Much like your average first-party Saturn or Dreamcast game, this is surely something that only insane people or those with a taste for anime and/or 5th-or-6th-gen jank will be able to tolerate. Let alone be a huge fan.

It's a blend between stylistic rhythm mini-games and a simplified point-and-click adventure game, with some easy casual puzzles thrown in for good measure. The art style isn't exactly something to write home about, the story isn't all too original, and honestly? Some of the mini-games are bafflingly terrible. Any time you are told to use the gyroscope is one to be groaned at, and even some of the traditional button-pressing games have cryptic or bullshit timing.

And yet, this game got me. I got sucked right into its Lupin III-meets-Clark Kent universe, I tapped incessantly at every environment I could, I fell in love with its batshit Napoleon-reviving schemes and ridiculously fun mini-games (of which there are several in spite of the bad ones). All held together by a show-stopping soundtrack that has surely melted into my brain permanently, like a fine plastic in a microwave.

It's one of those games held together with a lot of glue and Q-tips - either you'll unabashedly fall in love with it while trudging through its weak points, or you'll scoff at it as soon as it inconveniences you. Fortunately, my brain is also made out of glue and Q-tips and goddammit that's the only type of brain a sexy bitch needs yeeeeeehaw!!!!!

this game is an absolute MESS that lacks a good chunk of the appeal of the original games. i get changing the art style and tone to be peppier and sharper, but the execution ends up jarring and inconsistent, with groaner jokes and a cacophony of colored blob character designs that don't fit in with the main characters. even then, no one is animated all too well, with tweening that feels 10 years out of date in a world where toon boom has done wonders for mickey mouse and bugs bunny. they don't even bring back any old characters besides dark queen, or explain what happened to them!
on top of everything, it's one of those games that throws a bunch of genres at the wall and none of them stick, which feels right at home with rare's origins, but feels oddly regressive considering their growth into what made dkc and banjo so famous. but i digress. beat-em-up levels feel sluggish and repetitive with few enemy types and a tendency to simply fill the screen with visual noise. shump stages were cool at first, but they're bland and also have little variety. sidescrolling stages have drolling level design and dumb block puzzles. none of it is particularly fun.
they're weaved into the story poorly to boot. a story that's also just poor itself. it tries to give each toad a character arc, but it boils down to "they do something the other toads don't vibe with and then come around in the very end". really, no one's personality here besides pimple is enjoyable. they can be boiled down to "murderous asshole", "dumb", or "gay stereotype". it's trying the space ghost coast to coast approach of rethinking old one-dimensional characters as incompetent heroes, but it forgoes the intricacies of that show's re-interpretations of old characters or how far they go with them to reach a punchline.
if this game only had the difficulty option of "as hard as the nes game" and/or the music wasn't as KILLER as it was, this would probably be rated much lower. as it stands, it's really just so disappointing, as a huge fan of what little there is to battletoads. it should really only be played if you're THAT curious to see how not to bring back a franchise like this.

look i'm not gonna pretend this game is the scourge of the earth. i'm also not gonna pretend i have anything new to say about it. it's the incredibly middling end result of sonic team being pressured to make something shippable in time for christmas. it has more focus on spectacle than anything, and that would overall be fine if it didn't feel like levels were bland and tedious, and the controls weren't outright unsuited for standstill platforming.

loses a point for classic sonic's iron fortress. i'm glad sonic team is finally getting their way for frontiers, tho.

Man, this one hurts to give such a low score. There's clearly so much love put into this game, a passion project done by 2 people over the course of 18 months. Some of the most beautiful graphics on the Super Nintendo, long and lovely music tracks, and very consistent theming throughout. The devs clearly sought out to capture the essence of classic Disney animation on a cartridge, both its cutesy and frightening aspects.

Unfortunately, it falls for just about every platformer design trapping of the era. Lack of reaction time, ungenerous hitboxes and checkpoints, unmanageable clusters of enemies, lack of passwords. The second half was more frustrating than fun to me, and I'm so disappointed that it was. I hope that one day, this game gets a proper remake with the same level of care as it got when it was first being made...

by all means, i want to give this 5 stars. it's woefully short, has a dumb asteroids-like shmup stage, and has a stark difficulty spike right after that shmup stage (dark queen and shadow boss are really unfun, tbh). however, after hearing this game's music masterfully remixed in the 2020 battletoads game, i had a ratatouille flashback that reminded me how much i adored this game back in high school. i played all FOUR versions of it just to see all the differences between them, no matter how tiny. i'd look at youtube videos to see how others conquered this game, taking note of all the quirks and secrets it had to offer. i managed to internalize the gameplay loop of the lee brothers, how their running kick efficiently yeeted enemies into an explosion, how their tornado spin when using ropes could be steered and even exploited to skip a section of saws in the third level (nes/genesis only), how their smash hit (an aerial attack landing with the knees) swiftly got the weird ball-chain hands swelled up like tom setting off a mousetrap to see why jerry avoided certain death.
i loved this game. it was nowhere near the best game in the world but something about its cheesy action movie grandieur, its in-between level dialogue, david wise's rocking score (that somehow took a weird beating on game boy, even though wise was an expert at the old thing), its weird technicolor aesthetics, especially on nes. the way the battletoads have SMEAR FRAMES on snes. the way turbo bikes explode when you dash into them. the way you can use a stick to hit enemies like they're a baseball. the way the shmup stage can be destroyed and reduced into a spectacular of white impact frames and explosions. battletoads double dragon is the pinnacle of the franchise for me. has enough of a difficulty curve to be managable to an extent, but keeps all the gritty art, the swift controls and simple combat, the sense of humor it keeps with a proud grin as it takes you atop a rocket careening towards earth.
no other battletoads or double dragon game has done it for me like this has. what a thrill.

ah. i was truly suckered into blowing $30 on a rushed licensed product. i really am an adult now.

cosmic shake feels so weird. it constantly feels like it should be a great game. the controls are solid enough, the graphics are appealing, and it's running on the basis of the bfbb remake that i thought was great. yet, the new direction they take with the gameplay feels rushed at best. the game tells you where to go and what to do, and besides some side collectables, it's a straight shot to the finish with little non-visual variety. abilities that spongebob once had in the heavy iron games are no longer around, and you have to progress in the game to learn new ones (artificially making it so that you have to backtrack to previous levels if you want to 100% them). combat is drolling and repetitive, especially when they force you to take down the three-hit tanks. everything just feels worse.

this sentiment extends to the game's identity as well. half of the writing is references, and all of it isn't funny - precisely because it plays it way too safe and hogties itself to what older people might vaguely recall spongebob to be. i don't think anything made me respect the current spongebob crew's aim to give modern episodes a distinct difference from classic episodes than seeing a random european writing group's fanfiction given a budget. to that end, the audio - music is unmemorable, the voice lines play way too frequently, and sound mixing leaves much to be desired.

i could be much meaner. i thought i was going to be meaner. i also thought this might have turned out better than it ended up. i had high hopes for at least another solid spongebob adventure. i pre-ordered this for $10 less than msrp. unfortunately, when i finally got around to this, all i ended up with was a disappointment.

If I were to describe the PS1 Dr. Slump game on paper, it would probably sound like the most unappealing game in the world. You walk around, talk to people, warp to other places that webbed together in a convoluted manner, and complete their desired quests until you end up going to an action stage. Overworlds are tiny, placed in a void and can only be accessed from other overworld by menu. There is little to no voice acting, hardly any unique animations, not much in the way of side content at all, not even any NPCs that aren't the central characters, even. Yet, we only live on this Earth for so long, and this is a game you should play before you leave.
Dramatic, I know, but to put it into perspective, it's certainly a cheap game, but cheap in very clever ways. By skimping on realistic graphics, it succeeds at being one of the best-looking games for the PS1, toe-to-toe with Mega Man Legends. Who cares if the soundtrack is MIDI, it sure as hell bops, even if the main overworld song is played much too often. Despite the lack of voice acting and cinematic cutscenes a la MML, the dialogue, which is localized very well in the fan-made English patch, is funny and charming. The story clearly rushes through some of the manga's greatest hits, but it's enjoyable all the same. You cannot move the camera, but it's almost always in the place you want it to be. You aren't playing this game for much more than good times with the Penguin Village crew, and that's all it needs to be.
As for Arale's controls... could be better. They get the job done, but your jump is quite heavy and your combat options don't feel too well-equipped for some annoying enemies. There's also way too many insta-kill pits strewn about the later action stages, geez.
I suppose I'm biased due to my history with Dr. Slump, but this genuinely a really nice budget game for what it is. The fact that this was translated is a joy to behold, and it's super-short to boot. If you have 6 hours to spare, give it a shot.

I just cannot vibe with this one, fellas. The level design is either servicable or agonizing, bosses are insufferable unless you use their weakness weapons, in which case they're laughably easy, and it's just infused with several of those "lmao gotcha" moments that you can't see coming until you've seen them. I would've rated this a bit higher based on the more creative level and enemy theming, and the more solid controls/physics compared to the first game, but Quick Man and Boobeam Trap were enough to sway that decision. Sorry.