“Use the Force” the game tells you, and I did.

The Force being save states.

I tried to limit how often I used them and at least engage with the game's proper life and continues systems but towards the end of the game I got so frustrated that I outright employed emulation rewind. Maybe I should have put it on Easy difficulty but the Force was with me on this one because I got credits.

This game is repetitive and trolly where its easy to take damage. Several enemies can harm the player through their death explosions. A fascinating little mechanic, but a wicked and overwhelming one. Enemies respawn in a blink of an eye and the platforming could be obnoxious, especially long vertical sections where if you fall you have to do that all over again. Despite all that, there is fun to be had here.

The rhythm of running and gunning is tight where staying in place but having eight degrees of firing direction can make you feel deadly. The sound and graphics are pretty great. I have a sick nostalgia for this kind of SNES-chip Star Wars sound, although that comes from me playing Empire Strikes Back as a kid. On that note, I think this replay of the Super Star Wars series is going to continue.

Are you ready gamer? Are you ready for the sheer unadulterated terror that is the animalized men wriggling eerily?

Well, if you weren't then you didn't read the manual. We love instruction manuals, we can't get enough of being instructed and looking at funny pictures of the enemies with names like "Rolpher", who rolls at you! Demorobruzer, the dinosaur riding on the tank reminds me of something I'd draw while bored at school, which disappoints me that I wasn't allowed in the timeline where I grew up with this instead of Karate Kid. The absurd word choices in the manual would've been like Shakespeare to toddler me, and would most assuredly had taught me to always type EVIL in all caps. What's most astounding about the localization for both this and the arcade game though, is that they decided to call the mysterious undead warrior of Argus "Rygar", which for all intents and purposes is essentially the same name as "Ligar", the main antagonist. What's the correlation between these two characters other than being the main driving forces of the plot? Nothing else besides that, perhaps the massive lion headed snake thing with dragon hands is the dad and it's Ligar Jr.? It's a mystery to all.

Once you're done reading the manual, you'll have your handy dandy map to the main overworld, and the locations of the Indora War Gods who await to give you one of their sacred treasures to help you defeat your apparent dad. It's here that I realized that the manual actually can't make up it's mind on whether the fighting gods themselves are called "Indora"s, or if they're a collective of buff bearded men belonging to someone named "Indora", but in-game at least one of them calls themselves "Indora", and talk like they're just named Indora. My personal headcanon is that it's just one huge dude going between rooms quickly to talk to you, because you're the first person besides an animalized man who wriggles eerily to finally drop by the main overworld. Either way, if it isn't already apparent, this is an early search action/indy jones-like, and it's a very ambitious title.

So ambitious that the game suffers from many funny glitches, and flickering sprites are commonplace due to the game giving no shits sometimes about how many enemies it spawns during the side-scrolling sections. This is actually a boon however, because as a tip for you and anyone else interested in trying this, it pays to kill everything you come into contact with in Rygar. That's right, Tecmo was making Musou games way before their Koei half had even the inkling of the idea to turn a Romance of the Three Kingdoms fighting game into a beat'em up war simulator. Failing to kill enemies in this game only makes the game harder, as you deny yourself the ability to improve your "tone" and "last", which is your attack and durability respectively, as well as nabbing potential mind point drops, which is what you use to cast one of your three magic spells. One of them being a super useful health recovery that requires a full meter of seven whole mind. With infinite continues and forgiving checkpoints, this only gets easier as you play it unless you max out. Another tip I have is for the Pully you get from the first Indora. The manual says to aim for Rygar Jr.'s torso for trying to get on the zipline, and for best success try and wriggle (like an animalized man wriggling eerily) around in a circle until you hear "clink". It's alright, the game's held together with duct tape, and sometimes even the doors will require jiggling the handle to get through. I love it for it though.

Rygar's most interesting trait to me though, is that a lot of the soundtrack was changed for the western release. This funny four-note song that feels like the composer shitposting or forgetting to write the rest of it was actually changed from this pretty rad sounding piece. What was the reason? No one knows. Maybe Michiharu Hasuya thought we wouldn't get it, much how they figured we couldn't possibly get this and Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde at the same time. It certainly wasn't malevolent or anything, because we still at least got this groovy cave theme that keeps me from actively denouncing the NES version, ignoring my irony-fueled love of the four-note Castle of Dorago shitpost, and my craving to think of headcanon as to why Dorago is trying to drive Rygar Jr. crazy with his mad piano skills.

As of this post, I've beaten this three times in the last week and it's only gotten better for me on each subsequent replay just like many other search-actions of it's time like Simon's Quest. Rygar/Warrior of Argus Extreme Great Charge has not only been a consistent cushy fun romp, but also full of surprises thanks to it's mysterious programming. When I find myself casually strolling along and enjoying the scenery of Primeval Mountain only for six dragons to suddenly show up and attempt to drop eggs on my head with the frame rate dropping massively as the music struggles to breathe, that's just the peak of the goddamn medium right there. That's a fucking game. A really interesting and memorable game that I would've adored much like Metroid growing up.

Beastorized gentlemen squirming weirdly.

out of all the games ive played, fuckin hell, even shows, movies and comics this has to be THE piece of media that has done the best job at relating, identifying and encapsulating who i am as a person. if i were to make a game that came from the bottom of my heart and my usual doodle crude art style, it would have to be this (not saying that im even capable of putting in the hard effort, witty writing and really solid level and game design into this). although celeste has some of the biggest trophies of mine; being not only the first game to make me cry but also the best indie ive played, lisa was at some point my favorite indie. but the reason its not anymore is because this game is stressful to think about (i mean that in a very good way). this has the award for being the first game to genuinely make me feel uncomfortable and mentally unable to power through. i have beaten this don't get me wrong, but theres a point where you have to kill someone, and mid battle the opponent tells you ''why are you doing this!?'' and i was like -fuck... i cant do this... so i waited until tomorrow to do it. even replaying the recent edition i felt it again. this game has emotional power, it is a fucked up work of art. out of all the games ive played this has my favorite depiction of humanity; for it has its quirks, but more often than not it is horrifying and unbelievable

disappointed sigh... man… what the fuck happened here? While Double Dragons 1 and 2 (all three of the 2s) weren’t exactly the best beat-’em-ups of the 80s and 90s, they were some of the most popular at the time, and the original games still hold up somewhat all the way up to today. So, of course, they needed to follow up the first two (or five) installments with a third entry to pull a hat trick, but during development, something went very wrong. Instead of being developed by Technos, the company that developed the first two games in the series, instead, it was outsourced to another developer while they were working on WWF Superstars, which is incredibly sad, seeing a company prefer to work on a wrestling game rather than their own franchise. Instead, it was developed by East Technology, a company that had previously made Gigandes, a space shooter that has only one 3-star rating on Backloggd with no reviews, so I can tell we are in good hands here. The result of this outsourcing would be seen with Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone, the game that would signal the beginning of the end.

Now, it’s not as if outsourcing your game development to a different company is a bad idea, as this has become a common practice in the industry, and sometimes, it can pay off. However, there are plenty of times where this outsourcing can lead to a disastrous result, which can be plainly seen with this game. At its core, it’s still Double Dragon, but it feels… off. REALLY off. That makes it pretty bad overall, for plenty of reasons, as it just doesn’t feel good to play at all. And let me just say, Mr. Dragon 3, I’m not mad. I’m just disappointed, and that, in this case, is worse.

The story involves the Lee brothers going around the world and collecting sacred stones (ha ha, good one, Mega), so it is basically now a Final Fantasy game, the graphics are character sprites do look improved, but the animations are pretty piss poor, the music is alright, although the loud sound effects can drown it out at points, the control is… well, I’ll be touching on that very soon, and the gameplay is like Double Dragon, except if it was a poorly made bootleg you bought at a game convention from the shifty-eyed, pimply nerd.

The game plays like your typical Double Dragon game, where you travel through several, VERY short stages, you beat up every single thug and goon that gets in your way, using plenty of different moves to take them out, solve a puzzle in one or two instances of the game, and take out plenty of bosses along the way. The new aspect of the game would be with the item shop in the game, where you can purchase health, powerups, weapons, and even extra lives to help you out on your journey, which is pretty helpful overall. However, with that being said… there is a MAJOR problem when it comes to this store.

You see, usually when it comes to shops in beat-’em-up games, you usually have access to gold, or coins, or some type of currency in order to purchase the health, upgrades, or whatever you need in order to take on the upcoming threats you will face. However, in this game, in order to buy anything, you need to insert ACTUAL REAL MONEY into the arcade machine, using credits in order to get these items. This is one of the earliest examples in video games of that dirty word that makes me quiver in fear whenever it is uttered… microtransactions. If there is some sort of compensation for this, thankfully for the Japanese version of the game, this method of payment was changed completely, but even so, the fact that an arcade game from 1990 has any form of microtransactions at all is completely unacceptable. I thought that shit was just introduced in more recent years, but no, they were doing this shit all the way back then too, which really cements the feeling that god is dead, and there is no hope for this industry.

Ignoring that glaring issue for a second though, my main problem with the game as a whole would be that, controlling the game just feels… wrong, at least, in comparison to the previous two games. It is your basic setup for these games, having a punch, a kick, and a few special attacks, but the way that you move around the arena, and the speed at which you execute these attacks, feels really awful. It feels like the game is just trying to keep itself together by a couple of strings, and any wrong move could break it into pieces… that’s how weird it feels to control. Yes, the game all in all is still the usual stuff that we have come to expect from Double Dragon, but these two aspects completely ruin the entire game, as without a proper way of getting items without reaching into your wallet, or even a good feeling for your character or your combat, then you don’t have a beat-’em-up here. Instead, you have a mangled corpse of the previous two games, reanimated and shifted around to try to capture that same lightning in a bottle, only to completely miss the mark by a few thousand miles.

Overall, while the core game itself is still Double Dragon, to an extent, it is a far cry from what we have been given so far from the previous two games, and a horrible way to cap off the original trilogy. I wouldn’t recommend playing this game at all, not even if you were a big fan of Double Dragon. Don’t even play through any of the rereleases, just let it die in the pile of trash that it belongs in. Oh well, maybe the other Double Dragon III on the NES could have at least some semblance of quality that this one didn’t have, but judging from what I have heard about it over the years, that may not be the case.

Game #263