The Last Ninja (NES) Playthrough
289A playthrough of Jaleco's 1991 action-adventure game for the NES, The Last Ninja.
If you were to ask Commodore 64 fans what they thought of System 3's The Last Ninja games, chances are that the majority would respond with a lot of enthusiasm. The multi-layered gameplay, cutting edge graphics, and fantastic music earned the series a huge following. The first two games in the series won several GOTY awards, and between their various ports, the trilogy ended up selling over twelve million units.
Ask NES fans the same question, though - or at least, had you asked the question before James Rolfe brought the Nintendo game to the forefront - and you'd get a very different answer. A handful would say that they loved it on the computer, another handful would shoot you a look of thinly veiled disgust, and the rest would give you a vacant stare.
The series begins as Kunitoki, a shogun scheming to steal the sacred ninjutsu scrolls of Koga, lays a trap that wipes out an entire ninja clan... at least, so he thinks. In that moment, the lone warrior who had stayed behind to guard the clan's shrine, a man named Armakuni, became The Last Ninja.
The first game follows Armakuni as he makes his way to Kunitoki's palace where he avenges his fallen brothers.
Some time later, Armakuni is busy training a new generation of ninja when he's suddenly sucked into a portal created by Kunitoki and flung several centuries into the future. Armakuni now finds himself prowling the streets of modern day New York City in pursuit of his nemesis, thus kicking off Last Ninja 2: Back With a Vengeance.
The Last Ninja on the NES was a US-exclusive port of the C64 version of Last Ninja 2, originally released back in 1988. It's an isometric adventure game that mixes platforming with puzzle-solving and beat 'em up mechanics, and it all looks and feels quite novel and exotic as far as NES games go. There's nothing else quite like it on the platform.
But based on how it turned out, that shouldn't come as too big a surprise. The C64 and the NES were (very) roughly comparable in terms of power, and both platforms shone when running software that had been tailored to their respective strengths.
Last Ninja 2 was built to take full advantage of the C64's hardware, and it did many things that simply weren't feasible on the NES. The game's detailed environments shown from an isometric perspective, its odd-sized tiles, and heavy use of raster effects were not things that translated well, if at all, to the NES hardware, but instead of creating a similar game that played to the NES's own strengths, Beam attempted to recreate every aspect of the original C64 game for the console.
It was a noble attempt, but it failed miserably.
To be fair, all the stages are here (albeit with a few simplifications) and if you haven't seen the original C64 game, then the novelty of the presentation might even impress you a bit. The graphics are the strongest part of the whole package.
The facade doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny, though. The graphic detail has been cut way back, the music has been butchered, and the skewed perspective is pretty much a game-breaker: the details in the tiled graphics don't properly align from one side of the screen to the other, so you can't rely on the visuals when you're trying to jump over hazards. The jumps over the river at the end of the first stage are a perfect example of this problem - they can only be mastered through trial-and-error and memorization.
The collision detection is pretty awful, too. It feels like a matter of luck when you manage to hit an enemy, and you can't pick up items unless you're standing exactly in the right place, though the sweet spot changes from item to item.
You may also correctly figure out a solution to a puzzle only to dismiss it moments later because it didn't work the first six times you tried it. The last boss is especially nasty in that regard. Those candles are brutal... just like the password system. How can a game this simple require such an insanely long password?
It's not totally without its fun, though. You do get to burn a sewer gator to death with a molotov cocktail and poison a puma by feeding it a drumstick coated in opium.
I tried to like it for the longest time, but there's no way to sugarcoat a mess like The Last Ninja on NES. If the game looks like something that might appeal to you, do yourself a huge favor and play the Commodore 64 version instead.
(lt's worth mentioning that this is still a damned sight better than BttF 2&3.
Does anyone else think it's funny that Kunitoki's name makes him sound like a Japanese lemonade company?
You know, because 国=country and 時=time?
... fine, I know it's lame. Still made me laugh.)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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