The original Battletoads is known for being one of the hardest NES games and after playing it, it is indeed hard. I did not grow up or played Battletoads when it came out since I wasn’t born yet and nobody in my area talked about it and I didn’t hear about it until several retro game reviewers talked about it mainly the Angry Video Game Nerd. So how hard is this game, read the review to find out.

Gameplay- Most people tend to call Battletoads a beat ‘em up even though several of the levels are mostly platforming or racing. The first level is a beat ‘em up which is very simple and straightforward. The second level is a traversal level which is also simple despite having enemies that can kill you in one hit. The third level is where the game shows how difficult it is by introducing the infamous Turbo Tunnel which involves you riding a hover bike while avoiding obstacles and it gets faster as you progress. You have to be so precise with the dodging or else you have to start over at the last checkpoint if you die. This is the part where most gamers like the AVGN get stuck on because of how difficult it is. You have 3 continues and 3 lives per continue and if you lose all of them, you have to start over from the first level which is how difficult the game is. The sad part is that the Turbo Tunnel is not the hardest level in the game since there are several levels that are way harder. I did not play the game legitimately and used the rewind feature and save states featured in the Rare Replay version of the game to experience the entire game and for those that are going to call me a cheater or wuss for not playing it without those features, the game was still hard to beat because Rare made the levels hard on purpose. For me, the hardest levels are stages 10 and 11. Stage 10 is a race where you race against three rats and the third rat is extremely fast so you have to tackle it to knock it back giving you half a second to move and you have to do this multiple times to out run the rat which is frustrating since you have to get the timing to tackle the rat just right and there is an electric barrier that actives on and off at the end of the last race. Stage 11 involves you riding a unicycle to out run some vortex and you have to press forward the direction the bike is facing to move faster but there are several corners to turn and you have to be very precise on the turns. I had to pause the game on each corner to change direction just to move faster and I still died several times because their is some sort of input lag if you are playing the game on modern television since this game was never meant to run 60 frames per second. There are some boss fights at the end of some of the stages and they are easy once you figure out the pattern and aren’t as hard as the stages themselves.

Sound, Music, and Design- For an 8-bit game, the music is catchy especially the pause screen music which most games don’t have music for their pause menu. This is because the music was composed by David Wise who composed several soundtracks for games made by Rare like the Donkey Kong Country trilogy. The graphics are pretty unique for having a cartoony art style similar to Looney Tunes.

Conclusion- Battletoads is indeed one of hardest NES games and one of the hardest games that I ever played. Rare is known for making tons of memorable games but I really don’t recommend it unless you want to try it out to see how hard it is. I appreciate the graphics and the soundtrack even if the game wants to make rip all of my hair out and it’s not a game I would play constantly.

Final Verdict: 5 out of 10

holy shit. I just beat Battletoads.

I've seen the web lambast this game endlessly as the game has been showered with the title of "hardest game of all time" from all sorts of people and places on the internet. For years I had just assumed that this would be a game that I would never even think to pass the infamous Turbo Tunnels, much less actually see the ending. It was only when I saw this game cleared on a two-part Game Center CX playthrough when the illusion of this game being impossibly difficult faded. In fact, it looked like a fun kind of challenge! I figured that if Arino could beat this game, so could I, and as such I put it on the "games-to-stream" backburner until the time had come. And boy, did the time come. Roughly 9 hours of grinding later, here we are.

I think the main reason why this game sticks out so much as being so nightmarishly difficult is mostly due to how outwardly hostile the games design tends to be. Memorizing the levels and becoming intimately familiar with them through repetition (and a little bit of trial and error) is the key to being able to progress. Each level honestly stands out from one another well enough to make climbing back to where you were before at every game over not TOO painful in the grand scheme of things. Each of the 12 levels usually has some kind of gimmick or new mechanic to grapple with, like the ropes in stage 2, the turbo tunnels in 3, ice in 4, surfing in 5, snakes in 6, etc etc. Honestly the game does a solid job introducing the mechanics to let you know how things work before cranking the heat up. Graphically this game is really solid on the NES with plenty of quirks and tricks used to give the game some pizazz. It's definitely more of an A-list Rare NES title that contrasts from the licensed shovelware they occasionally made (likely to fund the projects they actually wanted to make like this)

It is still quite a spicy game, so those that are averse to getting your shit kicked in will have a bad time. Honestly the difficulty felt most similar to like middle-echelon Mario Maker levels. Like, the kind of stuff made by someone who is clearly good at games but not like insane person kaizo shit nawsay? Considering the fact that Rare has mentioned their lead designers being good at games and that a lot of difficult NES games are usually products of the developers also being the playtesters, essentially tuning their games for themselves rather than their players and accidentally cranking it up a bit too much, that's likely why this game is how it is. I had to use every trick the US version of the game could allow to finish this; I used the warps to skip levels 2, 4, and 7 while also alternating both players every continue with down+A+B held to get the most possible lives and continues the game offers, and even then I made it out on my last continue. Against games like this though, you really gotta get every leg up on the game that you can ngl, a clear is a clear. The hardest part for sure was the third rat in Rat Race, if you can pass that point you have enough skills to make it through the rest imo. Clinger Winger or whatever tf it was called was a cakewalk ngl, I heard the horror stories about that level and was surprised when I cleared the speeder section on my first attempt. This game is certainly a hot one, but idk it's definitely not the hardest game ever made. I don't even think it's the hardest game I've played, I had way more struggles with getting through stuff like Ninja Gaiden Sigma and God Hand (to their detriment, mind you. Overly hard games suck imo) than with this. The game is still pretty masochist-core, don't get me wrong, but if it was really the hardest game ever, I wouldn't have been able to get here in the first place. A must-play for pain-seekers, but definitely take-it-or-leave-it for the normal folk out there.

Rare exprimió al máximo los circuitos de la NES con Battletoads, en una época en la que empezaban a asomar los 16 bits. El juego tiene una dificultad programada por un auténtico psicópata. No te da tregua y te exige la "run perfecta" sin darte ningún margen al más mínimo error, teniendo que tener una precisión milimétrica. Un autentico dolor de huevos, pues te tocará memorizarte cada nivel, cada trampa, cada enemigo, y cada boss a la perfección. Puro ejercicio de ensayo y error hasta la extenuación. Por suerte, a día de hoy existen los "guardados rápidos", y se hace hasta jugable.