Revenge of the Ninja

released on Dec 31, 1984

The game tells the story of a skilled and daring teenage ninja named Hayate, infiltrating an evil castle in an attempt to rescue a princess he loves. Hayate must survive a collection of deathtraps and defeat a variety of mythological creatures and other adversaries on his quest to save the princess and destroy the castle.


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Is it Dragon's Lair with a Japanese skin? Yes. Is that a bad thing? No.

Revenge of the Ninja (aka Ninja Hayate) is one of those FMV games like Dragon's Lair, except instead of being a knight out to save a princess from a dragon you're a ninja guy out to save a princess from an evil samurai dude who turns into King Ghidorah. A better theme imo.

This is one of the SCD games I remember playing a ton back in the day along with Robo Aleste (rip my childhood copies wherever they went), I think it's pretty fun even if my nostalgia is probably upping the rating a bit. The difficulty settings are pretty fucked though, easy difficulty is a bit too easy, medium is too hard, and hard mode literally just removes the directional/button prompts entirely for text that says "action!". I guess if you ever play the game so much that you literally memorize every scene you could attempt "hard mode", but good god man. Fuck that shit.

The anime scenes I think look alright, and animate pretty well for what it is (ignoring the obvious compression from SCD). The death screens for the most part aren't super hilarious to watch though, most of them are just Hayate screaming like a wuss, which on the bright side at least provides comic relief when you lose a life. I think the only big complaint I have with the actual animation is that Hayate doesn't really look enough like a ninja, or at least the image of what I expect a ninja to look like.

There's also a really bullshit end to one scene where you need to pick the correct door out of three, and there's no indication of which one is correct since the left/top/right arrows all go off at once. I lost two lives to it, it was pretty much the only reason I had to use a continue when I played this. Well, it WAS in the arcade originally...

Pretty fun game to finally come back to! Glad I first played it on easy!

Published by the American branch of Telenet Japan, Renovation Products, this Mega CD port of Ninja Hayate is weirdly US exclusive despite the traditional Japan theme. Like the classic Time Gal (another Taito game), and Data East's Road Avenger and Cobra Command, Revenge of the Ninja was ported by Wolf Team. It's another very competent job, even if the game itself is more forgettable than the others.

If you're not familiar with that style of interactive movies, it's basically a QTE game. You've got button prompts appearing on the screen (here's it's the four directions and an action button), and if you don't press it in time, say goodbye to one life. It sounds simple but you'll probably need some memorization to beat Revenge of the Ninja since the timing is quite strict. It took me a while to figure it out and I almost gave up, but after playing a bit more it suddenly clicked and I managed to beat it. Well it's quite short after all, there's 19 "levels" (scenes would be more appropriate) but some end very quickly. If you want a real challenge there's also a hard mode that disables the button prompts (yeah, screw that).

The original Laserdisc game was animated by Toei and it looks good even after being butchered by the Mega CD video compression. There's a bit of a Lupin the Third influence with its goofy ninja protagonist infiltrating an evil castle and barely staying alive, but compared to the inventiveness of Time Gal or the hectic first-person action of Road Avenger, it's quite dull. Wolf Team did improve it by adding music (composed by Shinji Tamura) since the original arcade version had none!

A decent FMV game, but not the most exciting offering in an already very niche genre.