Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones

This page details one or more prototype versions of Double Dragon III: The Sacred Stones.

At some point Tradewest was going to publish the NES version of Double Dragon III before the rights were given to Acclaim instead. Tradewest's version of the game had a very different script from the final retail version released by Acclaim, being a rougher approximation of the later-released Japanese version, but otherwise the two English versions are identical in terms of content. This suggests that Acclaim simply took the build that was already made for Tradewest and made their own changes from there, while Technos independently refined their own version for their native Japanese market.

Title#

Prototype	Final

The publisher's logo was changed, as was the subtitle from "The Rosetta Stone" to "The Sacred Stones". The Tradewest logo is still in the CHR data in the Japanese version, but is unused in that version.

Script Differences#

Opening#

Prototype	Final

The opening text in the prototype is almost identical to the opening of the arcade game. Like in the final version, the first screen varies between games modes, showing Billy by himself in 1-player mode or with his brother Jimmy in 2-players mode. In a bit of an oversight, the second opening screen in the prototype is always written in the plural form and doesn't seem to have any singular variant to take into account the fact that you only have Billy at the start of the game.

Prototype	Final

Despite this, the prototype doesn't have the now-infamous Bimmy typo when it shows both Lee brothers.

Mission 1#

The dialogue is formatted a bit differently in the prototype. In the prototype, each dialogue box has the speaker's name aligned to the left and their line written around quotation mark on the right (very similar to the Japanese version). In the final version, the character's name (with a colon next to it) only appears the first time a character speaks and the entire dialogue box is used rather than just right portion.

Mission 2#

Mission 3#

Mission 5#

The text-only screen that explains Hiruko's death is not in the prototype.

Ending#

Prototype	Final

Like the opening, the prototype version of the ending originally featured text copied verbatim from the arcade game. While the first screen was simply rewritten to better fit the altered premise of the finalized English version, the final screen showing the three Rosetta Stones was completely replaced with a new screen featuring a reused image of Hiruko from the opening and an explanation of her fate in the game.

The character-specific epilogues in the prototype are pretty close to the finalized versions. Billy's and Jimmy's were rewritten to be more distinct from each other (but basically say the same thing), while Chin's and Ranzou's were made more elaborate.

Unused Text#

Chin Seimei's pre-battle dialogue has additional text strings in which he addresses Billy and Jimmy Lee individually. This suggests that his dialogue was supposed to vary depending on whether the player confronts him alone as either Lee brother or as both in co-op. However, Chin will always address the player as a pair, even when playing alone, leaving the singular variants of dialogue unused.