FGC #708 Super Ninja Boy

Empirical Fact: Super Ninja Boy represents the absolute worst of early 90’s gaming.

What is Super Ninja Boy?

First, there was Kung-Fu Heroes, a 1984 arcade title that migrated over to the NES by 1989. It was a top-down beat ‘em up that unfortunately had to share the spotlight with games that were tremendously more playable. It has about as much cultural impact as She’s the Sheriff. Kung-Fu Heroes’ 1991 sequel was Little Ninja Brothers. This added significant RPG elements to the mix. And to be clear for modern audiences, this was not “oh, you can level up now” RPG elements, this was straight up “you have to go to the town and sleep in the inn” RPG elements. Aside from the battle scenes, this was indistinguishable from Dragon Quest. But! Those battle scenes were very distinguished, and they reverted to a top-down beat ‘em up style reminiscent of Kung-Fu Heroes. Isn’t that new and novel? Super Ninja Boy, released at the absolute end of 1991 in Japan (December 28!), but not until 1993 in America, is basically Little Ninja Brothers upgraded for Nintendo’s superest system. Oh, and since we were now on new hardware, those beat ‘em up battle scenes could be much closer to Final Fight than The Legend of Zelda. This is where the problems begin…

Why is this Combat Garbage?

The early 90’s was practically the age of beat ‘em ups. You could fight along with The Simpsons, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Lee Brothers, and still have time to get home and beat up unruly citizens with Mike Haggar. Even back in (approximately) 1992, you already had a thousand beat ‘em up options. And you could easily identify what worked! Maybe it was jump kicks, maybe it was barrels full of food, or maybe it was co-op, but there were beat ‘em ups that were objectively good. Ape the best, and you were guaranteed a hit of haymaker efficacy.

Unfortunately, Super Ninja Boy patently refused to learn from the greats.

It’s a beat ‘em up: you walk around the screen, you punch everything that isn’t you (or a color-swap of you [except one time]). The basics are there. However, there are five significant problems with the beat ‘em up beats of Super Ninja Boy:

1. Throwing is vastly overpowered. Assuming you do not mess up and throw an enemy at yourself (because you are corner-hogging), 90% of your opponents can be infinitely tossed back and forth.
2. Speaking of throwing, “hazards” like pits do not appear to do anything. Or, if they do something, it is impossible to tell, as the exact same monster will quickly respawn, with no life bar or indication that taking a dip did anything. Thus, you are quickly trained to practically babysit your opponents to save them from falling into pitfalls.
3. Sometimes opponents just have moves where they are invincible and zoom back and forth. Please sit quietly until those animations are completed.
4. Your “jump kick” automatically activates when jumping, and has a hit box that basically exists where your Super Ninja Boy lands back on the ground. I am telling you this because the “jump kick” has no animation, and there is no reason to believe your jump has offensive abilities. But! This move is essential for grounding flying enemies.
5. And our biggest issue: while there are many different kinds of monsters with vaguely interesting and varied looks, they all boil down to three different attack patterns. For the entire game.

So, yes, the beat ‘em up gameplay is not great from minute one, and it gets repetitive before you complete your first dungeon. And that plays poorly with…

Why is the Encounter Rate set to “Always”?

This is the game your mommy warned you about:

In Super Ninja Boy, you can (and will) face situations where a random battle occurs half a step after your last fight. There are two, maybe three different configurations of opponents for each dungeon/area, and you will deal with these same critters as often as you blink. As a result, even the vaunted author of this article started running from encounters before confronting the first boss. And I never run! I was trained by Final Fantasy 5 at a young age to not be a chicken! But, inevitably, you will need a break from the repetition, and you will run too.

The purpose of encounters in an RPG of this era was to “wear you down” and encourage important decisions about item/magic management. But once you marry that kind of thinking to a beat ‘em up… Well… You start to feel like an asshole. You can make it through every one of these encounters without taking a hit. But you probably won’t, because you, the player, have your own stamina meter, and you are going to start making careless mistakes after fighting your 5,000th exact-same-as-last-time goblin. Super Ninja Boy quickly becomes a grueling gauntlet, but not in a fun, Gauntlet-like way. This is a gauntlet in a “the TPS reports need to be on the boss’s desk by tomorrow morning and I’m going to have to spend all night doing real live math” way. And that’s not fun! That’s work! This game is work!

And it’s work you have to do, because…

Why are there RPG battles, too?

You fight random battles because they give you experience points and gold. You use experience points and gold to get better stats through leveling up and purchasing new equipment. But! As any modern action game will tell you, you do not need to level up if you are just that good. You can be Level Zero through the entirety of a true action RPG, because only having three health points does not matter if you can dodge every attack. Just ask Sora! Or Teddy Tarnished! But if you include even one battle where you must be hit, you encounter the Super Metroid issue of an entire game being conquerable with low levels except one particular spot. Nobody likes to be routed at the last minute by some mandatory monster that demands more e-tanks.

And Super Ninja Boy does that four different times.

It is impossible to describe how much this is both weird and bad. On the weird front: why did they bother? Why program an entire RPG battle system for the purpose of four boss fights that comprise 1% of the playtime? Yes, they are memorable set pieces that emphasize the “boss” nature of the big boys, but they could have just, like, made a slightly bigger sprite. I remember every Krang I ever fought, and those toitles didn’t have to switch genres to get there.

And on the bad front? Well, these fights at least toss you a second player, so you theoretically have an extra party member to work healing and defense to your offense. Or you can just ignore that you have a “party”, because the designers certainly did, and you will both be frozen in place for half of any battle. “Status effects” are the only real gameplay quirk added to the RPG battles, and they all make things last longer than you can imagine. Sit around and wait while your boys are paralyzed! Throw punches that register as misses for friend and foe alike, so an entire round is wasted. Witness attacks that are doing “extra” damage, but was that a random critical hit or a hint to a boss’s weak point? Who knows! Doing anything but choosing fight over and over again proves to be a waste of your time, so why would you try to strategize? Use the thunder sword? No! Just gonna keep punching, because sometimes it instantly kills everybody.

Oh, right, I should probably address that.

Super Ninja Boy Does Not Care, Why Should I?

It is an RPG, so there is equipment. And one of your possible weapons is the HYPNOBLOW. You can earn this attack through a game of chance after the first chapter of the game, or you can outright buy one from a “hidden” (not very hidden) shop a little further along. The HYPNOBLOW increases your attack power, but, more importantly, it also has an instant death chance on practically every hit. This makes most random battles a matter of just waiting until the instant death activates. Hooray! Unfortunately, it also neuters practically every combat moment from that point on, as HYPNOBLOW even works on the final boss. And that jerk has two different forms! You are unlikely to ever see his second form, because HYPNOBLOW might blow him sky-high on the first turn.

Why is this even possible? Why is 90% of this game based on combat, and then there’s an item that makes combat not matter? Is it a trick? Is it a reward? Why am I still thinking about all the ways this game is a dedicated waste of time!?

Why is this also a Platformer?

Even if you have mastered the HYPNOBLOW, combat is not absolutely everything. There are 2-D action sequences, too! You know the deal: run, jump, try to avoid spikes. There is even a redux of the Bubble Man Stage because no one responsible for this crap has the tiniest bit of shame. It is an early 90’s game, so of course there is a minecart-esque section, too. And it all controls like garbage, because the physics of this world are intended for Bad Dudes, not Mario Brothers. But these sections are unavoidable, filled with instant death, and usually stuck right before a difficult or exhausting area. So you will probably have to repeat the whole thing over the course of multiple deaths. Just had to wedge one more genre in there!

So Super Ninja Boy has platforming, beat ‘em up, and RPG genres all sewn together into some terrible mishmash. What else has it got to make it the absolute worst of its gaming generation?

Why is there no Save Battery?

Dammit!

What could have happened with this Localization?

But maybe the Japanese version had a save battery. That was a pretty common issue back in the expensive cartridge days of the Nintendo and Super Nintendo: most games were not long enough to warrant saving, and nobody wanted to jack up prices to accommodate save features. So we will just do a little search for Super Ninja Boy in Japan and… Oh… It is titled Super Chinese World over there? It is part of the Super Chinese franchise? Wow. Okay, I can see why that got changed when it was shipped over to America…

And what else got changed? Practically everything.

Miraculously, there is not much documented history on the creation and localization of Super Ninja Boy. We do not know why any of this happened. But we do know that it happened, because Super Ninja Boy not only had a modified script by the time it hit the West, someone had also redone nearly all of the graphics across the Super Chinese World. Take a look at one town comparison…

(Maps found at VGmaps.com. There was no way in hell I was playing this game twice to capture Japanese images)

Here is Cactus Village. As you can guess, it is Native American themed. Nothing is particularly improved by the change between versions here. Additionally, in 90’s Japan or America, there is not anything culturally different that must be modified for different sensibilities. However, if you look closely, you will notice that the localized version of Cactus Village does not contain any cacti.

And this is the localization over and over again: sometimes things look a little better, but the modified graphics often miss the point of an area entirely. Ghoul Land looks appropriately ruined (by Ghouls) in Japan, but the American version is merely vaguely “off”.

(Maps found at VGmaps.com. There was still no way in hell I was playing this game twice to capture Japanese images)

You get that this was supposed to be a derelict town, localizers? Did you understand the assignment at all? I know you guys went overboard when even English was already involved…

Last time I’ll say it: Maps found at VGmaps.com.

So why these weird changes? We can all understand why anti-religious symbolism Nintendo would demand that churches become convenience stores (they’re practically the same thing in reality, right?). But modifying practically every tile in the game for no obvious benefit is a phenomenally odd choice. It makes America look bad, Culture Brain!

Bah! There must be something else to focus on in Super Ninja Boy…

Do you like constantly playing Match Games?

No! You can’t make me play this ever again! Never!

FGC #708 Super Ninja Boy

• System: It’s Super Ninja Boy, so it is a Super Nintendo game. This bad boy also popped up on the WiiU Virtual Console, and is now part of the Nintendo Switch SNES Classics. It is in no way a classic.
• Number of players: I played this with a buddy back when it was new! 2-Players make the beat ‘em up sections vaguely easier, but friendly fire is involved. The platforming with two players is atrocious. So, ya know, another department where this game fails.
• Goggle Bob Fact: I rented this one a few (hundred) times when I was a kid, because it was two players, and my number one player two and I could not resist ninja of all shapes and sizes. We kind of identified the game as “not good”, but we were still more likely to play it than Gradius 3. And it was two players! Even Final Fight wasn’t two players back then! That meant a lot… Even if we never got past the first (RPG) boss. Leveling is hard.
• Say something nice: All of the sprites are very expressive, and the monsters can be visually varied and interesting. I want to say “can be”, because there are more than a few color swaps and head switches in there. But when you get a flying boat filled with random animals dropping bombs as an opponent, that’s something special.
• Say something neutral: Super Ninja Boy’s world has no cohesion… but in a fun, Super Mario Bros. 3 kind of way. Sure, the mushroom forest of fairy people is three inches from That’s Just China, and Technopolis is seven inches away from a Native American Reservation, but at least these are interesting areas to randomly scatter about. It is dumb from a story perspective, but the Sunken City of Moo is a nice place to visit.
• How bad is that encounter rate: There are mandatory monorails that you must ride between overworld “futuristic” areas. You have absolutely no control over the movement of your characters during these parts, as it is basically just riding a train. And, yes, you still get a random encounter every three tiles or so.
• Gaming the Game: The password system does have one benefit over a save battery: there are a few passwords available that are merely two characters, and unlock distinct points in the plot. It is assumed these were developer “cheats” to skip around easily, and it is nice to just be able to revisit sections with zero friction. Or enter the code “FX”, walk into one nearby house, and trigger the credits so you can say you beat the game with a clear conscious.
• So did you beat it? Yes.
• Did you know? Cameos abound in Super Ninja Boy, as a few heroes and villains sneak in from other Culture Brain games. Like the town of Celestern has that music and princess from The Magic of Scheherazade. And there are probably other cameos, too! But now I don’t want to play anything else developed by the sadists at Culture Brain!
• Would I play again: I was happy when Super Ninja Boy appeared on the Switch, because it was a very accessible way to revisit a game I remembered from my childhood. Now I have confirmed as an adult that Super Ninja Boy is the worst game on the Super Nintendo. Hooray! I am learning! And never playing it again!

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Super E.D.F. Earth Defense Force! Let’s get these missiles ready to destroy the universe! Please look forward to it!