The Last Ninja

"If you've got a NTSC NES and a few dollars to spare, you owe it to yourself to give The Last Ninja a chance."

With 128-bit consoles soon to become obsolete, it must be increasingly difficult to understand how games like The Last Ninja, which celebrates its 17th birthday this year, can continue to stay relevant to the gaming community. Video games have advanced immensely - and continue to do so - in all respects since the 8-bit era, so it's a genuine surprise that this groundbreaking masterpiece, which has, in my opinion, remained unsurpassed to this day, was made so early on in the videogaming history. In order to understand this, looking for decontextualised elements of perfection proves pointless: The Last Ninja isn't about its isometric graphics, suspenseful music, or fantastic game design. What sets it apart from 99.9% of games is the poignant social commentary that permeates the game and the experience it succeeds to convey, namely the surreal rude awakening of a ninja from feudal Japan having found himself in late 1980's New York City. This experience is, or rather used to be, paralleled by the experience of the contemporary gaming public coming in contact with a game so dramatically superior to anything they had seen before - The Last Ninja was the first and one of the very few games to have received a perfect score from several gaming magazines.

The Last Ninja is a fittingly stern graphical adventure that takes itself very seriously, allowing for a rather menacing mood, though slightly less so on the NES as most drug-related scenes had to be toned down or completely removed to comply with Nintendo's family-oriented policy. Such serious tone was a logical decision by the design team; had the game been pitched in a different way, the premise would have probably seemed improbable, possibly even with a comedic, fish-out-of-water effect. The way it was done, we neither question the sparse story line of the ninja Armakuni having been sent forward in time by the evil Shogun nor do we regard it as a cheap page-turner gone digital. Indeed, the discreet bizarreness of the game's six stages and the enemies that our protagonist meets, such as the deadly juggler and a swarm of killer bees only in the game's opening, make all the difference between just another game, however good, and a metaphysical odyssey that is The Last Ninja thanks to the revolutionary vision of its programmers.

Most of us have played games with brilliant concepts that were ruined by poor execution, and if this was the case with The Last Ninja, it really would've broken my heart. Fortunately, the game is as much a technical tour de force as it is a design marvel having pioneered the isometric perspective that provides a breathtaking visual backdrop, and the control scheme that allows navigation to be intuitive and combat to be complex. This alone makes The Last Ninja a winner, yet System 3 went further and interspersed the interactive environments with unobtrusive puzzles that elevate the gameplay to a higher level but don't get in the way of the action. Furthermore, the enemies are beautifully animated - just watch their head fly back when they get hit in the face - and display excellent AI and various degrees of hostility. The game also keeps track of all their energy levels, and when they die, they don't flash three times and disappear like in most games well into the 16-bit age; instead, their bodies remain there for the rest of the level. I was slightly disappointed to see the combat having been simplified compared to the original, Commodore 64 version even though it doesn't hurt the game too much. Overall, the unforgiving, yet never unfair play mechanics, absolutely flawless collision detection, and a very orthodox approach to puzzles slowly build up the atmosphere that culminates in a catharsis in the final stage.

It's a pity that NES is graphically underpowered to the extent that much of the graphical detail had to be lost in the conversion. Personally, I rarely find this a problem but in the case of The Last Ninja, the achievements of the design team are scandalously underrepresented. Having said that, the game never looks overly crude - quite the contrary, actually, which once again proves that ugliness is never a matter of bit-count. NES players can thus marvel at the taste and attention to detail with which The Last Ninja's contemporary settings had been rendered despite their console's limiting hardware: it feels as if the game had a dedicated set designer. This is precisely what enables the relative primitive graphics to actually enhance the magic by having your imagination breathe life and the necessary mystique into the game's environments instead of the graphics engine, which still tends to falter under the load in modern games.

All this praise may come across as demented ravings of an 8-bit nostalgic, yet The Last Ninja is one of the very few "retro" games which players still talk about with respect and reverence rather than condescension; I wish I'd been around at the time to experience the impact the game made at the time of its release first-hand. It's important to stress that anyone having a go at the game for the first time out of curiosity (be advised that the NES port of The Last Ninja was only released in NTSC format) may well fail to see what all the fuss is about, and further doubt my sanity. If, on the other hand, you are able to tune into the ninja magic, you're in for an amazing transcendental journey.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 06/06/05, Updated 06/09/05