Retro Review - The Ninja Warriors

Some years ago, when I was I think about 12 years old or less, I don't remember exactly how old I was at that time, I played this game for the first time, I remember I spent hours playing it, but I never got to complete it for some reason, then some more years went by and I wanted to play it again, but I couldn't remember its name. Do you know when you hear a song that you like, but then you don't know how to look for it because you don't know the name? Exactly that was the feeling I had about that game, fortunately, a few hours later I found the name of this game thanks to an internet forum, which I think is not currently active and thanks to that I played it again, but this time I was able to complete it. It had been a long time since that moment, since I was able to complete the game, and a few days ago, after several years, I played it again, but the SNES version, since I understand that a recently released improved version was released, but I also found out that this particular game, is another version of an older game, so you could say that "The Ninja Warriors" has two versions. This one in particular was called "The Ninja Warriors Again. Although I knew it without the "Again" in the title, so I'll name it that way throughout this review.

Today's Retro Review is about: The Ninja Warriors.

The Ninja Warriors show us a future controlled by the military tyranny of a man called: Banglar, with the use of his power he has imposed cruelty and violence to the whole population, in such a way that the streets of the city are controlled by the army, but besides this, he has managed to control the population by means of mind control, in such a way that they are limiting their own thoughts, in short an oppression and dystopian tyranny of the high evil level.

Luckily, a group of scientists who are against all this control and oppression, have formed a resistance to be able to cut the chains that Banglar has imposed on them, for this purpose, they have created three ninja androids with logically superhuman abilities and equipped with a series of armaments necessary to accomplish this task. Now these three androids will have to go through a series of scenarios and obstacles, defeating Banglar's henchmen, in order to get to where he lives and kill him, bringing peace back to the city. Once again we are faced with a beat'em up with a very simple premise, but one that is fair and necessary to situate us in the events that will take place throughout this mission.

The graphic aspect of The Ninja Warrios I think is quite good, even to this day, it's a game that has aged really well, a merit that very few games manage to achieve. The amount of scenarios we'll see in this game is varied, having these very good details on screen that gives a certain depth to every place we go. Although there will also be scenarios where the quality is not so good, luckily most places have good designs, drawings and a decent amount of details.

The character design, in terms of graphics is the best, our 3 main characters have pretty big sprites (especially one character of them), they have great definition and a quite remarkable drawing style. Maybe the female android's design is quite common, since it's basically the typical ninja's design, but the other androids have really good designs, one is a kind of ninja with claws, with a design that makes it look quite agile and fast and the other android's design is that of a giant robot, it's really intimidating.

The enemies also have good designs, but in variety they don't change much, since throughout the game we're going to see the same enemy designs repeated but with a change in color, even so it doesn't affect the gameplay at all, that's obvious, although a better variety in the enemy designs would have been much better. The final bosses present designs, in some of them, with big sprites and good details.

Years later they released a completely new version of this game, improved its graphic appearance and updated the designs a little bit, it looks really good. They did an excellent job in that aspect, I haven't played it yet, but maybe I will soon.

This is one of the beat'em up that I like the most about its sound aspect, since it has melodies that outstandingly unite aspects of Japanese oriental music with synthesizers, in such a way that it creates a "genre" that I call "CyberPunk-Japanese". The music is quite dynamic, and it knows how to convey a sense of "speed and action" in a way that keeps us constantly on our toes, and keeps us encouraged to continue battling our enemies. It's that kind of soundtrack that after completing the game makes you want to listen to it completely. The sound effects also have a great job, you hear pretty solid, effects like shots, explosions, hits and even the screams that our enemies can make, you hear them really well. A 10/10 in this respect.

Video Author Classic Vgm Soundtracks

This "The Ninja Warriors", as I mentioned before, is an improved version of another game of the same name, in fact, this particular one is called: "The Ninja Warriors Again", but these two games have nothing in common, however, as I also mentioned (once again) many years later they made a new version of "The Ninja Warriors Again", called "The Ninja Warriors Once Again", where they improve by a lot the graphic aspect and the design of most of the characters, I haven't played it yet, but the little I've seen looks really good, I don't know if in terms of mechanics they have changed anything either, I have to play it to find out, but for the moment I will talk about its previous version.

The Ninja Warriors, like any other game of the beat'em up genre, focuses on the tour of stages plagued by enemies, whose only purpose is to defeat them in order to advance to the next, the famous "Me against the Neighborhood", a game system that was very famous some years ago and you can see it because it's quite a fun game mechanic and we can easily spend many hours playing it. This particular game is easy to learn how to control the characters, the control is quite intuitive and it's really one of the beat'em up that I enjoy the most, not only because of its mechanics that are extremely simple, but also visually it's quite good.

Unlike other beat'em up, which normally have four playable characters, this time we have three androids at our disposal, logically each with different skills, statistics, advantages and disadvantages, so we can choose the character that best suits our demands or our control skills, but with each of these androids you can play really well.

We have a:

Ninja: Logically it makes him the tank of the group, he's quite slow, both in movement and attack, however, he's very resilient and his attacks are devastating.

Kunoichi: Following the typical cliché of the games of this genre, this character, surprisingly is not the fastest of all, since normally in the beat'em up, the female characters are characterized by having more speed, but they cause less damage, however, this character can be considered as one quite balanced.

Kamaitachi: And finally we have this character, who could be considered quite easily as the best of the three, because in terms of design he's quite intimidating, because he has two blades on each arm, which makes him a real killing machine, and he's also the character with the most speed.

The Ninja Warriors is a true gem of a video game, few titles in the same genre are as fun as this one in particular, which despite having obvious shortcomings, like any other game, is still a title that will give some hours of fun while we go into their world.