It's all been said before about this game, but I'll say it from my own experience. Battletoads has great animation, excellent music, and interestingly varied gameplay and level design. It is also relentlessly, excessively difficult to the point of substantially damaging its enjoyability. Too many of its setpieces devolve into dying over and over and over again to memorize the level layout, because one mistake means death and getting sent back a ways. The margin of error permitted is unreasonably thin.

Battletoads (NES) is a notorious action-platformer known for its brutal difficulty and quirky 90's attitude. Players smash and morph their way through varied stages ranging from beat 'em ups to obstacle-filled vehicle sections. While its colorful visuals, creative level design, and iconic characters hold charm, Battletoads is ultimately an exercise in frustration. Unforgiving hazards and limited lives test patience more than skill, making it an experience primarily appealing to hardcore retro enthusiasts seeking a relentless challenge.

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

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.

Infamous for being brutally hard, Battletoads is still extremely difficult even with the features of Rare Replay. But what surprised me the most about it is that the difficulty of it felt fair.

At its core, Battletoads is a classic side-scrolling beat-em-up. Can be played with one or two people, however it’s probably more difficult in two player due to friendly fire and how you both have to complete each section.
The fighting is a lot of fun, with some combos to figure out, some weapons you can pick up. For the most part, the actual fighting I didn’t find to be too difficult, at least compared to games like Streets of Rage 2. Of course, it’s not all about fighting.

Some levels try out different things, keeping the game feeling fresh throughout its whole playthough. There are some platforming focused levels, and some vehicle based ones, including the dreaded turbo tunnel – a hoverbike section where you have to avoid obstacles hurtling towards you.

At first, I was surprised at how tame it actually felt based on everything I’d heard. Avoiding things wasn’t too bad, and making the jumps was surprisingly easy. Then comes a section where everything is extremely fast, avoiding everything is extremely difficult and I didn’t even get to the end due to accidentally hitting a warp and skipping the next level.

And then some of the later levels make the turbo tunnel look easy, such as the penultimate level where you have to escape a spinning orb on a track, requiring perfect timing for you changing directions on corners.

Alongside this difficulty is just an odd sense of joy. There’s a lot of charm in the animation and style, with great music as well (including the best pause music ever). Battletoads really is a classic.

The snapshots are quite fun, including an infinite loop of the Turbo Tunnel. Luckily, the amount of time you need to survive to complete is quite generous.

stockholm syndrome the video game. I made an initial review last night about how bad the level design gets after around stage 6 and how it's the opposite of the lost levels in the sense that it's a far more ambitious game that lacks infinite continues and was made difficult with the purpose of making the player spend more time. so naturally i spent the next day practicing levels and strategies and by god i was able to do it and I'm able to see more of the positives in it.

i beat it without savestates or warps so i have full bragging rights but i will say this game is really, really fucking addictive. disgustingly so, probably because it actually plays so well when you aren't losing lives as quickly the depreciation of Yen, and the variety, general game feel, satisfying sound design and player feedback are all so good. so good that it carries the game's (still imo even after beating it) terrible level design in its latter half. it's creative and it's rewarding to master but i've never played another nes game with so many hazards and so much bullshit that you'll need to pause buffer or have played stages upwards of 3 times to reliably commit to memory. the lifebar is basically a lie because almost everything after stage 2 either kills you in 1 or 2 hits and you NEED to know how to effectively and safely deal with them. it's a shame so many people dropped it and weren't able to beat the turbo tunnel because that honestly wound up being my favourite level and I think it's at least worth seeing some of the stuff rare pulled off since it's incredibly creative and impressive for the nes.

because all of this i highly recommend playing the japanese version instead. rare actually realised they made the game too difficult and ironically made that version easier. i tried just a few levels just for the sake of comparison and I can attest to that, even the turbo tunnel, and that's for the better. maybe it was a good thing that blockbuster went down under considering how many games were made harder for western audiences JUST so that people couldn't beat them with a single rental or so that they had to actually buy it. it also proves that games back then weren't just made harder for the west when brought overseas, they'd be harder no matter what.

Interested in Battletoads but haven't played it yet?
Maybe you were the only kid on the block that could clear the Turbo Tunnel and you want to revisit the glory days?

Check out this Prep Kit! It's full of 1991 magazine coverage, Nintendo Power comics, advertising, art, and LOADS of merch all to help get you in that Launch Day mindset! There's even a TV Show pilot from 1992 in there, check it out:

https://goatedquest.blogspot.com/2024/04/069-battletoads-prep-kit.html

Let me help make every game you play feel brand new, no matter how old

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.

Well I did it, I has Battletoads.

It's a game that presents itself as a beat 'em up when it's really only that like 15% of the time, the bulk of the game is it trying to come up with new ways to kill you. Turbo Tunnel is an infamous example but that's only scratching the surface of how much this game hates you and your entire existence. Vulkmire's Inferno, Terra Tubers, Rat Race, and ESPECIALLY Clinger Winger hate you for being alive.

From what I've seen of its changes, I encourage curious people to stick to the Japanese version, for their own sanity.