Ninja Five-O (Game Boy Advance) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
123A playthrough of Konami's 2003 action-platform game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Ninja Five-O.
Played through on the normal difficulty level.
I loved Ninja Five-O so much way back! I knew nothing about it and picked it up on a whim one day browsing the store shelves, and let me tell you - it was one of the best impulsive buys ever. The cart sat in my GBA for months as I played it from beginning to end over and over again. It's rare that a game can grab my attention and hold it for as long as this one did, and going back to it again now, I can safely say that age hasn't tarnished it one bit. It's just as good today as it was when it was released in 2003.
And that name is still as embarrassing, outdated, and generally terrible as it was sixteen years ago. It was named Ninja Cop in Europe, which (though lame) actually makes sense. I mean, were we supposed to expect Miami Vice with ninja?
Smh. Ninja Five-O... smh.
But hold on - before everybody starts with the litany of comments praising old Konami and slamming new Konami - just know that they only acted as publisher on this one. So who was behind the brilliant Ninja Five-O?
Here's a hint: they were a top-shelf NES-era luminary of software development that fell on rough times at the end of the 90s and were eventually pulled apart and consumed by corporate Konami. Any guesses?
*Ding ding ding* If you guess the house that Bomberman built, you'd be correct! Yup, Ninja Five-O was developed directly by Hudson Soft, and it's one of the finest action games the company ever produced. And oddly enough, it was one of the few games they ever made that has never been released in Japan.
(Sorry, I need another smh moment.)
So what makes Ninja Five-O so special? Well, in spirit, it's right out of the 8-bit days. You play a ninja who is also a cop, and you are fighting a gang possessed by masks. It makes about as much sense as any NES plot ever did. And the game draws its inspiration from many games of the 8 and 16-bit eras, but it updates the mechanics of these games in a way that feels immediately familiar but far more polished and modern than they ever did in the early 90s.
You have a grappling arm that can be fired at walls and ceilings, allowing you to swing freely across any of the environments, and it feels good to control. While it's similar in theory to Bionic Commando's main feature, in practice, it is so much smoother to control. Take about five minutes to get used to the controls and you'll feel like an artist with how fluidly you will be able to pilot Joe through each of the stages.
The combat is similar to what you can find in Shadow Dancer or Shinobi - you have an upgradable projectile shot for distant attacks, and a sword for taking care of people that get too uncomfortably close. Combine that with the ability to slide, to vault yourself from any ledge you are hanging from, and to summon ninja magic to clear the entire screen, and you have a game that is much deeper in its mechanics than it initially appears to be. It's not easy, either, though it's not as hard as you might expect with a bit of practice. And thankfully, though the levels require you to find keys to unlock doors, they aren't the obnoxious labyrinths that you'd typically find in games of this sort.
But I have to wonder about the airplane stage. I can't say I've ever been in any passenger jet that had 15ft ceilings ;)
The graphics and the sound are awesome, too. They evoke a similar feel to old games like Shadow of the Ninja and Ninja Gaiden with its art style in that it is a traditional "pixel-art" presentation, but it has been thoroughly amped up to suit the 32-bit GBA hardware. The backgrounds sport an impressive amount of detail given the low resolution, and the character animation is some of the most impressive I've ever seen in this style of game. And the music is an interesting (but definitely an effective) mixture of NES-style PSG music with samples that's extremely well done. It's catchy, memorable, and straddles the two eras better than than a hooker on... well, never mind. I'll stop there.
Ninja Five-O was never the success it should have been, and it's sad that one of Hudson's final independently developed games - especially one as phenomenal as this one - never did better. Still, if you weren't one of the lucky few that got to experience Ninja Five-O the first time around, do yourself a favor - go play it.
*Recorded using an LCD shader in Retroarch to mimic the look of the original hardware.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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