Battletoads & Double Dragon Soundtrack (SNES)

Battletoads & Double Dragon Soundtrack (SNES), David Wise, 1993

In 1993, the Battletoads franchise occupied a slightly curious position. The 1991 NES original had been successful enough to spawn several ports. There was also Battletoads in Battlemaniacs, a SNES title that ultimately felt like a remix of the first game. So where next for a burgeoning franchise that still did not quite feel fully established? Publisher Tradewest had released Battletoads across several platforms and also held the home licence for the venerable Double Dragon series. Why not combine two forces of nature in one game? On paper, the pairing made perfect sense, especially given that Battletoads co-designer Kevin Bayliss was a major Double Dragon fan.

In practice, things did not entirely work out. With Rare developing the crossover, Battletoads & Double Dragon often feels as though it is awkwardly forcing Billy and Jimmy Lee into the comic-book antics of a Battletoads game. It hardly helped that some Double Dragon characters appeared under the wrong names. In the end, the game received respectable, but rarely enthusiastic, reviews on release. More recent reassessments have tended to land in much the same place: a decent enough brawler that never quite fulfils the promise of its crossover premise.

Once again, the game appeared first on the NES, followed by Game Boy, Mega Drive / Genesis, and SNES versions. And once again, David Wise handled the music. Of the four Battletoads & Double Dragon soundtracks, it is the SNES score that takes the crown. Wise takes the hard-rock tendencies of Battletoads in Battlemaniacs – where they had shared space rather awkwardly with orchestral sounds – and pushes them decisively to the foreground. He is helped enormously by a guitar tone far punchier and more exciting than the thinly buzzing guitars of Battlemaniacs in Battlemaniacs. On the Battletoads & Double Dragon soundtrack, the guitars, and indeed the rest of the rock-band setup, are sampled to an impressively high standard, making these tracks come properly alive. It is difficult not to hear Wise’s work here as a precursor to the startlingly realistic sounds he would later coax from the SNES in Donkey Kong Country.

Better still, Wise’s writing for guitar is superb. His riffs are beautifully melodic, but also powerful, varied, and instantly memorable. Thanks to that strength, “Main Theme” opens proceedings at a steamrolling mid-tempo pace, nodding to Battletoads’ earthy rock introduction while updating it for the 16-bit era. Amid all the fist-raising hard rock, Wise also slips in a few synth leads that neatly evoke the game’s outer-space setting.

The rest of the soundtrack follows that lead, serving up some of the best melodic hard rock ever written for the SNES. “Abobo” reprises material from “Main Theme” in a slightly faster form before moving through a succession of new riffs. That sense of variety and flow shapes almost the entire score. As a result, most of the tracks genuinely feel like fully fledged, if abbreviated, hard-rock songs performed on SNES hardware. “Robo Manus” pushes the tempo up several notches and launches straight into the action with gleeful abandon. Its headbanging fury arrives with a grin on its face, capped off by a clean guitar solo with an unmistakably catchy pop edge.

On a handful of other tracks, Wise indulges in genre mixing as accomplished as the soundtrack’s hard-rock writing. “Big Blag” and “Shadow Boss” finally introduce the New Jack Swing influences the original Battletoads had conspicuously sidestepped. The irony, of course, is that Battletoads had always owed a clear debt to the NES Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles games and their New Jack Swing-heavy soundtracks. Wise’s cues rise to those formidable models, bringing the necessary cool swagger and rhythmic energy, while also taking advantage of the SNES’s broader palette. “Big Blag” focuses primarily on its grooving beats, complemented by brass and organ leads, while “Shadow Boss” folds hard-rock guitars and funk instincts together with seamless ease.

What “Abobo” and “Big Blag” make particularly clear is that the SNES version of the Battletoads & Double Dragon soundtrack is less interested in the moodier, more intriguing qualities of the Genesis port and instead simply aims to provide concise, entertaining rock-and-funk action. It may not be as creative as the Mega Drive score, but it is ultimately the more successful soundtrack. It sustains its momentum right to the last cue, whereas the Genesis version starts to fizzle out towards the end. That is largely because the Genesis score relies too often on repetitive material and lacks the range of instrumental colours that allows the SNES port to dress up its musical ideas in continually fresh guises.

The advantage of that expanded palette becomes particularly obvious in “Roper”. On the Genesis, the track feels a little too fragmented to make the most of its initially promising mood. On the SNES, Wise can fully indulge the soundtrack’s most ambitious genre mixture, bringing together introspective yet catchy synth melodies, funk brass fanfares, tribal drumming, fiery guitar salvos, and sludgy riffs. Above all, it is the crunchy guitars that help bind the different sections together far more effectively than in the Genesis version. It also helps that the SNES arrangement realises stronger dynamic contrasts, making the cue’s changes of direction exciting rather than jarring. Anyone inclined to question the SNES’s rock credentials should be pointed straight towards the Battletoads & Double Dragon soundtrack.