Leave Well Enough Alone

I’m probably going to show my age in this review more than usual and this may just come off as me screaming at kids to get off my lawn, but I call them like I see them. Also they actually do need to get off my lawn because their dogs poop on it, and when that happens I have to go to the trouble of putting it in a bag and setting it on fire on their front door step.

See, I played the hell out of the original Battletoads. I only beat it once and if I had to pick just a few NES cartridges to keep and then lose the rest, Battletoads would be up there towards the top. I loved the look of it, the characters, the difficulty was ridiculous, but as you became more familiar with the game and how it played, you would get better at it. Come to think of it the only ones I didn’t play were the Genesis and Game Boy versions of the original game.

So when I saw the announcement that Battletoads was coming back, I’ve seen enough reboots and remakes and sequels at this point to be skeptical, and I think rightfully so. The fanbases that grew up with these classic movies, tv shows, comics, and games have only wanted to see things that are faithful to the originals and source materials. That’s that key word: faithful. Changes are fine and sometimes even necessary, but any remakes and reboots need to have the same spirit as the originals. Modern writers have a really, really bad habit of writing new takes on characters and creating stories that are not faithful to the originals and more often than not it just doesn’t work.

That all leads me back to the newest Battletoads release, which with the exception of a few things, doesn’t really feel like a Battletoads game to me. Set in the present day, the game begins with the toads doing their usual task of fighting bad guys when they realize that they’ve been locked away in a bunker, Kimmy Schmidt-style, for the past 20 some odd years. To Rash’s horror, they’re not famous and they decide to go find the Dark Queen to defeat her and regain their famous hero status, only to find out she’s also been locked away, had her powers drained, and she’s also traded the pinup-style, Elvira inspired costume and staff she used to have for what looks like a copy of Magneto’s costume in the Bryan Singer run of X-Men movies. They decide to work together to defeat the big bads responsible, and depending on your sense of humor, hilarity may or may not ensue.

For me, some of the jokes landed and some didn’t. When they did, they were really funny. I found after awhile though, that there was more banter than actual movement in the story and I just wanted the characters to shut up and get on with it, not unlike playing a Neptunia or Disgaea title. Like going to a business networking event and getting cornered by some drunk and realizing you made a huge mistake in saying hello, there’s a lot of chatting but very little actually being said and it feels more like the writers just watched a ton of Adult Swim shows and wanted to spit-ball every joke they could think of to feel funny.

There’s not where it ends, though. The characters are all written to be morons, except for the Dark Queen. There’s no real personality in any of them, there’s no growth, and their sole motivation pushing them through each level is not to save the world or do anything meaningful, but to be famous. Well, that and also to bring the audience to another punchline. Because again, they’re morons, the writers are hilarious, and we need to remember that. And really because they have no personality or growth, you could switch them out for any other random characters and it’d be the same game. The writers didn’t create a Battletoads story. They just wrote a comedy. The ending to the game is especially disappointing as it’s completely anticlimactic. I won’t spoil it here but anybody will see the twist a mile away. Even leading up to the ending, the actual sequence of events in this game -if you take out the parts that don’t move the story – are so short that without the filler, the game could probably be cleared in half the length, maybe less. I’d have to play it through again in order to decide, and there’s a snowball’s chance in hell of that happening.

The pacing was really uneven and the core of what made the previous Battletoads games fun was mostly missing, and the whole thing felt like the writers didn’t know what to do with these characters.

So with all of that said, how is the gameplay itself? Not terrible, but I did find it clunky and uneven. The first 3rd to half of the game is your standard brawler stuff you’ve seen in previous games. You run around and use the face buttons to attack, launch enemies, or do morph attacks where the toads do their trademark Big Bad Boot, giant fists, things like that. Some of the moves are so bizarre that I couldn’t really get a grasp on how I was supposed to use them. Like one of Rash’s being that he pulls an arcade machine out and plays it. What do I do with that? The combo system isn’t very fluid either so don’t go into this expecting Devil May Cry or classic God of War style combat.

The toads all handle differently, which was really nice to see. Pimple hits like a truck but is predictably slow, Zitz is who you use if you want to rack up combos and he’s weak but fast, and Rash is an average between the two and is boring as a result. You’ll fight some enemies in an arena, then walk a bit and do nothing, then fight in another one. Sometimes there’s mid-level puzzles they’ll have to hack. There’s also worthless “collectibles” to get that do nothing but unlock some achievements. There’s no extras from getting them. I mean the developers didn’t even have the imagination to call them anything else.

The boss fights are unique, though one in the last half of the game in particular makes no sense and I don’t know why it was included. One last note is that if you get knocked out, you’ll get replaced by another toad and if you’re quick you can revive the fallen toad, which I thought was a cool touch. It kinda felt like you’re still fighting as a team, even if there’s only one toad on screen. It’s important to note that this game only has local multiplayer, which is going to be a sore spot for a lot of people who wanted to play online.

The rest of the game is this weird, uneven combination of minigames likes “Toad-sham-bo”, which is a rock paper scissors game that never seems to end, a few turbo-tunnel like levels, some shooter levels, and also a few levels where Pimple is just doing platforming and block-pushing puzzles because he’s sick of fighting and ran off to befriend what turns out to be an alien hippie cult. Yeah, you heard that right. A cult, like the Manson Family or Jonestown or those Midsommar people. Again, who wrote this? By the 2nd of the 3 Pimple levels I just wanted to finish the game because 2 hours in it stopped being fun. I don’t know why someone would think this was a good idea to add as none of the previous games had or needed this. Maybe they just needed to pad the game out because the brawler sections are so shallow?

The music is fine, it’s got rock guitar versions of classic songs from previous games and the Turbo Tunnel theme in particular sounded great. Voice acting was good and they did a great job of bringing the characters to life. The graphics are going to be polarizing though, especially Dark Queen’s design being such a stark contrast to the older games. The animation is this flat, bold style like something out of Teen Titans Go! or similar animation of that style. Not a ton of shading or detail in each of the characters, and everybody that’s not a Battletoad or Dark Queen basically looks like a generic alien. The environments have a lot going on with lots of neon colors and the parallax backgrounds look good. The animation is fine – the characters spaz out when they’re excited or angry in a very cartoonish way, which reminded me a lot of Ren & Stimpy. There’s a scene where Pimple goes nuts and rages out at everybody around him and his expressions are pretty hilarious.

So I didn’t hate this game, but if you couldn’t tell already, I didn’t have much fun with it either, but then I wasn’t expecting much out of it. The pacing was really uneven and the core of what made the previous Battletoads games fun was mostly missing, and the whole thing felt like the writers didn’t know what to do with these characters. The dialogue suggests they wanted to make fun of the characters themselves and it could be argued that they’re also making fun of the fans based on how badly they wanted another game in the series and also because of the fan reaction to Dark Queen’s overhauled look, neither of which are going over well according to other reviews I checked out by real people and not just gaming journalists.

During the game’s ending they talk about going on another adventure and unless the next one is a return to form, I won’t be joining in. I’d rather see a Mega Man 9 and 10 sort of revival where they go back to their 8 bit roots and create another tough-as-nails sequel with friendly fire turned on and just a couple different styles of gameplay. It doesn’t feel like a true Battletoads game otherwise. Regardless this’ll be a blip on Gamepass’ radar for what’s left of the summer and then it’ll be forgotten, probably for the best. So in my opinion, follow the advice of the first boss Pork Shank after he dies and tells you from the afterlife to make the most of the time you have, and just play the older Battletoads games instead whatever sub-par imitation this is.