There’s a tendency amongst some to analyze games by comparing them to another similar game that functions as a platonic ideal for how games of that kind should play like, but to me it’s precisely deviations from such a platonic ideal that make a game fascinating to me. Ninja Spirit/Saigo no Nindou is one such run ‘n gun game filled with minor oddities that you’d rarely see in both classic and modern run ‘n gun titles, but nonetheless ends up creating something interesting.
For one, you cannot walk while shooting. At first, this comes off as a rather arbitrary restriction. As enemies in Ninja Spirit constantly respawn from random sides of the screen, the more you stand still the more enemies get to respawn, resulting in what feels like a game with annoying staccato stop-start pacing. However, this changes when you realize that you can move and shoot at the same time while jumping.
This is where other oddities of Ninja Spirit begin to rear their head: you can hold the jump button to jump higher, but the game also has a very low gravity and weak mid-air control. Jumping is your main defensive move against enemies that cannot be shot down before they get into range, and the higher you jump the safer you are. But you must eventually come down, and the low gravity combined with weak mid-air control locks you in a weakly adjustable falling trajectory for a significant amount of time, during which you’re highly vulnerable to enemy attacks. This means that ideally you shouldn’t jump more or higher than necessary to minimize risk, but at the same time enemies and stage hazards force you to jump, and taking constant mini-risks by doing constant short hops forwards minimizes the overall time you have to spend on the respawning enemies![^1] Most of your deaths will be while falling, yet you must jump to survive. Accordingly, enemies in Ninja Spirit will attack different parts of the screen, forcing you to do short/medium/high jumps in different times and positions once multiple heavier enemies start to emergently overlap their attacks in unpredictable ways. This creates a unique player-enemy dynamic that would be nowhere as effective under standard run ‘n gun control conventions; the vulnerability of falling down would nowhere be as pronounced under higher gravity, and the player would have less reason to commit to inherently risky jumps if they could just shoot while walking.
This leads to another oddity about Ninja Spirit: most stages are almost completely flat! Stages 1 to 3 are next-to-completely flat, and only stage 4, 5 and 7 have some actual platforming going on. This sounds lazy, but remember that part of Ninja Spirit’s whole deal is jumping different heights/arcs as the situation demands: this is only any effective if you have the space to jump different heights/arcs in.[^2] The higher the floor and the lower the ceiling are, the more restricted your jumping options are. And because the stages are so wide and open, Ninja Spirit accordingly compensates by filling the screen with respawning enemies coming at you from every direction. Rather than the enemies being threatening when placed in specific spots in specific stage layouts a la Castlevania, enemies in Ninja Spirit are threatening because of the other enemies they’re combined with—taking a more Serious Sam than DOOM approach regarding enemy-level dynamics.
That is not to say Ninja Spirit does not (try to) do something interesting with its stage design, however. For example, while stage 4 has elevated floors and ceilings, it adds a twist by having enemies spawn and attack you from underneath the floor and the ceiling, and the latter half of the stage has the floor be broken up by bamboo pits that force you to advance by flipping your gravity and walking on the ceiling. However, your options are more limited on the ceiling, as you cannot jump while walking on the ceiling—pressing jump while ceiling-walking will simply make you fall back to the floor, which isn’t ideal if the floor is a bamboo pit and if the ceiling is being threatened by a heavy enemy that you cannot shoot down in time, thus making foresight a necessary skill to see if you can cross over a large pit safely.[^3] After that, stage 5 is a vertical mountain climb where the only way to progress is constantly jumping up narrow platforms, marking jumping as not just a defensive maneuver but also essential for just being able to progress at all. Moving on, stage 6 has the simplest yet most treacherous twist to the stage design: an uneven floor. Slight height variations in the layout irregularly force you to jump or fall to move forwards, which, when combined with the most intense enemy spawning the game has to offer, creates a recipe where your foresight will be pushed to its limits—doubly considering some enemies will also high jump rather than walk forwards if there’s a slight incline in their path. All the more to consider![^4]
That said, stage layouts are only one half of stage design in games--that other half being enemy placement—which in Ninja Spirit’s case may seem like haphazard chaos. Although enemies do constantly respawn from semi-random parts of the screen, Ninja Spirit does show some restraint in the type and number of enemies spawned. The enemies that constantly respawn from everywhere can all be taken out in one hit of any weapon, and the projectiles they fire can be canceled using your Sword or Kusarigama. Even though their spawn positions are semi-random, they can still be consistently dealt with using the tools at your disposal. Their function is more to add random noise to the mix and keep you on your toes while dealing with the heavy enemies, who present the bulk of the actual challenge in Ninja Spirit, as they cannot be easily burst down before they get into range. Per section, there are different enemy types that are allowed to be spawned, different limits to how many are allowed to be on screen, and different limits to what parts of the screen they’re allowed to spawn in from. There’s enough intentionality behind the enemy composition in Ninja Spirit to prevent every stage from feeling like an indistinguishable clusterfuck, even when the stage layout is just (almost) completely flat.
But, so far I’ve described Ninja Spirit more in theory—when it comes to how Ninja Spirit actually plays there are some caveats I must list. For starters, once you understand how absurdly powerful and versatile the Kusarigama is[^5], stages 1 to 3 and stage 5 can be played by and large on auto-pilot. These stages lack the environmental constraints of stage 4 and 7 or the multiple overlapping heavy enemy spawns of stage 6. A single heavy enemy spawn and the chaos created by fodder can’t really pose much of a threat to the all-mighty Kusarigama. Even if you limit yourself to using the Shuriken or the Bombs, the lack of pressure in the stage design would still persist. The boss fights also by and large lack the aspect of overlapping threats that the stages themselves can offer, with only the stage 4 boss (what with it being a 2v1 fight) and the final boss posing an exception.[^6]
One thing I’m trying to get across here is for everyone to more thoroughly examine mechanical oddities, especially when they deviate from some kind of platonic ideal for the genre. It’s easy to dismiss a game when its mechanical oddities don’t really have a narrative justification, or if some elements of it appear thoughtless. It’s easy to look at Ninja Spirit’s inability to walk while firing, its low gravity, its flat stage design, its weird air control, and conclude that you’re dealing with an unintuitive control scheme in a lazily designed game. In the name of intuitiveness, control standardization and quality-of-life improvements, these kinds of oddities that potentially enable new dynamics can easily become buried. Sure, the mechanical oddities may deviate from what makes [Trendsetter Game Most People Consider Great] great, but perhaps they also enable something new that the platonic ideal could not offer. Hence why it’s all the more important that when you criticize a game, that you should do so on its own merits, and not by how well it stacks up to something else. Nor should simply being different give something a free pass, but it certainly makes them extra worth examining.
For that reason I do recommend to everyone Ninja Spirit a look, to see how its randomly spawning chaos drives gameplay, how it manages to have Castlevania-esque committal jumps in a chaotic RNG-driven scenario, and the “enemy hell” feeling Ninja Spirit evokes by throwing legions of enemies from all directions at you. Stage 6 is really something that should be felt in person.
I do however wish that beating the game didn’t reward you with an epileptic seizure...
[^1]: The part of the game that really hammers this dynamic home is the swamp section in the second half of stage 3, where wading through the swamp (and the intensified number of enemies spawning in) slows your movement to a crawl until the monks forcing you to jump make you realize that moving forwards by bunnyhopping through the swamp lets you progress at standard speed. The swamp section is akin to Mario Bros.’ very first screen when it comes to wordlessly tutorializing an essential part of the game, which Ninja Spirit really should have done in the first stage rather than the third.
[^2]: By contrast, more typical run ‘n gun games have more limited potential jump arcs, but they compensate for it by letting you duck, and having more movement options and platform placements that help extend the possible amount of paths you can traverse on screen.
[^3]: The asymmetry of being unable to do regular jumps while walking on the ceiling and instead being forced to fall to the floor when jumping may seem like another inexplicable oddity. However, I think the developers made the right call there. In a game designed around variable commitment via variable jump heights, being able to escape over-commitment and the recovery of your slow falls by landing on the ceiling would feel like a betrayal of that, instead possibly turning a game of measured jumps into a game of ping-ponging constantly between the floor and ceiling as enemies struggle to keep up with you. Being forced to fall from the ceiling when jumping reintroduces that recovery again, turning the ceiling into more of a temporary safe haven that you can snap onto when the floor looks too hot. But because of this asymmetry you want to be walking on the floor when possible. There are good reasons to have walking on the floor and ceiling in 2D games be symmetric regarding your movement options (in Alien Soldier, this was done to maximize the player’s movement opportunities to compensate for the large player/enemy sprite already taking up most of the screen real estate), but in Ninja Spirit it’s better off being asymmetric for the aforementioned reasons.
[^4]: And then right before the final boss of Ninja Spirit there’s the infamous and abominable Ninja Pit, a section so indefensible and justly hated by everyone who lays eyes on it that we will not speak of it further, but for the sake of warning and good faith must be mentioned in passing.
[^5]: In Ninja Spirit you can freely switch between equipping your Sword, Shuriken, Bombs, and Kusarigama, which can respectively be characterized as Absolute Defense, Absolute Range, Absolute Damage, and Absolute Screen Coverage. The fact that the Kusarigama can be repeatedly whipped 240 degrees around you, cancel most enemy projectiles caught in the circle, and cover over half the screen doing so (on top of your two shadow clones echoing your Kusarigama whips as well) makes it very much too good at controlling the screen to the point where outside of specific situations there’s generally little point in using the Sword for its defensive capabilities or the Shuriken for their range. At the very least Bombs are still useful against single targets.
[^6]: The latter especially does something unique by throwing homing projectiles at you that can box you in and must have their trajectory be manipulated by your jumps. It’s actually a very cool fight once you get to grips with it, but it’s a complete bitch at first because manipulating projectile trajectories is a skill 95% of the game never expects out of you (what with the Kusarigama and Sword being able to cancel most projectiles anyways).
For one, you cannot walk while shooting. At first, this comes off as a rather arbitrary restriction. As enemies in Ninja Spirit constantly respawn from random sides of the screen, the more you stand still the more enemies get to respawn, resulting in what feels like a game with annoying staccato stop-start pacing. However, this changes when you realize that you can move and shoot at the same time while jumping.
This is where other oddities of Ninja Spirit begin to rear their head: you can hold the jump button to jump higher, but the game also has a very low gravity and weak mid-air control. Jumping is your main defensive move against enemies that cannot be shot down before they get into range, and the higher you jump the safer you are. But you must eventually come down, and the low gravity combined with weak mid-air control locks you in a weakly adjustable falling trajectory for a significant amount of time, during which you’re highly vulnerable to enemy attacks. This means that ideally you shouldn’t jump more or higher than necessary to minimize risk, but at the same time enemies and stage hazards force you to jump, and taking constant mini-risks by doing constant short hops forwards minimizes the overall time you have to spend on the respawning enemies![^1] Most of your deaths will be while falling, yet you must jump to survive. Accordingly, enemies in Ninja Spirit will attack different parts of the screen, forcing you to do short/medium/high jumps in different times and positions once multiple heavier enemies start to emergently overlap their attacks in unpredictable ways. This creates a unique player-enemy dynamic that would be nowhere as effective under standard run ‘n gun control conventions; the vulnerability of falling down would nowhere be as pronounced under higher gravity, and the player would have less reason to commit to inherently risky jumps if they could just shoot while walking.
This leads to another oddity about Ninja Spirit: most stages are almost completely flat! Stages 1 to 3 are next-to-completely flat, and only stage 4, 5 and 7 have some actual platforming going on. This sounds lazy, but remember that part of Ninja Spirit’s whole deal is jumping different heights/arcs as the situation demands: this is only any effective if you have the space to jump different heights/arcs in.[^2] The higher the floor and the lower the ceiling are, the more restricted your jumping options are. And because the stages are so wide and open, Ninja Spirit accordingly compensates by filling the screen with respawning enemies coming at you from every direction. Rather than the enemies being threatening when placed in specific spots in specific stage layouts a la Castlevania, enemies in Ninja Spirit are threatening because of the other enemies they’re combined with—taking a more Serious Sam than DOOM approach regarding enemy-level dynamics.
That is not to say Ninja Spirit does not (try to) do something interesting with its stage design, however. For example, while stage 4 has elevated floors and ceilings, it adds a twist by having enemies spawn and attack you from underneath the floor and the ceiling, and the latter half of the stage has the floor be broken up by bamboo pits that force you to advance by flipping your gravity and walking on the ceiling. However, your options are more limited on the ceiling, as you cannot jump while walking on the ceiling—pressing jump while ceiling-walking will simply make you fall back to the floor, which isn’t ideal if the floor is a bamboo pit and if the ceiling is being threatened by a heavy enemy that you cannot shoot down in time, thus making foresight a necessary skill to see if you can cross over a large pit safely.[^3] After that, stage 5 is a vertical mountain climb where the only way to progress is constantly jumping up narrow platforms, marking jumping as not just a defensive maneuver but also essential for just being able to progress at all. Moving on, stage 6 has the simplest yet most treacherous twist to the stage design: an uneven floor. Slight height variations in the layout irregularly force you to jump or fall to move forwards, which, when combined with the most intense enemy spawning the game has to offer, creates a recipe where your foresight will be pushed to its limits—doubly considering some enemies will also high jump rather than walk forwards if there’s a slight incline in their path. All the more to consider![^4]
That said, stage layouts are only one half of stage design in games--that other half being enemy placement—which in Ninja Spirit’s case may seem like haphazard chaos. Although enemies do constantly respawn from semi-random parts of the screen, Ninja Spirit does show some restraint in the type and number of enemies spawned. The enemies that constantly respawn from everywhere can all be taken out in one hit of any weapon, and the projectiles they fire can be canceled using your Sword or Kusarigama. Even though their spawn positions are semi-random, they can still be consistently dealt with using the tools at your disposal. Their function is more to add random noise to the mix and keep you on your toes while dealing with the heavy enemies, who present the bulk of the actual challenge in Ninja Spirit, as they cannot be easily burst down before they get into range. Per section, there are different enemy types that are allowed to be spawned, different limits to how many are allowed to be on screen, and different limits to what parts of the screen they’re allowed to spawn in from. There’s enough intentionality behind the enemy composition in Ninja Spirit to prevent every stage from feeling like an indistinguishable clusterfuck, even when the stage layout is just (almost) completely flat.
But, so far I’ve described Ninja Spirit more in theory—when it comes to how Ninja Spirit actually plays there are some caveats I must list. For starters, once you understand how absurdly powerful and versatile the Kusarigama is[^5], stages 1 to 3 and stage 5 can be played by and large on auto-pilot. These stages lack the environmental constraints of stage 4 and 7 or the multiple overlapping heavy enemy spawns of stage 6. A single heavy enemy spawn and the chaos created by fodder can’t really pose much of a threat to the all-mighty Kusarigama. Even if you limit yourself to using the Shuriken or the Bombs, the lack of pressure in the stage design would still persist. The boss fights also by and large lack the aspect of overlapping threats that the stages themselves can offer, with only the stage 4 boss (what with it being a 2v1 fight) and the final boss posing an exception.[^6]
One thing I’m trying to get across here is for everyone to more thoroughly examine mechanical oddities, especially when they deviate from some kind of platonic ideal for the genre. It’s easy to dismiss a game when its mechanical oddities don’t really have a narrative justification, or if some elements of it appear thoughtless. It’s easy to look at Ninja Spirit’s inability to walk while firing, its low gravity, its flat stage design, its weird air control, and conclude that you’re dealing with an unintuitive control scheme in a lazily designed game. In the name of intuitiveness, control standardization and quality-of-life improvements, these kinds of oddities that potentially enable new dynamics can easily become buried. Sure, the mechanical oddities may deviate from what makes [Trendsetter Game Most People Consider Great] great, but perhaps they also enable something new that the platonic ideal could not offer. Hence why it’s all the more important that when you criticize a game, that you should do so on its own merits, and not by how well it stacks up to something else. Nor should simply being different give something a free pass, but it certainly makes them extra worth examining.
For that reason I do recommend to everyone Ninja Spirit a look, to see how its randomly spawning chaos drives gameplay, how it manages to have Castlevania-esque committal jumps in a chaotic RNG-driven scenario, and the “enemy hell” feeling Ninja Spirit evokes by throwing legions of enemies from all directions at you. Stage 6 is really something that should be felt in person.
I do however wish that beating the game didn’t reward you with an epileptic seizure...
[^1]: The part of the game that really hammers this dynamic home is the swamp section in the second half of stage 3, where wading through the swamp (and the intensified number of enemies spawning in) slows your movement to a crawl until the monks forcing you to jump make you realize that moving forwards by bunnyhopping through the swamp lets you progress at standard speed. The swamp section is akin to Mario Bros.’ very first screen when it comes to wordlessly tutorializing an essential part of the game, which Ninja Spirit really should have done in the first stage rather than the third.
[^2]: By contrast, more typical run ‘n gun games have more limited potential jump arcs, but they compensate for it by letting you duck, and having more movement options and platform placements that help extend the possible amount of paths you can traverse on screen.
[^3]: The asymmetry of being unable to do regular jumps while walking on the ceiling and instead being forced to fall to the floor when jumping may seem like another inexplicable oddity. However, I think the developers made the right call there. In a game designed around variable commitment via variable jump heights, being able to escape over-commitment and the recovery of your slow falls by landing on the ceiling would feel like a betrayal of that, instead possibly turning a game of measured jumps into a game of ping-ponging constantly between the floor and ceiling as enemies struggle to keep up with you. Being forced to fall from the ceiling when jumping reintroduces that recovery again, turning the ceiling into more of a temporary safe haven that you can snap onto when the floor looks too hot. But because of this asymmetry you want to be walking on the floor when possible. There are good reasons to have walking on the floor and ceiling in 2D games be symmetric regarding your movement options (in Alien Soldier, this was done to maximize the player’s movement opportunities to compensate for the large player/enemy sprite already taking up most of the screen real estate), but in Ninja Spirit it’s better off being asymmetric for the aforementioned reasons.
[^4]: And then right before the final boss of Ninja Spirit there’s the infamous and abominable Ninja Pit, a section so indefensible and justly hated by everyone who lays eyes on it that we will not speak of it further, but for the sake of warning and good faith must be mentioned in passing.
[^5]: In Ninja Spirit you can freely switch between equipping your Sword, Shuriken, Bombs, and Kusarigama, which can respectively be characterized as Absolute Defense, Absolute Range, Absolute Damage, and Absolute Screen Coverage. The fact that the Kusarigama can be repeatedly whipped 240 degrees around you, cancel most enemy projectiles caught in the circle, and cover over half the screen doing so (on top of your two shadow clones echoing your Kusarigama whips as well) makes it very much too good at controlling the screen to the point where outside of specific situations there’s generally little point in using the Sword for its defensive capabilities or the Shuriken for their range. At the very least Bombs are still useful against single targets.
[^6]: The latter especially does something unique by throwing homing projectiles at you that can box you in and must have their trajectory be manipulated by your jumps. It’s actually a very cool fight once you get to grips with it, but it’s a complete bitch at first because manipulating projectile trajectories is a skill 95% of the game never expects out of you (what with the Kusarigama and Sword being able to cancel most projectiles anyways).