Collection essentials #39: Battletoads (NES)

 

Here’s the first game in the series made by Rare, a British company that became more relevant after the NES days with some games that it’ll take me a while to get around to in this series. One of the company’s more popular series before their heyday was Battletoads, starting with (obviously) this game.

Battletoads is a game that has immediate appeal. It’s an action game that starts out with a “beat ‘em up” style level. The “beat ‘em up” genre was most popular in the ‘90s due to arcades being at their peak; these games, though 2D, usually let the player move up and down in addition to simply being left-and-right side-scrollers, and gameplay mainly revolves around punching and kicking groups of enemies while trying to not let them do the same to you, with various weapons available to grab along the way. Beat ‘em ups can get repetitive, so Battletoads doesn’t restrain itself to just being a beat ‘em up. Almost every level involves you doing something different, so it’s probably more accurate to say it’s a variety action game, and that’s pretty cool. The graphics are good and the game certainly has style to go along with that, so it’s not hard to see why people took a liking to this game.

But…there is something that keeps Battletoads from being one of the true classics of the NES. That would be the fact that the game is brutally, sadistically, ruthlessly difficult. The first two levels of the game are just fine, but once you get to the third level of the game, the “Turbo Tunnel”, which has you riding a vehicle and forces you to dodge a series of walls and jump a series of gaps with extreme precision, the casual fun is over. If you actually want to complete Battletoads, you have to be a seasoned gamer with lots of patience and sharp reflexes. Sometimes I like games like that, but Battletoads unfortunately makes the difficulty a little excessive for its own good. Two-player mode winds up having very limited appeal because the two player characters can damage each other with their attacks, which can be hard to avoid and makes the experience frustrating. If the game had unlimited continues, it would be more bearable, but it doesn’t, so after some inevitable deaths, you can get kicked all the way back to the beginning of the game after making lots of progress. I guess I haven’t actually made a true, serious effort to conquer this game yet, so I also haven’t reaped the satisfaction of conquering it.

It’s worth noting that, since Battletoads was developed in Europe, it got a Japanese release after the original Western releases, and the Japanese version was heavily altered from the original release to make it a more easier and forgiving game. There was also a Sega Genesis version released a couple years afterward which is also much easier. So those are technically better. There are also a few sequels that aren’t so brutal, either. But I have to have the original American NES Battletoads, because it’s so iconic, and actually its reputation is better than you would probably guess from reading these paragraphs. A lot of kids in the early ‘90s really did enjoy Battletoads and remember it fondly even though they probably died in it hundreds of times and didn’t get very far.

Another fun note: at the time I acquired this Battletoads cartridge back in 2012, it was the 1,000th game in my collection! (Currently I have about 2,700 physical games, and thinking of trimming that down a bit)