Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue (Game Boy) Playthrough

A playthrough of Konami's 1993 license-based action-adventure game for the Nintendo Game Boy, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Radical Rescue.
The final entry in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Game Boy trilogy is a complete departure from Fall of the Foot Clan ( • Teenage Mutant Ninja T... ) and Back From the Sewers ( • Teenage Mutant Ninja T... ).
It casts off the by-the-numbers platformer trappings of the earlier games for a less-linear, Metroidvania-style approach. As you save the turtles, you'll gain access to their individual abilities that'll help you overcome obstacles and reach new areas of the map. Radical Rescue feels like a simplified take on some of the older NES action-adventure platformers like Metroid and Castlevania II: Simon's Quest, though it is more limited in scope.
The presentation is nice, but it's a step down from the first two games. The sprites are much smaller to accommodate the flow of the action and it can be difficult to make out hazards against the screen ghosting caused by the dark backgrounds, but the animation looks good, and the soundtrack features a few fun toe-tappers.
Konami certainly deserved props for such an ambitious, "radical" shift in game design, but I can't say that I was a fan. As a kid playing it, I was frustrated to no end. I found the level layouts to be needlessly complex and the boss encounters to be viciously difficult. It wasn't what I wanted or expected from a Turtles game, that's for sure.
It has grown on me somewhat over the years, though. I still think of it as the weakest game of the three, but I can now at least better appreciate what it was trying to do. It does have its devoted fans, though, and it'll soon be made available for the first time in decades with the Cowabunga Collection, so if it looks interesting to you, why not give it a try?
*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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