River City Girls 2
So every beat’em up since the first Streets of Rage is required by law to have one sequence where you battle fools on an elevator- usually starring the hilarious ability to just chuck people over the edge to end the fight, which, side note, must leave some GRISLY corpses in the streets down below.
That first elevator is the one up above, by the way- it’s one of the last sequences in the game, fought as you head up to the final boss, and it is extremely cool, which is why every beat’em up thereafter has copied it.
River City Girls 2 also has a sequence like this in Technos, which is very directly a reference- you even fight through the elevator while its on its way to a boss, though it’s not the final boss this time.
The funniest part, though, is that Kyoko and Misako both question why anyone would do this, because you’d think that just waiting at the top and jumping them all at once would be better and less dangerous than jumping down in waves into a moving elevator!
God I love River City Girls 2.