The 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game is a beat ’em up from Konami, built on the first season of the animated series. It shipped on Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, PC and PlayStation 2. It is a faithful adaptation of the show, and a thin one.
Four Turtles, Four Sets of Levels
You pick Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo or Raphael. Each turtle gets his own levels. That structure is the game’s best idea and its main limitation: the four campaigns split the same story rather than deepen it. The story mode runs for one or two players, and a versus mode lets two players fight head to head.
The versus roster is the most generous thing here. You can fight as all four turtles, plus Splinter, Casey Jones, Hamato Yoshi, The Turtlebot, Hun, Oroku Saki and The Shredder. Beating Oroku Saki with any turtle in Story Mode unlocks Challenge Mode, which you need to finish to unlock Hamato Yoshi and his dojo.
Here is how the two modes compare:
| Mode | Players | Roster | Unlock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Story | One or two | Four turtles | Challenge Mode, via Oroku Saki |
| Versus | Two | All four turtles, Splinter, Casey Jones, Hamato Yoshi, The Turtlebot, Hun, Oroku Saki, The Shredder | None |
Mousers, Mutants and a Crystal
The story loosely adapts a run of season one episodes. In order, that run includes:
- “Things Change”
- “A Better Mouse Trap”
- “Attack of the Mousers”
- “Meet Casey Jones”
- “Nano”
- “Darkness on the Edge of Town”
- “The Way of Invisibility”
- “Notes From the Underground” Parts 1-3
- “Return to New York” Parts 1-3
One level comes from nowhere in the series at all.
The plot moves fast. Mouser robots destroy the turtles’ old home, so they look for a new one. Michelangelo gets on Raphael’s nerves until Raphael leaves for the surface, where Purple Dragon thugs, Casey Jones and Dragonface are waiting. Baxter Stockman then uses invisible Foot tech ninjas to capture Raphael, and Donatello has to rescue him.
Later, Donatello analyzes a strange crystal found in the lair and notes it looks like mutated brain cells. Raphael kicks Michelangelo into a wall, a tunnel opens behind it, and the crystal starts glowing. The turtles follow the tunnel and meet genetically mutated humans, created by past experiments of Shredder’s scientists. The crystals are the only thing keeping them alive, and the mutants cannot leave their underground home. They ask the turtles to defeat Shredder so no more humans suffer as they have.
What the Adaptation Gets Wrong
That is a real story with a real ending, and the game knows it. The mutants’ plea gives the back half of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles actual weight, which is more than most licensed beat ’em ups manage. The problem is everything between the plot beats.
Four separate turtle campaigns chop a single season into pieces, so no one turtle’s run carries the arc. The versus roster is deep, but depth in a fighting mode does not fix a campaign that repeats its own levels four ways.
Worth playing for the show, not for the fighting.
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