GOTD 6/5/2016: Ninja Crusaders (NES)

[celerystalker]

As has been mentioned, you could hardly go to a gas station in the '80s without getting harassed by ninjas hopping all over the place. Things got so out of hand that video game companies began making games in which players could endlessly rush ninjas into certain doom to gain some semblance of catharsis. Ninja Crusaders on the NES is one such game; a side scrolling action platformer in the vein of Ninja Gaiden in which players would take their ninja avatars and rush head-long into a sea of robots and mutants armed only with some very basic weaponry.

Actually, Ninja Crusaders, while similar in many ways to Tecmo's classic series, does some cool stuff to be different. There are no secondary weapons or ninja arts to use, but you can switch between four main weapons by picking up the corresponding icons. Ninja stars have great range, but are, of course, weak. The chain sickle has slightly shorter range, but attacks slightly higher. The sword is powerful with a chest-high attack, and the staff attacks at waist height with excellent power. More interesting is that picking up a duplicate of the weapon you currently are using grants you an extra life, givinga lot of opportunities for a 1cc clear if you stick with one weapon. Perhaps best, though, is that Ninja Crusaders allows two player simultaneous co-op, adding a Contra-like feel to a ninja action game, which is pretty sweet.

There are five main levels separated into two stages each in Ninja Crusaders. For the first four levels, there is a boss at the end of the second stage, and the final level has a boss at the end of each individual stage. Stages are pretty brief, but have a lot of variety in color schemes and graphics for the backgrounds. Enemies also continue to change up, making for a fairly short, but nicely varied adventure. The sprites look good and the control is spot on, making for one of the better co-op games on the NES that doesn't get a ton of love. I like it a lot.

Played this one? Any good co-op stories?

[Az]

I haven't sunk a lot of time into this one, but for what I did it was weird that you could use the bird transformation to fly over waayyy too much of a level.

[celerystalker]

I haven't sunk a lot of time into this one, but for what I did it was weird that you could use the bird transformation to fly over waayyy too much of a level.

Ha, you know what's terrible? I played through it tonight and had forgotten about the transformations! It's easy to begin with, but, yeah, the transformations are game-breaking.

[bb_hood]

Havent played this one much, I plan on beating it soon.
The speed record for beating this game at SDA is 4:46. I would say yeah the transformations probably break the game.

[drunk3nj3sus]

The transformations do kinda make the game way easier in parts but you can see what they were going for because some of the bosses sorta require you to have a certain transformation or weapon. I recently played through this for the first time a few weeks ago on that new 150 in 1 cart think I got to like the end of the fourth world or beginning of the fifth it gets sorta cheap towards the end so I gave up on it. Didn't even realize it has 2 player co-op I'll have to give that a shot that's pretty rare for a NES platformer.

An underrated game that this is really similar to is Totally Rad which has a better take on the transformation concept although its a bit more of a run and gun. NES prices are strange I was going to list totally rad as a really cheap alternative to this but I looked it up before posting and it's now a $20 game I paid a little over $5-$7 just like a year or two ago.