As so many of the characters look alike, it can often be easy to confuse which sprite you're controlling, especially in multiplayer. Perhaps this is to reinforce the "Double" theme of the game's title, but more likely it's the result of system limitations. Billy and Jimmy are palette swaps of one another, as are most of the enemies in the game you never get more than two enemies onscreen at a time, and they're usually clones of each other coming in pairs. The exciting title screen music gives way to a generic NES action game soundtrack with sound effects so loud you can't hear the music anyway, and the visuals sport the boring 8-bit colour spectrum of many grimdark third-party games of the era.
The developers immediately double up on the misogynist story tropes, however, as the Damsel in Distress from the last game has now been shot to death, and our heroes Billy and Jimmy (or Bimmy and Jimmy?) must avenge their mutual love interest's murder by smacking dudes in the neck along a series of corridors. It begins promisingly enough, with a title screen featuring large Japanese characters and an up-tempo soundtrack to get you in the mood, along with some fairly novel cutscenes by NES standards. Little did we know, multiplayer doesn't mean squat if the game is still terrible. When the 1988 sequel Double Dragon II: The Revenge was ported to NES, home-bound fans rejoiced the multiplayer mode would arrive fully intact for buddy-night shenanigans.
The original 1987 Double Dragon is one of the early casualties of arcade-to-home conversion, losing its integral two-player mode entirely in its transition to NES. These arcade classics were ported to home consoles with varying degrees of success, often heavily modified to fit into measly game cartridges. we were kicking mobsters in the stomach together. Perhaps the most fun aspect of these titles was the multiplayer cooperative gameplay, so we weren't just kicking mobsters in the stomach. There was a period from the late-'80s to the early-'90s when side-scrolling beat 'em up games were all the (streets of?) rage – from Double Dragon to Final Fight to Streets of Rage, we just couldn't get enough of punching hooligans in the face down long straight paths.