Ranking Battletoads Levels

Battletoads is one of my favorite NES games of all time. No, I'm not a masochist.

Seriously though, for all of its design flaws and its infamously brutal difficulty, I've always had a strong love for the original Battletoads. I think it's the game where Rare as a company really came into its own, and it's one of the most ambitious showcases on the NES, with lush and vivid visuals, an experimental David Wise soundtrack, and a unique genre-blend where every single stage tosses something new and fun at you. But I also think it's unappreciated just how well-crafted and polished Battletoads is. Movement is fast, tight, and responsive in every mode of play, and all the vehicles have a satisfying sense of weight to them that feels unreal for an NES game. I do agree that the game is way too punishing, but in the same way that most NES games are too punishing, I just don't like lives and continues systems. However, putting that to the side, Battletoads is an absolutely incredible and mind-boggingly impressive title on the system.

So, having just replayed it, I wanted to rank all the stages in Battletoads. As I mentioned, each stage in this game feels entirely unique from the last which should make for a really interesting ranking. So without further ado, let's start with...

12. Clinger Winger

Clinger Winger is far and away the worst Battletoads level, and honestly, it's probably one of my least favorite video game levels period. The main premise is that you need to ride on the titular clinger, a unicycle that goes onto walls and ceilings, and you control it by holding the direction of the wall you're currently on. If you change the direction you're holding at the perfect time, you'll gain speed, and if you botch the timing, you'll lose speed. You're being chased by an insta kill Buzzball and you need to make it to the end of the stage, sounds simple right? WRONG. The timing for changing directions is not only incredibly tight, but also hard to gauge. There's no meter or indicator telling you when to change directions, you just have to feel it out, so a lot of the time, it's hard to tell what you're even doing wrong when you fail. And whenever I do make it to the end, it never feels like I accomplished anything, it just feels like I was lucky. At the very least, Clinger Winger is mercifully short, and you get to beat up the Buzzball at the end of the stage.

 11. Intruder Excluder

After how consistently strong its first half is, Intruder Excluder marks the point where Battletoads kinda dips in quality a bit. Not horribly, but the later levels do have a few more rough edges to them. Intruder Excluder is a simple climb up a tall shaft, bouncing up springs, hopping around corners, and timing your jumps through electrical bolts. It's mostly a fine if unremarkable stage, but it is held back by a fair share of really irritating enemies. One particularly annoying part of the stage has you navigate through two bouncing jellies who latch onto you and suck your health away, and this stage also introduces these cannons that shoot insta-kill gas at you, along with fans that also insta-kill you if they suck you in. Intruder Excluder isn't an especially bad level, I'd argue Clinger Winger is the only bad level in Battletoads, but it is an occasionally irritating one.

10. Rat Race

Rat Race is a level I'm honestly really split on. The main concept is that you need to race an increasingly fast rat down a shaft to disable three bombs before it can detonate them. There's a nice level of strategy in how you can punch the rat into a wall with the right timing to save you a bit of time, and pulling off a long, uninterrupted drop feels really good. The first two race are really fun and if the stage was just those two, I think Rat Race would be one of my favorites in the game. However, the final race is just plain ridiculous. The rat moves so inhumanly fast that you need to punch it into walls to not end up losing it, which is really hard to do at this point because of how easy it is to whiff such a fast-moving target. This is one of the hardest sequences in the entire game, and I honestly don't understand how you can do this without savestates.

9. Terra Tubes

Terra Tubes is another level that's so close to being incredible. The concept of working your way through these cramped pipes is fun, the art direction is especially clean and crisp, and despite being heavy on the water sections, I actually think the swimming controls in Battletoads feel really nice and accurate. Unfortunately, Terra Tubes also contains the most BS design choices in the game. There's a neat mechanic where you grab onto propellers that slowly float you down or up while dodging spikes, but the camera is so zoomed in that you have barely any time to react to them. Even worse are the giant gears that you need to run from before letting it pass you and destroy itself, a solid concept in theory but held back by the fact that there's no internal consistency to which direction the gears will go in. You just need to pick a hiding spot and hope it doesn't suddenly chose to go in there, it's pure trial and error.

8. Ragnarok's Canyon

I don't have too much to say about Ragnarok's Canyon, it's the basic bait-and-switch stage meant to trick the player into thinking they're just playing another standard beat-em-up. You get a safe place to mess around with the controls and combat mechanics a bit, and probably the coolest boss in the game which you have to fight from the boss's perspective. The main reason why this stage is so low is just that it's really short, you can get to the boss in about a minute.

7. The Revolution

Rare saved their most impressive visual spectacle for the final stage, as The Revolution has you hop up a rotating tower, like those bits in Kirby's Adventure but even crazier and made two years earlier. There's a solid balance of both platforming and combat, with some of the beefiest enemies in the game as well as a nice variety of platform types to deal with, and I even like the setpieces where you need to cling onto the nearest pole before an enemy blows you off the tower. This is also a much easier stage than the last few, and it feels a lot more fair. The only thing really holding The Revolution back is its crushing length, and doing nothing but hopping up a tower and fighting the same few enemies over and over again does get fairly repetitive by the end.

6. Surf City

Surf City is my least favorite of the three vehicle stages in Battletoads, though as you can tell, I still think it's quite fun. In Surf City, you need to ride on a surfboard, dodging logs, whirlpools, and mines. I like the variety of hazards on offer, and the movement of the surfboard is unique in that you can't jump. Instead, you need to use momentum to hop over and around obstacles which is always fun to pull off. However, Surf City also feels a bit too tepid compared to the Turbo Tunnel and Volkmire's Inferno. The best Battletoads take a fun concept and escalate it to absurd levels of difficulty by the end, but Surf City never really hits that kind of climax. The speed of the surfboard never ramps up, the obstacles never get more complex, the level kinda just ends.

5. Wookie Hole

Wookie Hole is the first sign that Battletoads is more than meets the eye. It's still primarily a beat-em-up, but the whole stage has you dropping down a large shaft on a bungee line, tossing kicks at enemies and dodging hazards on your way down. It's still a fairly easy stage, especially with how you can juggle enemies to rack up lives fast, but it's also just really fun to mess around with the rope physics here. You can pull off powerful swinging kicks, and even kick yourself off the wall to bounce across the room, there's a surprising amount of depth and nuance to the movement here. The only real issue I have with Wookie Hole is that it runs on a bit long, but it's still a very fun stage.

4. Arctic Cavern

Arctic Cavern is a fun encapsulation of all of Battletoads' various mechanics, offering a nice balance of platforming, puzzle-solving, and combat all in equal measure. As you'd expect, this is an ice stage entirely composed of slippery platforms, but the abundance of ramps makes it pretty fun to gain speed. There's some satisfying jumps across spike arrangements, and a bunch of increasingly complex puzzles about breaking down doors, either by hitting them with an ice block, tossing snowballs at them, and using an enemy to break them for you. This is where my only major gripe with Arctic Cavern comes in, it's very projectile-heavy. At its best, you get to partake in fun snowball fights with the other enemies, but it's also easy for those enemies to snipe you from off-screen when you're just trying to platform around.

3. Volkmire's Inferno

Volkmire's Inferno is the last of the vehicle stages and it's quite fun. There's a bit of a build-up before you reach the jet, but I love seeing the unassuming alien cavern suddenly set itself on fire right before your eyes. The jet's controls aren't quite as complex as the previous vehicles, but I like how the jet segment here blends both the speed of Turbo Tunnel with the variety of Surf City. You have to dodge lasers, fireballs, and missiles, and the stage keeps ramping up in speed until a blisteringly fast final gauntlet. Volkmire's Inferno is also noteworthy for its primarily RNG hazards, but there are ways to get around many of them, like hanging around the top of the stage as the fireballs come in.

2. Karnath's Lair

Karnath's Lair is a fun breather stage in the middle of the game that removes all enemies and focuses purely on platforming across moving snakes. The mechanics of these snake platforms are really fun to mess around with and learn, as you can climb up them vertically but not downward. You need to make your way across a few increasingly spike-filled rooms, starting off in a safe area, but ending with you need to carefully hop around intricate spike mazes on increasingly fast-moving snakes. The difficulty really gets wild by the end of the stage, but movement in Battletoads is so tight that it doesn't feel especially unfair.

1. Turbo Tunnel

What a classic stage. The Turbo Tunnel is obviously infamous for how much of a massive difficulty spike it is, but I also just think it's a really fun stage on its own merits. The speeder bike controls feel so tight and responsive, once you get into the groove of zig-zagging around those gates, it feels really satisfying and natural to make it through the stage. I love how the level slowly ramps up and adds more stuff to worry about, while also ramping up the speed and forcing you to think on your feet more, culminating in an absolutely bonkers final sequence where even the music starts to speed up to nearly indecipherable levels. Turbo Tunnel is absolutely a brutal gauntlet of a stage, but it's incredibly well-crafted and no other stage in Battletoads is anywhere near as exhilarating or satisfying to finally complete.