Let me head off a question at the pass: why this game in particular? It’s a sequel and I haven’t played the original. What gives?
When I was a kid we had a local drug store down the street. A corner of it was eventually converted into a fairly weak video and game rental kiosk with some of the weirdest offerings you can imagine. They rented Game Boy games, which is kind of a terrible idea! My Mom was kind enough to snag a game for me to try now and then, and this was one of ’em. I played it for a weekend, got my ass beat, and we turned it in. After Cubix I figured hey, why not stop by while I was in the licensed game neighborhood?
I’m a 90s kid, which means I was born too late to care about TMNT in its heyday and born too early to care about any of the reboots. None of these goobers mean anything to me. I don’t even know who any of these characters are beyond the titular turts and their rat dad. Apparently someone I beat to death in this was named Baxter Stockman? That’s ridiculous.
You know what I do hold in high esteem? 90s Konami, baby. If there’s one thing you should take away from this writeup, let it be that this game’s soundtrack is yet another collection of impossibly catchy drumlines and kinetic treble. No other company of this era was so reliably producing 8 bit jams that make you want to beat the shit out of people like Konami. I have a working theory that they’re going to end up being one of my favorite entertainment conglomerates as I keep playing these. There are other games of theirs on this confounded handheld device that I already know to be bangers, and I haven’t even played GBC Metal Gear Solid.
I’ve gotten this far in and I haven’t even talked about the game itself yet. This is for a very simple reason: there’s not a lot to talk about. This is a pretty middling arcade-style beat ’em up, and by that I mean it’s full of sequences that feel like they’re more designed to munch quarters than provide much for challenge. It’s not excruciatingly hard, though the last level’s a bit of a bastard. Instead the anchor around your neck will be those shell boys kind of sucking at this whole “ninja” thing.
All 4 turtles are playable here, only differentiated by their weapons on account of the lack of color. Donatello’s stick is the best one and it isn’t particularly close. Barely any non-boss enemies have more than 1 HP, so the extra reach and slower swing speed is basically never a drawback. By contrast we have Raphael, who attacks with a dinner fork and cannot be bothered to extend his arm past 90 degrees. He just does high speed curls with the damn things and that makes him almost useless against bosses, who get i-frames after each hit. I ended up using him a lot, not because I liked him, but specifically because I hated him and used him to eat damage while scouting new levels instead of the boys I actually wanted to use.
Bizarrely, these heavy shell-havers are amazing jumpers and awful walkers. Note that I said “walk”, not run. You don’t do that here. Every level that isn’t an autoscroller is paced at a slow trudge, frequently flipping back and forth to slap baddies on both sides. There is an interesting mechanical detail where you can hit left or right while swinging and the hitbox remains active, which you’ll need to get the hang of immediately because this game constantly throws dudes at you from all directions. This is, unsurprisingly, easiest to accomplish with Don’s bigass stick.
The levels themselves are reasonably varied, but that doesn’t go far when the challenge mostly ramps up by way of just putting more shit on the screen. Why are there so many chompy robot dogs and Chopping Mall drones endlessly streaming out of every crevice? Konami knew damn well what they were doing too. So many sections end with an apology ‘za, often obtained by interrupting a goon’s succulent Italian meal with a stabbing. In true beat’emup tradition it can be completed hitless through liberal applications of jumpkick, but the margins are razor thin. I did no such thing. Shit, I popped two continues on the last level (which just dumps you back to the start, but like hell I was starting over to keep my score) because I never got the hang of not getting shot in the head by turrets. Raph’s just gonna stay in jail forever, and frankly that just means more pizza for the turtles that matter.
Wack Game Boy Zone 
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