The Ninja Warriors, for SNES

Rating: 8.0/10

This game is a 2D sidescrolling beat em up, where you play as one of 3 androids. The characters look good and each has different stats and moves, giving a different play style. I only have a couple of conceptual problems: First, the female is the balanced one while the scythe guy is the high speed low power one. This makes little sense, given that the female’s weight is listed as being the lightest. Secondly, why does the female have hair, breasts and skin? Sure she is hot, but it makes little sense given as how the plot tells you that the androids needed more development time and were not yet tested. I guess she was meant to be used more for infiltration? Or maybe they never got around to giving the males skin?

The controls are decent, but could have been much better. The worst part is there is no control or move list in the game (if it is in the manual that does not count). Block uses the same button as attack (hold it). Unfortunately, it means you always perform an attack before blocking. There are plenty of unused buttons, so this game fails to make proper use of the SNES controller. I do not like how you must perform so many weak normal attacks before getting a power attack. For example, the Ninja does 2 dumbass punches and then swings around his nunchuk for multiple hits, the female does some small dagger hits before an awesome sword attack, and the scythe guy does some weak attacks before a cheap long ranged chain type attack. Now, I of course would prefer to spam the cheapest and most effective attacks and not waste time on inferior attacks. I would have preferred a combat system with 1 button for light attacks, and another for heavy attacks, with a trade off between which to use when. It is a refreshing change how touching an enemy grapples them instead of causing you to take damage, and there is a good trade off between saving energy for your ultimate attack, using some for moderate attacks and losing it all if you take too much damage.

The environments look good, though I think the scene transition where the protagonist does a massive jump to a new area is overused. The story is well done (for this type of game), with text and cinematics. Enemies and bosses are fairly well done with a good variety, though they have predictable behaviours. Lack of multiplayer is a flaw.

Overall, the game is definitely worth playing at least once, maybe up to 3 times to try each character.