This article is sponsored by CFK.
It’s amazing what independent developers can do, isn’t it? We usually see one-person developers working on cozy living simulators, spending years perfecting the music and harvesting small-town vibes, easily transporting you into their bucolic, laid-back world that makes you take a deep breath, Smell the proverbial (and literal) flower. But this is not the case in “Ninja Issen”. No, far from it.
In Ninja Issen, indie developer Asteroid-J has been hard at work on an action-platformer that harkens back to the early days of video games—a time when pixels ruled and all you needed was 2D. Make your heart beat faster and your palms sweat. , side view of a screen filled with lasers and unstable ledges.
Ninja Issen is a throwback to that era, but it draws on all the lessons learned over the decades. It’s fast, intense, and fun; gone are the shocking load times, eliminating the quality-of-life issues that memory constraints bring to games. In 2023, Ninja Fighter proves that this pixel platformer can reach the lofty heights of its predecessors, and may be a game you end up comparing to Ninja or Ninja Gaiden. High praise indeed.
Ninja Issen, launching on Nintendo Switch and PC at the end of November, puts you in the water with a lengthy (and quite lengthy!) tutorial section, handing the reigns over to your cyberpunk ninja protagonist as you run wild. It feels ironic; aware of all the tropes that make the genre as irreverent and relevant as it is today, but all done with a tongue-in-cheek charm that knows a lot.
The game is pretty difficult, but in a fun way (not in a “let’s send you to the beginning of the game and start over” way). For players with slightly less dexterous fingers, there are plenty of checkpoints and continuations, and a compelling story of revenge, robotic body augmentation, and teaming up to take on something bigger than it initially appears will drive you forward, even through Trickier things are in various parts of the game.
Because we’ve all been liberated from the constraints of proper logic from the Mega Drive/Genesis era (despite what aesthetics say about that), the game gives you a cool set of tools to do your wet work; you can do whatever you want with it Jump, blink, summon fireballs, double jump, dodge, cloak and hail shuriken. You’ll need to do all of the above if you want to progress, thanks to a rogues’ gallery of interesting enemies who want to see your ninja journey cut short.
If you’re craving a game where ninjas run up the side of a building, dispatch a warehouse full of heavily armed bad guys, and then ride an elevator to reach an impressively behemoth boss, then you can’t do better than Ninja Issen game already – you can even try out the first few levels
Even the soundtrack seems to be taking a cue from Yuzo Koshiro and his impeccable Streets of Rage -era music. It’s a love letter to retro gaming that will make you feel like you’re holding an old Sega game pad, slogging your way through the neon-lit streets while staring at a CRT TV at 3am. As you struggle to end this nostalgic experience. There is no sounder advice than this.
Ninja Fight is now available on PC via Steam and Nintendo Switch.
