No one would have imagined it after the first game, but in trying to one-up the stakes of the predecessor, Double Dragon II went even more reckless in using Marion (yes, the series is rather inconsistent with spelling her name) as a plot device. While the official artwork still shows her as the damsel in distress rescued by the Lee brothers, with her skirt strategically torn to just barely reveal her butcheeks, the game then opens with Willy cold-bloodedly gunning her down. Now Billy and Jimmy are really angry and set out to avenge their friend, hence The Revenge.

Double Dragon II ostensibly takes place in the same universe as the original, but introduces much more pronounced dystopian sci-fi elements. The first stage now is a military heliport guarded by Burnov, a fat giant wearing a metal mask, who just disintegrates when he is defeated. The second boss Abore wears some strange goggles, and the now long-haired Abobo looks like he's sporting evil cyborg eyes. In general, the enemy variety has improved a little bit. Bolo has been replaced by the more unique-looking O'Hara, and the kung fu fighter from the NES game makes his arcade debut as Chin Taimei, except now he is fighting with a pair of short sticks. All the regular enemies return, but have been redesigned to look more ragged and Road Warrior-esque.

Their last photo together - of course Billy rocks a murder mullet.

Not much has changed in terms of game structure. The Lee brothers still go beating thugs throughout four belt-scrolling stages to confront the Black Shadow Warriors' (the gang name got upgraded in between games, apparently) boss Willy at the end. Since the Lee Brothers don't have a girlfriend to fight over anymore, their evil shadows are summoned for the final showdown, who can throw energy projectiles and disappear into the ground, only to pop out again for a really unfair grapple attack from behind. Even two of the three stages are reprises of the first game, but stage three is a cool old-fashioned crop field where Billy and Jimmy can get run over by a combine harvester if they're not careful.

Even though there still wasn't much competition on the market - Final Fight was yet a full year in the future - the guys at Technōs apparently felt a need to innovate at least in some way. Unfortunately, the area they chose to experiment in was one that really didn't need fixing: the controls. The new input scheme doesn't assign attacks to buttons in a fixed manner, but relative to the direction the player is facing. So the left button always attacks left, the right button always right. This may sound intuitive at first, but to anyone who's played a beat-em-up before (and probably most anyone else, too) it's really hard to get used to. The standard forward attack is always a punch and the standard backward attack a kick, so if you want to kick an enemy in front of your character, you first have to turn around. The whole affair is more confusing than anything, and even if you thing you've mastered it, you might still get thrown off your game when things get crowded. Despite the weird controls, the available moves are mostly the same, with two notable exceptions: The headbutt is gone, but replaced by a much more impressive attack. At the height of their jumps, Billy and Jimmy can perform a spinning kick in the air, which henceforth became one of their trademark moves in the series.

Overall, Double Dragon II is a worthy successor, if a little bit too similar to the original, and the one big innovation with the controls is the part that's most off-putting about it. The more rugged look suits the setting well, and the music is as great as ever - the "Easy Lover" ripoff in the first stage notwithstanding.

The 16-bit computer ports by Binary Design look a lot more like the real deal this time. The Amiga version even uses a nice high resolution that shows more of the playing field even than the arcade original, while the Atari ST and IBM PC versions are rather cramped with thick black borders. Unfortunately the one-button problem is still a major inhibition for enjoying any of them, and with the new move set this is somehow even worse than before. However, the Amiga version justifies its existence thanks to the great tracker chiptune music alone, even if it's only one melody playing the entire game. The Amstrad CPC version looks almost astonishingly good, but the gameplay feels a bit stiff while the hit detection is rather loose, which surprisingly makes the game really easy. Two players can easily create a barrage of shovels where no enemy can break through.

The ZX Spectrum has two versions of the game, one for the standard 48K models and an enhanced port for machines sporting 128K of RAM. The former only shows a tiny strip of the area and thus feels really claustrophobic. It also needs to reload from tape every few steps, has significantly shortened stages and omits all the bosses and anyone who isn't one of the two standard goons. The 128K version retains a bit more of the original experience, but still has weird changes like bosses in the middle of a stage. Both versions feature braindead opponents most of the time, but occasionally they can catch you in infinite hit loops and utterly destroy you.

Double Dragon II on the Commodore 64 is almost great, considering the circumstances. Of course it still can only rely on one button, but the pacing and scale are changed in a way that makes the input scheme more controllable, and it's much easier to pull off any desired move. On the downside, the hit detection is really bad. Enemies keep slipping away from attacks and standard moves don't even hit stun them properly, so they almost always counterattack immediately afterwards. There's also an offputting delay to most moves. All this makes it very difficult to complete a stage within the strict time limit. Even then, the "three lives, no continues" policy makes this an extremely hard version despite the initial appearance of comparatively high playability.

The version for the Genesis - or rather Mega Drive, as it was only released in Japan - was published by PAL Soft in December 1991 - much earlier than Accolade's port of the first game. The ending screen is replaced by a black-and-white recap of the boss fights, which looks like it was supposed to be the background to a credits scroll, but no names of its creators are given. Since PAL Soft generally appears only as a publisher, it is unknown who actually programmed the game, but it appears they didn't have a too solid grasp on optimizing for the Mega Drive. In contrast to the almost arcade-perfect port of the first game, the graphics are all scaled down significantly, the lack of colors is very apparent, and many of the stage decorations are missing. More than a fifth of the screen is covered by a big black border for the status bars, too.

The movement and scrolling always feels a bit choppy and uneven, and the pacing of the action is kind of messed up. Linda is now the most dangerous enemy of the early game, as a group of her can pinch you in a spot for a lot of abuse, especially when playing alone. The rest of the game is actually easier than in arcades and quite generous with the continues, but you better do equal damage to the two final Chins, or else the remaining one is gonna form one deadly duo with machine gun Willy. The Shadow Lee brothers, on the other hand, are ridiculously weak.

The quest is almost the same as the original, but stage two has been mixed up a bit. The Abobo punching through the wall at the very beginning is missing, but the area now contains a detour up a ladder, where you fight a few additinal goons on a set of conveyor belts.

Double Dragon Trilogy is mostly the same deal for this game as it was for the first, with one exception: an additional option to switch the controls to a more conventional mapping where one button is always used for punches and the other for kicks. This makes it much easier to cope, especially for those with no experience of the arcade game, but it still shines through that the game wasn't designed for this method. Standing kicks still always go backwards, no matter what.

Technōs created once again a vastly different experience with Double Dragon II on the NES. The experience system was dropped, but the moveset still underwent a few changes. The elbow attack and turning jump kick are gone, but with the standard kick directed backwards they seemed a bit redundant anyway. There are two new ways to make enemies in a grapple suffer, elbow smashes to the head, and a high kick to propel them away. In the brief time window when the Lee brothers are crouching after a jump or after getting knocked down, it's possible to perform a rising uppercut or a knee jump attack. The timing for these isn't easy, but they are the most powerful moves in the game.

On the NES, Double Dragon II is a much more innovative and unique sequel than in the arcade, but it marks also the time Double Dragon started its schizophrenic shifting between wildly different tones and gameplay styles. In a way it's one of the best games to bear the Double Dragon name, but it's hard to shake the feeling that Technōs had already started to loose a cohesive vision of what it meant to be Double Dragon, both in tone and in gameplay.

The game starts out on a military base like the arcade, but then you get to chase a helicopter across some rooftops, and then fight within the helicopter as the door keeps opening and closing, with the air suction drawing Lee brothers and enemies alike outside. This is followed by a high-tech underground facility with severely limited movement, as not only confines you to a single line but also prohibits jumping with a row of spikes on the low ceiling. The crop field is replaced by yet another forest/mountain stage like in the first game, but it leads to a fight on a giant track vehicle that has to be climbed while it is moving back and forth on the screen.

The latter half almost seems like it wants to be a best of 8-bit platformers, with conveyor belts, cyclically disappearing platforms like in Mega Man and a Castlevania-style clockwork segment. One level ends with a big fight on an enormous bulldozer, which keeps moving back and forth, making it harder to get up to your foes. There is also an exciting screen where the floor starts crumbling down from behind and you have to defeat a bunch of opponents before there is no floor left to stand on. Almost half of the game now takes place on a single 2D lane rather than the semi-3D angular perspective the beat-em-up genre is known for.

The NES version of Double Dragon II is the first game in the series to actually spell out explicitly that the setting is a post-apocalyptic near future version of New York, taking place in the year "19XX" after a nuclear war. It's the first to spell out a lot of things, in fact, as there are short transitional texts after every stage. Even though it still follows the narrative of Marion getting killed by the Black Shadow Warriors, Willy doesn't appear at all in this game. Things instead get supernatural, so the Lee brothers get transported to an otherworldly plane with a demon in the background, where they must fight an ominous shadow warrior, who looks more like a prototype for Wolfgang Krauser from SNK's Fatal Fury 2 with his cape, and he's just as mean in a fight as the SNK boss. Defeating him causes an angel to descend from heaven to revive Marion.

However, you only get to fight the penultimate boss on Supreme Master mode, the highest of three difficulty levels. Practice mode is over after level three, and Warrior mode stops just short of the final encounter. But even on the highest setting the game isn't too hard compared to the arcade versions, especially after mastering the timing for the knee attack, which sends enemies flying down pits in an instant. The platforming segments demand a little more precision than the game seems to be built for, and the many instant kills are a bit much, but once getting used to the stiff jump length, they become quite surmountable. The only really hard parts are the stage with the spikes that prevent jumping, an extremely annoying boss fight against two super fast, shuriken-throwing martial artists who are extremely hard to catch, and the final boss whose special attack can kill a Lee brother in three hits. Otherwise the health bar is extremely generous, although you don't get another chance at continuing after losing all three lives - unless you put in a special code at the Game Over screen, which also differs between stages.

As so often in NES action game localizations, the Japanese version has none of that sadistic nonsense - here you can continue normally, and you get to play the entire game no matter which difficulty you choose. The Famicom version also has the kindness to adjust the difficulty of the disappearing platforms accordingly.

In contrast to the first NES game, Double Dragon II finally lets two players seek revenge together, even allowing the choice whether or not the brothers can hurt each other by accident. Otherwise it is subject to the same technical limitations, so once again there is no mixing of enemies and no more than two of them on screen at a time. The 1-on-1 mode from the first game is gone, too.

The PC Engine CD version by Naxat Soft is surprisingly modeled closely after the NES game, from featuring mostly the same levels down to the rule of having no more than two enemies on screen at a time. But it does mix and match different types together, and in general extends the stages with additional hoodlums. There are a few other notable structural differences - namely, the fight on the huge moving bulldozer at the end of the forest level is missing, but to make up for its omission, the Lee brothers actually have to fight Willy before they meet their own shadows like in the arcade game. They also get to face the Shadow Master (now without the cape) on any difficulty level, although you miss out on the second round in a church and the good ending with Marion revived unless you beat the game on the Hard difficulty mode.

The game is no slouch even on easy, though. The hit detection has shifted a bit in your favor and most standard foes are easily disposed of, but there are exceptions. Fighting Chin with his far jump kicks and foot swipes on a single lane is still no fun, the shadows spend a lot of time off screen and suck out almost all health when they possess the Lee brother's bodys and the final boss still has totally unfair priorities, plus he is now invisible for most of the fight. At least the life counting is a bit more lenient than the NES version - the options menu lets you increase both lifes and continues up to five each.

The biggest difference comes with the new presentation. The characters are drawn in a far less cartoony style even compared to the arcade game, making this version almost look like a Westernized DOS version. Especially the large opponents are a lot more impressive with the realistic proportions, although Abobo now looks like a sexy vampire for some reason.

Thanks to the power of the CD-ROM, this version features a new awesome synth soundrack, including possibly some of the most "eighties action movie" feeling music ever heard in a video game. Like the arranged soundtrack of the first game, there are a few odd voice samples here and there, but overall the choices are not nearly as strange. Some of the tracks are totally original to this version too.

Also new are anime style cutcenes that are spliced in between the stages and do a better job at showing how the Lee brothers transition from location to location - you see them catching on to the helicopter before the fight inside, get washed out of the military base to resurface in front of the secret island in the middle of the ocean, or climb up a straight brick wall with their bare hands. In between there is a fair bit of banter between Billy and Jimmy, no matter whether the game is played alone or in two-player mode. The scenes don't add terribly much to the game, but they're one of the neat little features of the multimedia era to look back at - too bad there never was a US version to grace the Lee brothers with a terrible early nineties English dub.

Even though the second Game Boy offering is called Double Dragon II, it uses the cover art from the NES Double Dragon III, but the game inside is neither of the two. In fact, it originally was not even a Double Dragon game. After the first portable title alread included a few elements from the sequel, Technōs apparently didn't bother with creating yet another remix, so they just took a Game Boy game they already had - an entry in the long-running Kunio-kun series - and gave it a gritty facelift, much like they did with Renegade. (See the Kunio-kun article for a direct comparison.)

Since both series were made by the same developer in the same genre, the result isn't totally different from a true Double Dragon game. If anything, it works better with the new sprites, since something always felt a bit off with the oddly proportioned Kunio characters. The moves tend to be a bit more exaggerated. If an enemy is hunched over, the next kick is always a high jump kick, and the heroes can leap over to stomp on downed opponents - a very Kunio-kun like attack. The biggest difference is the lack of a jump. Pressing both buttons together instead makes the character crouch down, which can be used to avoid attacks but also as an opener for a jumping uppercut. Overall, the moveset is a bit more limited than Double Dragon fans will be used to.

Oddly, the most Kunio-kun feeling part of the game is the music. Even though it was completely replaced from the original, it still is much more upbeat and faster than a typical Double Dragon soundtrack, and if anything invokes memories of playing Nintendo World Cup.

Unfortunately, the game is just kind of dull. Aside from the occasional subway sidewalk to fall down, there are no traps in the flat stages. The game is so bankrupt of ideas, it makes you go through basically the same subway ride twice, complete with subway station segments for entry and exit, only swapping out some of the gangsters with their stronger superiors. Most enemies can be dealt with using the same simple approach, except for the many armed foes in the later game. At least you get to fight cool bosses like Jason Vorhees with a chainsaw, a ninja who can disappear in a puff of smoke, and a fat guy who throws you on the floor so he can sit on you. They won't be as fun to fight in the ultra hard boss rush at the end, though.

With only three lives and no continues, the game can get quite frustrating and unfair, especially considering you never get to use any weapons despite many enemies coming into the fight with familiar Double Dragon mainstays like bats, knives and chains. The game also does that annoying D.D. Crew thing (although it predates that game) where you can never hit multiple opponents at once even if they stand in the same spot, enabling one to counter attack while you hit the other. This forces an approach to crowd control that's opposite from most beat-em-ups and common fighting sense alike, by trying to keep the enemies scattered to both sides.