Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan is a video game developed and published by Konami in 1990 for the Game Boy. It is the first of three games based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise that Konami made for the handheld, and takes much of its inspiration from the 1987 animated series.
The game is a side-scrolling action Beat 'em Up with light platforming elements. The player can choose to play as any of the four Ninja Turtles, and must fight their way through five stages, battling against the forces of the Foot Clan to reach the end and defeat each of the bosses, with the goal of rescuing their news reporter friend April O'Neil. Each turtle acts as one life, and if one of them runs out of health in a stage, he will be captured, and will no longer be usable for the remainder of the game. If all four turtles fall, the game is over.
Fall of the Foot Clan would go on to get two of its own Game Boy sequels, Back from the Sewers and Radical Rescue. In 2022, all three games would receive a rerelease for eighth and ninth generation consoles as three of the games featured in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection.
This game contains examples of:
- Absurdly Short Level: Stage 3 is noticeably shorter than the others in the game, only having one segment that isn't especially longer than those in any other stage.
- After Boss Recovery: Your health is restored to full every time you beat a boss, though you will receive bonus points for each hit point you had remaining.
- A Winner Is You: If you clear the final stage without having started from stage 1, the game simply goes straight to the game over screen immediately after the turtles save April, without playing the rest of the ending or credits. You have to clear all five stages in one run in order to get the full ending.
- Bonus Stage: By moving your turtle into specific secret spots in each stage, you can enter one of three bonus minigames. Clearing the game will refill your turtle's health.
- Bonus Game 1 will have Splinter select a random number from 1 to 999, and the player is given ten chances to guess it. After each guess, they will be told if the number they picked is bigger or smaller than the correct answer.
- Bonus Game 2 pits you against Krang, and challenges you to take turns removing shurikens from three rows, trying to avoid being forced to take the last one. You can take multiple shurikens in one turn, but only if they are adjacent to each other.
- Bonus Game 3 is a target shooting game. One by one, black circle targets will fly across the screen, and you have to move your crosshair over them and press the A button to hit them. You must hit a certain number of them to pass.
- Classic Cheat Code:
- Pausing the game and entering the Konami Code will instantly refill your turtle's health all the way, but this can only be done once per playthrough.
- Pressing A, B, and Select on the stage select screen will make a "?" appear as a selectable option. Picking it will take you to a screen where you can choose any of the three bonus games to play.
- Covers Always Lie: While the game's cover art is styled after the original TMNT comics from Mirage, the artwork in the game itself is based on the 1987 cartoon, using the cartoon's designs for all the characters, as well as a rendition of its theme song.
- Damsel in Distress: April O'Neil has been kidnapped by the Foot Clan, and the Turtles have to rescue her.
- Death from Above: Some of the indoor segments have blocks of ceiling that fall down and damage the turtles if they touch them.
- Disc-One Final Boss: Unusually for a TMNT game, Shredder is not the final boss, instead being the boss of the penultimate stage. The actual final boss is Krang.
- Down the Drain: The first stage has segments where the turtles go underground into the sewers. There are pipes that act as platforms, and pits of shallow water they can trudge through.
- The End... Or Is It?: After the credits, a The End screen appears with a picture of a scowling Krang, before his face suddenly turns into an evil smile, and a question mark is added after The End.
- Eternal Engine: The final stage takes place inside the mechanical walls of the Technodrome. This stage also features the debut of the robotic Roadkill Rodneys, and certain obstacles fire out dangerous elecrtical currents.
- Evil Living Flames: Large fireballs with evil faces appear as enemies in the second stage. They jump up and down from the flaming pits.
- Gameplay and Story Segregation: The transition scenes between levels have specific turtles appear in them, with stage 2 featuring Donatello, stage 4 featuring Michaelangelo, and stages 3 and 5 having all four turtles. These scenes do not change to reflect if any of these turtles have been captured.
- Game of Nim: In a bonus stage, you play a game of Nim against Krang by removing shurikens until there are none left, with the winner being the one who removes the last shuriken.
- The Goomba: The most frequent and basic enemies in the game are regular Foot soldiers who run or jump towards the turtles without trying anything else. They are easily dispatched with a single swipe of your turtle's weapon.
- High-Speed Battle: All of stage 3 has the Turtles jumping across moving vehicles speeding down a highway in pursuit car April is in, all the while fending off more Foot soldiers. The stage ends with a boss fight against Baxter Stockman, atop a still moving truck.
- Hitbox Dissonance: The hitbox on the turtles' weapons is noticably larger than their attack animation would indicate. While the animation shows them waving their weapon in front of them, it can hit enemies that are over their head.
- Marathon Level: The first stage is actually the longest one in the game, with four segments when most of the rest have two, as well as having three hidden bonus games, the most of any stage.
- Mighty Glacier: While Krang and his android body don't have many particularly fancy moves for the final battle, he is one of the only enemies in the game capable of taking two hit points from a turtle with a single attack.
- Never Say "Die": Running out of health will result in your current turtle being "captured" by the Foot Clan instead of dying. While a few other Turtles games did this as well, those ones allowed you to rescue captured turtles to get them back, something you can't do this time around.
- Power-Up Food: The turtles can regain health by eating pizza, naturally. A slice of pizza will restore two hit points, and a full pizza will restore four.
- Recurring Riff: The iconic theme song to the 1987 cartoon appears at various points throughout the game, being the main theme of the above-ground portions of the first stage, the "heroes in a half-shell, turtle power!" tune playing when you defeat a boss, and even getting a reprise in the final stage, playing in the final segment before the final battle.
- Shooting Gallery: One of the bonus minigames is a target shooting game in which you move a crosshair around the screen to shoot at a series of black circle targets that are thrown onscreen one after another. You need to hit a certain number of the allotted targets in order to clear the game.
- Super Not-Drowning Skills: The turtles can stay submerged in the river in stage 4 with no fear of drowning.
- Teleport Spam: Shredder has the ability to teleport during his boss fight. He will use it after every time he attacks, then teleport to the other side of the Turtle he's facing.
- Truck Driver's Gear Change: Stage 2's tune goes up in pitch for the second half of the level.
