4 out of 5

Label: Limited Run Games

Produced by: ?

Across its 50+ tracks and three different editions of the soundtrack to TMNT Tournament Fighters – covering the NES, SNES, and Genesis scores – we get, obviously, quite a lot of music, but also a nice spread of approaches to VGM, and Turtles VGM specifically. The latter exposes within me what I realize is an ultimately silly bias: across the many different Turtles’ soundtracks, I make a judgment about how “turtlesy” something may sound, and consider it a negative if the music doesn’t evoke whatever that term is meant to express. Which, really, just comes down to tunes that play with or near the bouncy themes established in the Fred Wolf cartoon or first movie. And that’s… dumb, no? That I would limit a decades-spanning franchise by the irrepressible catchiness of one iteration, composed however many moons ago? Except I can’t deny that that’s where my fandom was borne, and surely the same is true for many – these games are due to that show’s popularity, after all – and so I can understand and approve of my brains logics. But I guess I highlight that to underline how challenging it is for composers to meet that made-up criteria, needing to craft something that is both new and familiar.

And so: on Tournament Fighters, different sects of the Konami Kukeiha Club approach the matter on the three aforementioned platforms, leading to NES and SNES tunes that fit the “turtlesy” bill, while the Genesis score mostly goes astray, into funky grungy territory, as befitting the lovely crunchier Genesis sound system. However, this is kind of a slow build to the Genesis songs eventually coming around to certain themes, and if we’re completely stepping outside of a TMNT framing, that platform’s tunes are the most enduring on this collection. So it’s a plus and minus.

The SNES stuff lands right in the middle, both literally – it’s the end of the A-side and start of the B-side – and in terms of how it sounds. It’s bright, shiny, rich and boppy, tossing Turtles’ themes up with surfy, platform-y ebullience (this is a fighting game, but no matter), and really making for non-stop toe-tapping stuff. For KKC, this is really solid work; for a Turtles game, there’s not really a song or vibe that stands out, but the music changes up enough that you can listen to it for long stretches, and be pretty engaged the whole while.

The NES stuff is bananas. It’s partially hard to listen to because the cuts here are so short that you can’t get into anything (not sure if this was chopped down to fit onto the cassette edition I purchased, or the preference for looping tunes was given to the denser 16-bit stuff), but even with that, it’s hard to marvel at the wizardry done with a narrow chiptune register. We were at the end of the NES lifespan here, and the programmers knew how to milk the machine for all its worth. The bananas part really comes from the level themes, though, which are sped up to like grindcore intensity; 99th level of Tetris stuff. Like: am I playing this in fast forward? It’s fun, funny, and a little crazy.