The Nintendo Entertainment System is a classic gaming console and gaming today owes a lot to Nintendo’s little gray box. Not the least of which that gaming still exists, as after the gaming crash of 1983 it looked like video games were little more than a fad that had it’s 15 minutes until it came around. During its time, the NES was the best-selling video game console✃, trouncing what little competition it had with games that remain a classic to this day. If you need any more proof about how beloved the system is, just look at the NES Retro, a throwback console Nintendo released at the end of 2016 and sold out within minutes of its announcement.

All that being said, there’s no denying that some of those s🃏upposed “classics” are indeed overrated. Thanks to nostalgia and rose-tinted glasses, we tend to look back on some of these games and think they were better than what they truly are, or maybe they’ve aged poorly and public perception hasn’t caught up to that fact.

Maybe you like some of the games on this list and that’s okay. This article isn’t about crapping on your opinion, it’s about saying that maybe som♍e of these titles get a little too much credit.

15 Maniac Mansion (NES Version)

The Maniac Mansion franchise has quite the legacy itself. It’s the first game legendary designer Ron Gilbert wrote and directed and its sequel would be the first game Tim Schafer directed (along with Dave Grossman). It was a poin💞t-and-click adventure released during the prime of the genre and a much beloved one at that.

Which is exactly why the NES version of the game is so terrible. Point-and-click adventure games don’t work on consoles and the NES is no exception. The controls just didn’t work. Trying to move the cursor all t💖he way around t💟he screen and then back down to the bottom to select an action is tedious at first, but becomes more irritating the further you go.

Perhaps the biggest problem though was that the graphics were totally redesigned for the less powerful console. The intricate🎃, detailed scrolling backgrounds were replaced with much flatter, one screen versions. These changes, while necessary for the hardware, just removed a lot of the game’🧸s charm.

14 Tecmo Bowl

Tecmo Bowl has seen a surge in popularity in recent years though and it’s even been featured in some recent car commercials starring former ꩲfootball players Bo Jackson and Brian Bosworth. There are even some outlets that use the game to guess the score of big games, including the Super Bowl.

While great at the time of its release, Tecmo Bowl has since been bested many times over by other games, and not even just modern ones. NFL Street and ESPN NFL 2K5 on the PS2, and Mutant League Football on the Genesis offer much better acrade-y style American football games. The fact of the matter is, Tecmo Bowl is extr𒁏emely limited and, even with its arcade🃏 roots, it’s not a very well-balanced game.

Bo Jackson might be most famous not for playing two sports, but because of his appearance in this🌜 game as a literally unstoppable beast. Anyone playing as the Raiders instantly win, because they can just hand the ball off to the beast of a running back and watch as all 11 opponents fail to tackle him. It might be fun to watch for a time, but eventually it gets dull really quickly.

13 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the game) is a product of its time. Much like the popular TV show, it completely missed the point of the original source material, which was all about parodying darkly serious super heroes. Instead, the game followed the 🌳TV show’s direction and took the form of a kid friendly, funny side-scrolling beat ‘em up.

You can’t blame the game for missing the point of the comics though. Instead, you can blame it for capitalizing on the trend of extreme difficulty at the time. TMNT on the 🍬NES is notoriously difficult, even by the high standards at the time♊.

What seals its fate as grotesquely overrated though are two levels in particular. One has you swimming through electrified plants where so much as touching one of these plants is instant game over. The other is in the sewer, where you have to perform a diffic෴ult jump to the next platform over while trying to dodge another platform directly above you. Luckily though, it was possible on the NES version with a lot of practice. The PC version, however, was literally unbeatable because the platform was too far away.

12 Battletoads

Another NES game that got its kicks out of being frustratingly challenging, Battletoads didn’t even have a popular TV show or licensed characters to fall back on. Even more difficult than TMNT, Battletoads is another side-scrolling beat ‘em up t🌜hat gives the player little health and a ton of enemies to get in the way. This one is famous for its co-op mode, but that only makes it more d𓂃ifficult, as friendly fire is prevalent.

Most of the nostalgia from this one comes from that difficulty though, same for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Many people lament how easy games are, at least compared to 🥃the days of the NES and later the SNES. I believe it’s because of this that a lot of people elevate games that aren’t quite worthy of being remembered as cla🐻ssics in their mind for that simple reason; because it was hard and that’s all they had growing up as kids.

There is some charm in Battletoads at least. It doesn’t take itself too seriously and the art style still holds up to this day. But even beyond the difficulty, the game is n🍷othing more than a repetitive button masher.

11 Bionic Commando

While not as bad as its modern day remake, Bionic Commando on the NES just isn’t quite a good game. It’s got a great concept with the bionic arm that let⭕s you swing aro🍸und like Spider-Man, but really, that’s all it had going for it. Beyond that, it was another generic side-scrolling shooter.

Originally released in the arcades in 1987, the NES port didn’t help the game much. Many of the game’s enemies were cut or severely altere👍d from the original version, and while the levels themselves offer more opportunities for the grappling hook, the fact of the matter is it didn’t mattꦏer much anyway. Instead of jumping over a gap, you swung your metal arm over.

Perhaps the most noticeable difference 𝐆with the NES version was the main villain. In the Japanese version of the game, the main enemies were literal notices and you got to kill Hitler by making his head explode. In the US version, how⭕ever, this was changed to a more generic evil organization. While the final boss still bears an uncanny resemblance to Hitler (he even calls you a “damn fool”) he was renamed to Master-D in the West.

10 Metal Gear (NES Version)

Make no mistake, Hideo Kojima’s original Metal Gear is indeed a masterpiece. It’s 𒅌just that the NES version is less ‘Elias Garc✱ia Martinez’, and more ‘old lady trying to be Elias Garcia Martinez’.

Metal Gear may not have created the stealth genre as many believe, but it 🍸perfected it and was one of the first console games to tell a compelling story. However, the NES port of the original Japanese MSX game was a disaster. The English translation is noticeably terrible, with the line “I feel asleep” forever engrained into our knowledge. The port added 💟new, unnecessary levels and took some away, and even swapped out the titular Metal Gear final boss for… a giant computer monitor.

Series creator Hideo Kojima himself came out to publicly trash the NES version (which he had nothing to do with), calling it “pitiful,” an “abomination,” and that it “had no sli🤡ver of appreciation for the players.” Wow, talk about not holding back.

9 Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy is a huge game. It saved the company that created it from financial ruin, sound hundreds of thousands of NES consoles, and popularized the JRPG genre in the west. The original Final Fantasy is a decent enough game, but that’s just it. It’s decent. The original was clearly⛦ still trying to find𓆏 its feet, which it found in later games, as early as the second game. But the first game is just kind of ‘meh.’

You’ll find extensive think pieces on how every Final Fantasy game is overrated, so including it in this article doesn’t feel particularly original or interesting. But it must be said, the original Final Fantasy has been re-released dozens of t🐻imes and every time the reaction is more or less the s🌃ame. General excitement at first, decent review scores, then everyone forgets about it.

That’s not to take away from the legacy of Final Fantasy. It’s spawned some truly great games over the years and, like I said, the fꦓirst is a good game. It’s just not the diamond encrusted classic everyone usually thinks of it as.

8 Mega Man 3

There’s no denying the first two Mega Man games are all-time classics. Much like Final Fantasy, the games are constantly re-released, though this time to much greater acclaim. But there’s one black sheep in the NES Mega Man library that only a handful acknowledge, and that’s Mega Man 3.

The series definitely started to drop downhill after the first two games, and even developer Capcom acknowledged this by creating the Mega Man X series three years after the release of MM3. But even by this point, it was becoming clear that Capcom was just running out of ideas. The first Mega Man, known as Rockman in Japan, was released in 1987, with its sequel coming the following year in 1988. They took a little longer with Mega Man 3, which came out in 1990 in Japan, but that extra time didn🃏’t doꦆ much.

Again, don’t get me wrong. Mega Man 3 is a fine game. It’s just that after two previous games, there’s nothing interesting about it. It’s a “bring a lunch pail to work, get the job done” kind of game. Its serviceable, but not exciting and clearly lacking the luster of the first two, and even some of t♕he later games.

7 R.C. Pro AM

R.C. Pro AM is a great game on paper and you can see why so many people love it to this day. It’s got gr♚eat graphics for the time 🦩and playing as little remote controlled cars instead of real ones allow for fun scenarios. But it’s the execution that really keeps it from being as truly great as everyone remembers it to be.

For one thing, the camera angle was terrible. Since the camera couldn’t really be placed behind the car for a full 3D experience, the developers decided to use an isometric camera🦹 angle. This caused the controls to be clunky, because you had to constantly change directions even when your car didn’t to compensate for the camera moving.

The NES version isn’t even the best, as the Genesis port was much better. The already good graphics were enhanced and you got to race against five opponents instead of just three. Kind 🍨of embarassing for what’s considered the 8th best NES game according to Paste Magazine.

6 Bubble Bobble

It’s not easy to try and explain what exactly Bubble Bobble is. It’s a two player platformer that requires each player to trap enemies within🔥 bubbles, then burst the bubbles by running into them and picking up the food they drop, but enemies can escape the bubbles and attack you, and there are magic spells and other things getting in the way as well. It’s somehow both overly complex and completely barren in terms of gameplay.

Which makes it so surprising that people have such fond memories of it🔥. Perhaps it was the cute marketing that caught people💦’s eye, the images of the two dragon BFF’s hanging out surrounded by bubbles.

Originally an arcade gam🌟e, the NES port saw the game receive a bit of a downgrade. The levels were smaller and less sparse, and the graphics obviously weren’t as good as the arcade version. The game is an early example of one featuring multiple endings, but the only way to get the endings was by how well you played as opposed to any choices you made.