Some TMNT Brawlers, Ranked in No Particular Order for No Particular Reason

Like most dudes in their 40s, a big part of my childhood involved watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in its various forms. It also meant that as soon as I got my hands on a slightly modern(ish) video game console (the NES, roughly a year after the SNES came out) I started trying to convince my parents and really anyone else I could find to give me a way to play as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it. Unfortunately for me, this meant that my first TMNT game on a proper console was, in fact, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that was so bad Konami put it out under the Ultra name.

Now I need to stress something, which is that by the time I got this game, I knew there was a better one. My dirtbag uncle (shouts out to dirtbag uncles, I think I am probably the closest thing to a dirtbag uncle any of my nieces and nephews have and I take this role very seriously) had an NES and when we visited him and my aunt we played his copy of TMNT II, so imagine my horror when I slid that cart in (after cleaning it with rubbing alcohol, because it was a garage sale find and kind of a bastard to get to boot) and we got... that.

I never, as far as I know, got anywhere near the end of the game. It's fucking bizarre, it makes very little sense, and the best I ever did was successfully rescue Splinter. Unfortunately, there's a lot of game after rescuing Splinter and I never got there. Ever. We did our best, but when you are playing something as fiddly and weird as that game is you eventually run into a wall. I did eventually get my hands on a copy of TMNT II, and when my brother and I were out of school due to both contracting the chicken pox, we spent a whole day banging our heads against the game until, with the help of a Game Genie giving us 10 lives instead of 3, we beat the game. It remains one of the fondest memories of my childhood, even though I had the fucking chicken pox.

Anyway, that was a formative experience for me, one of those moments where it became certain that I would probably play a lot of video games forever, which has continued to be the case. I can, and have, waxed poetic about a lot of fuckin' types of video games - your DOOMs, your JRPGs, your Zeldas, your spooky games, etc. etc. etc., but somehow I am prone to forgetting the pure joy of the ol' beat 'em up genre (or beat them up if you want to sound like an asshole about it). The recent release of Absolum got me back into the genre heavily, and when I think of a beat 'em up, I inevitably think of those Teenaged Mutants who are Turtles and also Ninjas.

I bought the Cowabunga Collection back when it released, mostly because I wanted to play Turtles II again, but hey it turns out there were a lot of other good-ass TMNT Konami games released too. Wild! Then I thought, "why not rank these noble games and also some of the other TMNT games I've played? There are a lot of them! That would be fun to write about!" At no point did I consider whether or not it would be fun to read, but that's not my problem. If you got this far I assume you are in for the long haul. Bear in mind some of these entries will be very short, because I am not going to sit and go into detail about the fuckin' Game Boy games okay they are uniformly kind of bad. Anyway, we'll start at the bottom and work our way up so that you can get really mad at me for not really giving Turtles in Time its due. Also I have played TMNT Tournament Fighters but I don't have it ranked here because it's a fighting game, that's different.

1. 1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
      This is a piece of shit. I rank it here at the bottom because I had such high hopes for it, and it looked so promising, and then it came out and it was broken and stuff barely worked and the scripting bugs out so you get stuck and... man, what a fucking bummer. I own a copy of this game and every so often I install it and attempt to play it and my heart breaks anew. Arkham-style combat but it's Ninja Turtles should've been a slam dunk but somehow they managed to fuck that up! They got the voice talent from the 2012 series to do this game and it's a fucking waste! Someone should've gone to prison for this one, man, I just... Fuck, what a bummer of a video game. This should've been higher! They fucked it all up!

1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan
   The first of the Game Boy entries, and maybe the most low-effort of the TMNT games (not counting the dedicated lcd handheld game I had which was just "fight guys in the sewer" but I'm not ranking that one). The attract mode is a nice picture of the turtles and some text that explains April's been kidnapped and you have to save her. Five stages which are all available from the jump, you fight an assortment of familiar baddies from the cartoon and then go to the next stage. Because it is on the Game Boy, most of the screen real estate is spent rendering a good-looking turtle and maybe the biggest mousers that aren't supposed to be that big. Then you get to a boss. If you die, that turtle's captured and you choose another one, which doesn't matter because they all play the exact same. Also it runs at like two frames per second because again, it's on the Game Boy.
   One Nice Thing: Okay I did clown on the fact that there are only like two things on the screen at a given time, but the sprites are pretty detailed. You absolutely know that you are looking at a Foot Ninja or wheelie robot or mouser or... bats? I guess there's bats too.
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Radical Rescue
   Most people would probably rank this higher, but I never really played it that much and, you know, this is my list so GET USED TO IT. Don't give me any lip! Michaelangelo goes out for pizza, and when he comes back his bros are all missing because they went to rescue April and it was a trap. You have to find them! There's a map in this one, which is kind of weird! I think this is a very neat idea that should've been on something with a little more horsepower, because as it is it is damn near impossible to tell where you are going. They shrank the sprites down so they could put more of 'em on the screen and do more with the environments, which is actually a good idea! The more I write about this game, the more I think it might be kinda good? That's the case with a lot of these games!
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Back from the Sewers
   This gives you a fun little animated intro that is kind of like the tv show. It also has things like an options menu where you can set the difficulty and also a sound test that lets you hear a compressed voice say "PIZZA TIME" as much as your heart desires. No complaints here! It also has much nicer looking backgrounds and actual level design! A big step up from the previous entry, and I'm being completely serious. The kid across the street from me owned this game and we played an atrocious amount of this game growing up, even if a lot of that time was spent just listening to the pause screen music, which is some of the finest music mankind has ever produced.
   What more could a man want? Well, maybe a game that runs better, but we're on the Game Boy so you get what you get. The turtles look good (for what they are) and so do the enemies! They also have more animation to them than in the previous entry, which is pretty crucial in terms of making the game at least feel fun to play even if the reality is that it's kind of bleh. Lightyears ahead of Fall of the Foot Clan, but still not really a great time. Also the jump kick animation does make it look like you are just kinda sitting down. It's bad. Still, there's a lot of nostalgia there and the soundtrack is, as I mentioned, extremely good.
4. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989)
   One of the finest examples of what happens when you give a game developer the smallest of briefings and then say "okay make a video game out of this." Konami took the basic premise - it almost seems like they focused solely on the comic for the most part, apart from April's design, the fact that Splinter turns into Hamato Yoshi at the end, and the presence of the Turtle Van and Turtle Blimp which were cartoon things - and then just ran with it. From a gameplay standpoint, that means that you fight lava monsters and also guys with hockey masks and chainsaws alongside your Foot Clan and mousers. There's also giant bats (again with the bats) and dudes that are just... constantly on fire that make no sense. The game has you run around an overworld (eventually in the Turtle Van) and transition into 2d levels which are more platformer than beat 'em up. It is also fiddly, difficult (in a bad way), and any time you die your turtle gets captured and put into a random level for you to go back and rescue. Oh, and there's an underwater level that fuckin' sucks, it's basically impossible to get through without your turtles being near death by the end. Not to brag but I got pretty good at that part, although I've never finished the game.
   On the positive side the soundtrack is great, the attract screen intro to the game lives rent free in my head forever (I played a lot of this game), and the turtles not only have different pros and cons - Donatello can hit stuff from further away (and also through the floor or ceiling) but he's slow, Raphael attacks the fastest but his range sucks, etc. - but they level up the more you use them. Not in a way the game communicates to you at all, but the more you use a given turtle, the stronger their weapon gets, the faster they can kill stuff. It's neat! A shame the rest of it is so unpleasant to play. Fortunately once you rescue her in the early game April is always there to let you know that You Have My Support.
5. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the Gamecube one)
   This was the only modern-ish TMNT game I played until Out of the Shadows depressed the hell out of me. It was based on the 2003 show and it was... not bad, as I recall? The only problem with it was the character barks got real fucking old, real fast. Donatello yelling BANG ZOOM! whenever he did his special move just... boy that was grating. Also I wanna say the first time we got to the final fight it bugged out on us? Some fuckin' bullshit, man. It's not bad though, it's fine, I wouldn't seek it out but I would play it if it happened to be there and someone was like "hey let's play this mediocre TMNT game."
6. TMNT (2007)
   This is the GBA game that came out in connection with the animated film that actually rules and I wish they made another one after it. I was always bummed that it didn't get a sequel, but then we got Mutant Mayhem so you know, that's okay. I feel like it worked out for us. This is a straightforward retelling of the film, you pick your turtle, you play the game, it's a pretty good brawler, for all that. Not as good as the ones from 2003, but still pretty good. Points docked because instead of eating pizza to heal you eat... sushi? That's fuckin' weird.
7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Battle Nexus
   The sequel to the other GBA game based on the 2003 series, this one is a weird one! It's almost run based, kind of? You go into a level looking for crystals, and in each level you start without a weapon, and have to go find your turtle of choice's gear before you can really get to punchin'. I think the sprites look better in the first GBA entry, but you still have some kick-ass movesets and it feels good to play. Suffers from the curse of not having a very good soundtrack, but really Konami never quite reached the heights of the NES games again. They were simply On Their Shit back then in a way they never were again. Also it suffers from, you know, not being able to play with a buddy. All the portable games do, which is why they are low on this list.
8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Hyperstone Heist
   This is one I didn't even know existed until I played it in the Cowabunga Collection. Did you know Konami put a TMNT game on the Sega Genesis? Did you know it was basically just repurposed assets from the SNES game? Did you know it kind of sucks because the sound is awful? I do now, and I have no desire to really play it again, ever. I don't know how it manages to somehow feel bad when like, the Genesis had Streets of Rage on it, I know you can play good fuckin' brawlers on there, but... I dunno, something just feels off here. The sprites don't even look as good, and you can't throw people into the screen because the Genesis didn't have Mode 7. Hard pass.
9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: Mutants in Manhattan
   You'd think this would be higher than TMNT II, but it isn't for a couple of reasons: one, Konami really went all-out in terms of sprites on screen and... well, the NES isn't quite up to the task so there's a lot of slowdown and flickering which is not... great to look at. Two, the levels just aren't as good! They almost all overstay their welcome, it's kind of a bummer - and the bosses are somehow even more bullshit than usual (the Bebop fight on the ship is maybe the most egregious example of this). It's a shame because the turtles all get more moves - the super move from the first game is replaced by unique animations for each turtle, although annoyingly it now costs health - and they can throw people over their heads now which will one-shot most of the stock enemies. Bigger enemies aren't throwable but it's still a nice little move! The music is still pretty good too, although nothing sticks out to me like some of the other tracks do. If you enter the Konami code at the title screen, you get access to an options menu where you can adjust the difficulty and do a stage select and such. It's neat!
   I didn't play as much of this as a kid, although a buddy of mine did have it and we played a fair amount of it in his basement. Pretty sure we used a Game Genie to get more lives, and also pretty sure we never actually beat the game. I definitely still haven't. One day I might! We'll see.
10. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade
    In my heart, this is ranked higher. I already said a bunch about it up in the intro, but this game kicks ass. It's also a righteous motherfucker and really taxes the NES, it is flickering sprites and slowdown from hell to breakfast. I was playing this with my brother (as one does) the other day and he pointed out that while it does feel like you are constantly getting swarmed by enemies, the game actually never displays more than three foot clan on screen at once - presumably for performance reasons. Smaller enemies like mousers can show up in slightly larger numbers, but even they're limited - I wanna say when you fight Baxter in the sewers he never spawns more than four at once, maybe five? This is extremely not the case in the actual arcade version, but hey, compromises.
    Konami gets to be indulgent here, which is to say they realized that if they just ported the arcade game straight people would riot - I love that arcade game, but it's short - so they stuck a shitload of extra levels in like the Magic Ninja Factory and also New York in Eternal Winter for Some Reason. There's no real logic to it, but who fucking cares? It's good as hell! Konami was extremely On Their Shit when they did the soundtrack for this too - it's those good Konami drums and they pick their spots with the actual TMNT cartoon theme so that when it hits it fucking hits (I am specifically thinking of Scene 4, where you actually go save April). It's goddamn delightful is what it is!
    Visually I have to admit that nostalgia is probably coloring my memory here, but it is gorgeous! Gorgeous, I say! The Turtles themselves basically look the same barring color and weapon (and play the same too), but it doesn't matter because they look like they're right out of the damn cartoon (not really, but on a Nintendo these sprites looked incredible. The actual Arcade game, of course, is where to go if you really want that shit, but we'll get to it later. It's a little further up this list, for obvious reasons of being fucking amazing). It does get to be kind of a slog by the end - and the Shredder fight is some hot bullshit. He's got a one-hit kill that can stunlock you, so you can, in fact, lose multiple lives over the course of a couple seconds. It sucks! Konami is basically looking at you in this situation and saying "what, you don't have a buddy to play this game with? Because if you had a buddy to play with you could take care of these clones way faster, you big loser!" Konami does that a couple times (the weird fucking tiger enemies in the... magic... ninja factory? Or whatever? are another example - way easier if you can place a dude on either side and stunlock those fuckers).
    The best levels are the ones from the arcade game, the worst levels are generally the ones they added - although I think the snow level is great, the ninja magic factory kind of sucks (even if it does introduce NINJA QUASIMODOS, who are pretty great as enemies). Konami got to make their own bosses for those extra levels, which is neat! Weird gopher (weasel? Ferret? Mink?) in a leather jacket boss is... extremely funny, as is the equally weird Samurai Ghost Man whose head comes off and floats around. Shades of the first NES game there, if we're being honest. I love this game, it's the first game I played where I had to do things like "keep track of my shadow on the ground to figure out if this jump kick would hit the flying enemy" which was at the time a brand new concept for me. It rules! It's got its faults, but it is a stone-cold classic. Also, gratuitous Pizza Hut product placement!
11. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003)
    This came out on the Game Boy Advance and is... you know Maximum Carnage? It's like that. It also fucking whips. Each Turtle has their own separate storyline (each storyline is an adaptation of an episode of the 2003 cartoon, as far as I can tell), they all have a variety of cool moves, you collect crystals for some reason, I dunno, I've honestly not played a ton of this one - just enough to know that it kinda kicks ass? I'm really into it, even if I'm a little disappointed that Donatello's first level kinda sucks. But hey, that's how it goes sometimes! Fortunately, the game still rips so who cares. The music isn't as good as the old Konami beats, alas, but that's fine. I can forgive it because the turtles feel so damn good to control. Like hot damn man, Konami was cookin' with gas here.
12. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time
    The title alone should tip you off to the fact we're talking about the SNES port of the arcade game, because Konami kept a numbering system for their Nintendo Console releases that I appreciate. The SNES was way more up to the task of presenting an arcade-like experience, and it shows with the gorgeous fuckin' sprites. The Turtles look fantastic, and so do their enemies! It's delightful! Big Apple, 3 AM! God bless us, everyone! You throw enemies at the camera and the sprites scale because that was a thing the SNES could do! Fuck yeah, Mode 7!
    I never owned a SNES - I had a friend who did, and he loved TMNT as much as I did, so I did play some of this game, but bizarrely only ever as a rental. He never owned the damn game! So I don't quite have the history with it that I do with, say, TMNT II. That said, I cannot deny that the game is amazing - in fact, I stopped writing this for around 45 minutes to play some of it that I did not intend to play. I was going to just jump into the first level for a second, but then the game was just so damn good. Also the sprite when you get flattened by something is great. It's so cartoonish, it's great. I love this game and have definitely played more of it as a grown man than as a kid.
13. Turtles in Time
    The arcade game, obviously. Take everything you liked about the previous TMNT arcade game and make it time travel. That's the assignment, and Konami did a good job of following it to the letter. More bosses, animation that's somehow more fluid, more voice lines, more of all the shit you like. The turtles all have their own unique styles to them and it plays so goddamn well. Absolutely kills it. For whatever reason (I am sure there is a reason tied to the overall rise and fall of arcades) this was not as prevalent a cabinet for me as its predecessor, which did not stop me from scrounging quarters to play it (or just standing in front of it watching the attract mode, a thing all broke kids did) whenever I found it in the wild. I think the local bowling alley had a Turtles in Time cabinet, but I might be thinking of a different bowling alley? Who knows. All I know is that this is one of the games that has gotten the most playing time out of me in the Cowabunga Collection. I fuckin' love this one, but not as much as....
14. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    This is the one. This is the thing I saw in a Pizza Hut and dumped as many quarters as I could scrounge into. There was another one in a Wal-Mart, one in a K-Mart, and one in a movie theater we went to sometimes. There were also two in two separate arcades in Garden City, South Carolina, where we went on summer vacation pretty often - one on the boardwalk and one in the pier. I knew where all these were by hart, because this game was the ultimate wish fulfillment for me - it looked exactly like the cartoon, and you fought Bebop and Rocksteady! The Shredder taunted you, and I never had the money to get to him but we played the absolute shit out of this thing any time we could. When I went to the Galloping Ghost for the first time, I immediately found the TMNT cabinet and played through the whole fucking game. It was a glorious experience. Last time I was visiting my parents my brother and I took his kids to an arcade and they had a TMNT cabinet and if you guessed "me, my brother, my nephew, and my niece played through the whole game" you are right. That's called building family bonds, everyone.
    It is impossible to describe what it was like to see this thing for the first time as a kid. Video games just didn't look like this! It was incredible! You would look at the NES version, then look at this version, and feel the gulf between what arcades could do and what consoles could do. You can run around as all four turtles at once and it fucking rules. It still rules! It will always rule! I don't really have much more to say about the game beyond it is still an arcade game which means the encounters and boss fights are, of course, kinda bullshit because it was made for you to lose money. Doesn't matter, it still whips.
15. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge
    Remember how I waxed poetic about TMNT II? It was hundreds of words ago, so you can be forgiven if you can't, but Shredder's Revenge basically took TMNT II and made it better. Modern beat 'em up sensibilities - which means combos and juggling and also character progression - met raw nostalgia pumped directly into my veins. The game's gorgeous! They got voice acting in there that's not just crunchy samples! The music is tremendous, even if it isn't those sweet, sweet Konami NES drums. We'll never get those sweet drums again, at least not in a Turtles game.
    I can't say this for certain, but the game's overall vibe feels so drawn from the NES version of TMNT II for me - which sure you can argue that actually it's drawing on the original arcade game, and you'd probably be right, except they have stuff like plunger-shooting foot clan which is, I think, a pretty obvious nod to how silly the guns in the NES version looked. The entire thing is one big love letter to the arcade games and console games, is the point. Everything from the way the sprites look (they're all '87 designs) to the way the game itself is begging you to play with as many people as you can find - right down to giving you more than just the turtles as options. April O'Neil finally gets to stop being kidnapped long enough to start beating ass, and she's one of the best characters if you ask me. Splinter's also great. Everyone has unique move sets and super moves, and the more you use 'em (if you're playing story mode) the stronger they get! There's also an arcade mode, which is an even purer experience - limited lives, limited continues, no leveling up, just you and your character of choice going through each level.
    I haven't played through the whole thing in arcade mode, but I have played the hell out of this game, clearing story mode with all the original characters. I haven't gotten around to beating it with the DLC characters yet, for the obvious reason that they stuck a fuckin' roguelike into the game as part of the DLC so you can... just keep playing it! Forever! Kind of like Absolum, except unlike Absolum I have yet to see credits. Still, it's an extremely good time and I've done a lot of multiplayer in there. Somehow I don't have this on my Nintendo Switch, but the very act of writing this article has got me thinking I should correct that error soon. Easily my favorite TMNT game now - and the pinnacle of the TMNT Beat 'em Ups, as far as I'm concerned.

There are tons of other TMNT games, of course - Hell, we got Tactical Takedown this year and that's one of my favorite games of 2025 - but these brawlers (mostly sprite-based) are the ones that have stuck with me. The cartoon aesthetic just works better with sprites, although Mutant Mayhem's style would obviously work well in 3D since, you know, the movie is also in 3D and console hardware is at the level where it can produce something close to (if not at) that level. Maybe we'll get a really good 3D brawler one of these days (or maybe one exists I just don't know about, feel free to inform me of one). This thing's gone on way too long though, so until I find something else to natter on about this will have to do. SEE YOU NEXT TIME, TRUE BELIEVERS!

Wait shit I mean "Cowabunga!" or maybe "Turtles fight with honor!"

No it's definitely "Cowabunga."