"Ninjas! What more could you want?"

Introduction

You play as Zool the ninja who for pretty much no reason is sent to different worlds to fight evil monsters who roam the country! Lol, so it is pretty basic but I like the simplicity of some games and not having to scroll through walls and walls of text in order to finally start the game.

Gameplay: 9/10

It has the classic simple gameplay that pretty much all game boy games are infamous for. B is for jump and A is for shoot. It works very well for me, haha. Though I would always press B and while in the air, press A for Zool to do a little spin with his katana and shoot too. This took care of pretty much any surviving enemies. Talking about enemies, they are probably the weirdest kinds that I have ever seen. They range all the way from Bees to flying violins depending on which worlds you were in. I found it very interesting but, there was always a palette swap of each one so, you could get used to it real quick.

The game was actually pretty easy for me, but that was only because I had played it for hours and hours. Most of my friends had quite the difficulty with it. Enemies seemed to come from all sides in this Mario-like game and that made it a not so easy game. You could also set the difficulty so more enemies would appear, more points were required to pass the level, and less chances of a heart appearing when you destroyed the little buggers would also happen. For hardcore gamers like me, this option really got me pumped.

To enhance the simplicity to this game, they also added a few power ups and other miscellaneous items that would help little Zool in time of trouble. The white shield would give Zool a doppelganger that would follow him and copy everything he did. Very helpful to take care of those extra monsters that you didn't get yourself. The black shield gives Zool invisibility for a limited amount of time, and who couldn't use that at any moment of the game?! Either when you're going through a huge spike area or battling one of those impossible bosses you face every 3 levels I have always found it very helpful indeed. There were also tokens you could collect very much like the coins in Mario. Though, in this game, you would have to get a certain percentage of these in order to pass on to the next level. That's of course lowered as the difficulty is raised. This could would extremely annoying if I was in a hard level and not thinking about those tokens at all. Then I would have to reset. Some games just seem to hate you

Graphics/Sound: 7/10

Probably some of the best graphics I have seen for the game boy of all time!! The animation and movement of both Zool, and the monsters are simply amazing. It is surely the best 2D I have ever seen for the game boy. The design for the levels is also very tuned up but, they get kind of old after a while, in my opinion.

Now, I can't exactly say the same for sound. They play the EXACT same tune over and over and over again, throughout the entire game! It was catchy at first, but it gets really annoying after the 42nd time. At least they could have made it a different song for each world or something.

Play Time/Replayability: 6/10

I'd say around 2-5 hours depending on how good your platforming skills are. I was playing this game for days till I finally beat it and then I had no will to play it again, ever. It does have hard modes, but what's the point? You get no special price or anything, except for the score board which I guess you can brag to your friends about… or something.

Final Recommendation

This game probably suits best to people who need a short, no brainer game for a few hours. This certainly won't last you longer than that, unless you're trying to beat the world record on the score board or something.

Now, I'm not sure if this game is even obtainable at all anymore. I played it on one of those 50 games in 1 cartridge for my good old game boy. But if you were to find it, they shouldn't charge you more than a few bucks. I really enjoyed the game myself, even though it only managed to kill a half a dozen hours.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 03/19/07