Game:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989)

Duration: 19:30

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989 NES)

This is a hack called TMNT: Return to New York.
Using this hack, the stats of all of the Turtles gets adjusted. Raphael gets a pretty big power boost, even surpassing Donatello's original strength, and takes half damage to boot, but as a result, he doesn't jump as high and can't use ammo weapons as well.
Donatello is fairly nerfed due to having the best range to be a lot closer to Raph in damage potential, plus he takes a little more damage himself. This and he's incredibly sluggish. So his usefulness has become severely limited as his mobility is pretty much nonexistent. He's still useful against Rocksteady and Shredder, as he has ways to attack them without them being able to retaliate.
As a small tradeoff, he can use ammo weapons slightly better.
So now the most useful turtle becomes Michelangelo, who now gets a noticeable speed boost, and also deals slightly better damage with ammo weapons. His tradeoff was taking more damage himself.
Leo got a small damage boost and is now the designated Jack of all-stats. Master of none, pretty much designating him as the backiest of backup characters.

Run Time: 18m 26s
Run Skill: Very Difficult

Pretty much the basic strategy of the game is to be in control of Mikey as much as you possibly can and switch to Raph for enemies Raph can one-hit kill that Mikey can't.
Note that Raph will get a huge increase of power at half health or lower. Being able to go from dealing 2 red blocks (16 damage) to dealing 3 blocks of health (24 damage). Making him the ideal character to use in combat situations. And thanks to him absorbing twice as much damage as before, he's able to tank the hits and deal the damage.
A nice rule of thumb is to always give Raph a pizza, and switch to him immediately if you're about to take damage.

You can switch turtles on the fly by pressing up/down+ start to cycle through them. Of course the original method of using the start menu still exists, but the new option is very useful for saving time.

I would say this is a huge upgrade over the original game.
It seems to rebalance the game very nicely.
If you like to play the game safe, you can use Leonardo for the majority of your playthrough, and you'll do just fine.
Or if you like to play the game fast, like me, you can try using Mikey, with his high risk high reward style of gameplay.
Either way, you'll find yourself switching to the two power hitters a lot. And once again, you have a choice. Play it safe and distant with Don, or play reckless and fast like Raph.
Donatello was once the be all end all character of the original NES title, and it's really nice to see him retain some usefulness and no longer being completely broken.
Just as it's nice to see Raph being the physically toughest turtle. As he should be.

Played on BizHawk 2.2.1 using the 4xBRZ shader

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