80s reference). It's a much more complicated system than the button-mashing arcade games that defined Double Dragon in the 80s, but that depth means that even a small investment reaps huge rewards.

Take my experience with Double Dragon Neon as an example: The game launched as a freebie for PlayStation Plus subscribers, so I downloaded it on day one believing I could slap people around without much thought. With even basic foes able to juggle Billy into the air and Abobo nearly filling the screen with his arms, I doubt I cleared the first stage before running out of lives. Given the hectic nature of my life at the time—a three-year-old son, a pregnant wife, and TGS coming one week later—I found the whole thing extremely frustrating and must have put it down without a second thought.

In anticipation of its 10th anniversary, I fired up Double Dragon Neon on my PS5, as the game is included in the current PlayStation Plus Premium lineup. My first playthrough in 2022 went about as well as it did in 2012; I struggled to get past regular enemies without taking massive damage, and Abobo wiped out nearly all my lives on his own. My failure drove me to seek answers online, and while I found no quick-fix, seeing the sheer amount of moves written out convinced me I needed to give the game a se-, no, third try. Turns out Double Dragon Neon does a terrible job of giving players information they need to succeed via the in-game tutorial, but all the tools are there from the first screen. On my next attempt, I cleared the first stage without losing a single life.

I don't know that I can call Double Dragon Neon a "hidden gem" or anything on that level; I'm unlikely to see it through to the end without a second player to make the experience fully enjoyable. I'm certainly impressed that a 2012 downloadable game poking fun at a 1987 arcade game holds up to modern scrutiny, and we should talk about Neon when we discuss the recent resurgence in indie beat-em-ups bringing new blood into the once dried-up genre. It's easily the best Double Dragon game in recent memory, even if its aesthetics leave much to be desired. WayForward has given us some of the best pixel art the medium has ever seen, but Double Dragon Neon's polygonal characters look like puppets and the drab, flat backgrounds only undercut the retro-80s bright colors seen in the foreground.

The music, on the other hand, that's worth singing about. In Jake Kaufman's expert hands, the Double Dragon Neon soundtrack both revives tunes from the original series and offers brand-new tracks that befit the spirit of the 80s. I consider playing the game purely optional at this point—PS+ Premium subscribers can do so for free, Switch owners can purchase a port—but do not sleep on this music under any circumstances. Frankly, with 80s nostalgia even stronger and more commercial today than it was 10 years ago, the Double Dragon Neon soundtrack should be playing in movie trailers and on boomboxes around the planet. It's that good!

I know the 80s party has to come to an end sooner or later. Stranger Things' next season will be its last. We've already seen the first wave of 90s nostalgia—Crystal Pepsi came back, amazingly—and things will only intensify as the Reagan era slips further into history. At some point, throwbacks to the 80s will feel as dated as the 80s themselves. As I wrote in my Double Dragon column, I'm perfectly okay with letting this series, a relic of the arcade era, fade away. But Double Dragon Neon can come back if WayForward wants to keep delivering updated takes on the beat-em-up formula. Perhaps Neon 2 can be more of a 90s throwback, with four or six player co-op, and Jake Kaufman can try his hand at grunge or ska. Are you telling me you wouldn't mark out for a Skullmageddon cover of "Them Bones"? He's made of bones! The gags write themselves!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch. With Tokyo Game Show up and running this week, expect the next column on September 25.