Retro Review Ep. 22 - NINJA BOY 2
03 / 5 Stars
A strange combination of JRPG and beat-em-up that I played relentlessly as a child without ever really making very much progress.
The storyline is charming in a way that only a completely nonsensical plot can be; Ninjas saved the world [in the previous game, presumably] so they decide to take a vacation in outer space, only to be shot down by a ship that looks like it belongs in the Battletoads franchise...now they must planet hop across the Marco Polo Clustar [not a typo] to stop the evil galaxy pirates.
Gameplay is pretty straightforward as you march across the overworld of each planet in turn, learning the tiniest nuggets of lore necessary to point you in the direction of the next objective...generally, each planet seems to consist of visiting a town, talking to a person, and then going to a "dungeon" (i.e. a maze filled with monsters) in order to fight a boss and get a treasure. When you get all the treasures, supposedly you can do a thing to stop the baddies. All of this is well and good, but I don't think anyone is playing this game for the script.
The standout feature of this game IMHO is that while the encounters occur in the standard JRPG style (walk across ground until screen flashes and enemies appear), the combat itself is a weird platforming/beat-em-up that seems to be inspired by games like River City Ransom...using the layout of each battlefield to your advantage, you can punch, somersault, and use various ninja magics to defeat a set number of foes in order to bring the battle to a close. Enemies fill various archetypes (standard goon, guy with gun, impossible to hit flying creature, etc.) and as their levels go up each enemy type learns new moves and becomes more aggressive, with later enemies throwing you curveballs like having stretchy necks that change their hit boxes, or the ability to teleport. While there are a few enemies who are very nearly impossible to beat without abusing certain ninja abilities (which cost MP), the combat generally strikes a good balance between fun and goofy, though there is the standard amount of jank from an original GB title made by a third-party developer.
Unfortunately the game's fun factor is (for me at least) completely destroyed by the combination of A) enemies which require expenditure of mana to have a CHANCE of defeating OR escaping from, B) no clear way to restore mana outside of resting in towns, and C) possibly the most aggressively toxic encounter rate I have ever seen. I'm talking battles taking place a single step outside of town, or even (in one case) as I actually ENTERED a town. You can take a single step, get into a fight, take another step, and get into ANOTHER fight. I have literally had cases where I set off for a dungeon and a bad run of nasty encounters caused me to have to return to town and heal before I even lost sight of the town...and I was not skipping around or under-levelled in any way.
As near as I can tell, this game is an "honest" 6-10 hour experience, but the developers instituted an insane encounter rate with very low returns on experience and money as a way to push the length of the game...in my 4 hour playthrough, I cleared roughly 1/2 the planets in the game without an insane amount of grinding, only to hit a brick wall that would have required another (by my estimate) 2-3 hours of levelling to overcome.
Charming, but I'm not a fan of spending as much time levelling as I do playing the actual game, so it's a mixed bag for me...maybe I'll play it again (for some reason this game has a HOLD on my psyche), but it won't be something I come back to in the future like so many other 90s games from my childhood.
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