Double Dragon & Kunio-kun: Retro Brawler Bundle

Beat 'em ups don't get more old-school than Double Dragon and Kunio-kun so let's revisit their NES roots in a fun new compilation.

Time for a little story lesson. Back in the 80’s and 90’s, there was this neat little Japanese developer called Technos. They basically invented the beat ’em up genre with their two most important franchises: Double Dragon & Kunio-kun. The developer has released tons of games from both of these franchises back in the day, up until they went bankrupt. All of their assets were eventually purchased by our good ol’ pals at Arc System Works, and they have finally decided to cram a ton of T...

The Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle brings a lot of novelty with its new NES translations, but the retro games on offer will hold little value to anyone not already familiar with the Technōs catalog.

Double Dragon & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle is a great piece of video game history for beat-em-up enthusiasts the world over. The once niche and Japanese-exclusive library of Kunio-kun games are playable in English for the first time, and while some of them haven't aged well enough to warrant extended play sessions, the in-game achievement system and Online Play add oodles of replayability to otherwise minorly novel Famicom classics. The lack of a gallery mode and alternate console editions of each game keeps the collection from being perfect though.

It feels like a pointless endeavour to stick a score on something like this, really. Thanks to recent titles such as River City Girls and timeless classics such as Streets of Rage 2, I’ve found playing most of the titles in Double Dragon & Kunio-Kun: Retro Brawler Bundle to be painful, at best. To me, they’re now nothing more than curios; relics of the past that are good to be remembered but not to be played. But you might feel differently. It’s a costly gamble to find out, however, when priced at £32.39/$39.99.