Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone

For some reason, Technos didn't want to develop the third Double Dragon arcade game themselves, so they farmed it out to East Technology, an even more obscure developer. Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone was a drastically different game from its predecessors that was poorly received by fans of the previous entries.

Most notably, the overseas versions featured item shops where players could purchase additional moves, weapons, and playable characters not by using in-game currency, but by actually putting more credits into the machine, a transparent ploy to sucker players out of their hard-earned money.

Then again, with today's proliferation of paid DLCs and microtransactions in games, it seems East Technology were just ahead of their time.

Jimmy Lee portrait


A portrait of Jimmy Lee for the character select screen. It seems that the original character roster consisted of Billy and Jimmy Lee, plus three unique fighters. This is more consistent with the game's ending visual, as well as the artwork on the Japanese promotional brochure, which both depict a team of five protagonists.

The character select feature was only kept in the Japanese release of the game, but instead there are now four character types in the form of sibling teams, which was essentially a way of allowing multiple players to use identical characters by assigning a different palette swapped sibling to each player (resulting in the sudden existence of Sonny, the yellow-clad Lee brother controlled by the third player). As a result, Jimmy's portrait went unused since it would've been redundant to have a second portrait for the Lee Brothers.



A reconstruction of how the character select screen would've looked like with the original five character roster, made possible thanks to the presence of unused name tags in Japanese that would've been placed just below each portrait, as well as letters that spell out "SELECT PLAYER" that are not the ones used in the actual game. It seems that Jimmy would've occupied the upper right corner of the screen, with Roney being placed in the center instead. Note that Masao (of the Ōyama Brothers) was initially named Masahiko, while Roney and Seimei would've wore the colors of their Player 2 counterparts (Sunny and Taimei respectively).

Character profiles


Profiles for the early character roster, which lists each character's name, role, height, weight and special technique. Presumably these profiles would've been shown during the attract sequence. The "special technique" refers to the overhead attacks that are performed by jumping over an enemy's head and pressing the punch button. Since Jimmy Lee was a separately selectable character at this point, he has his own stats, including a different special technique. Translations of the profiles are as follow (the names of the special techniques have been translated as close as possible and are followed by their English language equivalents when available):

Player select cursors


Early character select cursors that are a bit different from the ones used in the final Japanese version, since the "1P" and "2P" characters are spelled in different fonts and the cursor themselves have a bit more shading. There's no "3P" cursor.

Dojo


It seems that Mission 1 was originally going to start in front of Billy and Jimmy's martial arts school, the Sōsetsuken Dōjō, which appears to had been vandalized by the revived Black Warriors gang prior to the start of the game. Judging by the building that follows it, the dojo would've been located just before the Weapon Shop. While the dojo never appears in the final game, its graphic tiles were still kept in the game's data.

Japanese text
Some leftover text from the final Japanese version.

Character select


One feature in the Japanese version that was not present in the overseas versions was the option for players to choose their character at the start of the game, with four character types in all. Clockwise from the top left they are the Lee Brothers, the Urquidez Brothers, the Ōyama Brothers, and the Chin Brothers.



In the overseas versions, the player starts the game as one of the Lee brothers and can only play as the other three characters by purchasing them from the item shops, each available in a different stage. The player can have up to three extra fighters in stock and when his current character dies he will change to the next available one, essentially turning these additional characters into a form of extra lives. However, one advantage purchasing an extra fighter has over simply inserting another credit after dying is that a reserved fighter will inherit special techniques bought by the previous character.

Item shops
While the shopping system was removed from the Japanese version of the game, the item shops themselves are still present in the actual stages (with only one exception) as non-interactive scenery.

Stage design changes
The starting point of Mission 1 was changed from the Weapon Shop to the front of Power Records store. The Weapon Shop is inaccessible in the Japanese version.

The pitfall and conveyor belt in the warehouse at the end of Mission 1 were removed in the Japanese version.

Other differences

 * Since weapons are no longer purchasable in the Japanese version, they are now found lying on the ground in certain stages if the player is controlling a Lee brother (since only they can wield weapons).
 * In the overseas versions, certain moves (namely the Hurricane Kick and the overhead attacks) are only usable by purchasing the "Tricks" item from the shop. In the Japanese version both of those moves are usable by default, but the Hurricane Kick was made harder to execute to balance things out. To perform a Hurricane Kick in the overseas version, the player must simply do a neutral jump and press the kick button. The input is similar in the Japanese version, except the kick button must be pressed almost immediately after the jump button in quick succession.
 * Most enemy attacks do 1/3 less damage in the Japanese versions than they do in the overseas releases (i.e. an enemy punch that does 12 points of damage in the overseas version will do only 8 points in the Japanese version).
 * The shops have two items that were not carried over to the Japanese version. The "power up" item, which increases the player's attack speed, and the "energy" item, which restores the player's health to 150%.
 * When the player begins a new area in the Japanese version, he will have temporary invincibility against enemies.