A playthrough of Konami's 1991 license-based action game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Back from the Sewers.
Played through on the normal difficulty level.
About a year after the release of the excellent Fall of the Foot Clan ( • Teenage Mutant Ninja T... ), Konami brought the Turtles back to Nintendo's handheld for an encore performance, just in time for the 1991 holiday season.
Shredder, Krang, and all of their minions from Dimension X are again running amok in New York, and as the song says, these Turtle boys don't cut 'em no slack.
There are six lengthy stages for our amphibian heroes to battle through this time around, and unlike in Fall of the Foot Clan, your choice of turtle has an impact on the gameplay since they all differ slightly from one another in their attack range and speed.
The structure of the game is similar, but there are a few key differences. The levels are larger and better varied: though you still walk to the right as you flail your weapon at anything and everything that moves, there are a few open areas with multiple paths, and a couple of areas (like the autoscrolling skateboard stage and the elevator ride) even go so far as to shift the game into a 2.5D perspective that gives the playfield a sense of depth akin to that found in the TMNT arcade games.
The controls are tight, too. They feel about the same as they did in Fall of the Foot Clan, but the shuriken toss has now been replaced with a slide maneuver that can be used to attack or to evade airborne enemies.
Back from the Sewers looks and sounds fantastic, easily surpassing already excellent presentation of the first game. The benefits of shipping on a two-megabit cartridge (twice the size of the first and third GB TMNT games!) are immediately obvious. The clear snippets of digitized speech sprinkled throughout are a rare treat for a Game Boy game, and the graphics are a big upgrade. The character and enemy sprites are impressively large, the animation is smoother, and the backdrops are more complex - it looks much better than the average NES game despite the low resolution and lack of color. The art style is a bit awkward and never quite manages to nail the look of the comic or the cartoon, but the graphics turned a lot of heads in 1991.
The game isn't terribly difficult overall, though it is a fair bit more challenging than Fall of the Foot Clan when you play at the normal difficulty level. It has its frustrating moments when it'll relentlessly pelt you with attacks from off-screen or when the action becomes so busy that you can barely tell what's going on. It's still quite reasonable most of the time, but I prefer the flow and feel of Fall of the Foot Clan.
That's not to say that Back From the Sewers isn't still a lot of fun, though. If you were a fan of Fall of the Foot Clan, it's probably safe to assume that you'll enjoy this one too when it's re-released as part of the upcoming Cowabunga Collection.
PIZZA TIME!
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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