A Princess Who is Also a Ninja
I’ve only played a single SG-1000 game before (Champion Baseball), but I think it’s an interesting system and wanted to try out some of the classics, so here we are with the SG-1000 version of Ninja Princess. The original game was in arcades, but this is the first home port. As the title implies, you play as a princess who is also a ninja, which is pretty neat. Poor Princess Kurumi never gets mentioned as one of the pioneering female protagonists despite her being a pretty early example.
Every so often when I’m out exploring some old school games I come across a game where I’m like okay this is seriously some good shit. Ninja Princess is kind of the complete package and I could not put it down once I started. When I started this blog I only wanted to write about games where I had some kind of novel point to make, which I don’t really have in this case. But this game was so damn fun that I want to write about it anyway.
This is one of the only vertical run and guns I can think of that doesn’t have a military theme like Front Line, Commando, Ikari, Guerilla War, etc. I’m also inclined to say that it’s my favorite of the genre, even better than Commando and Guerilla War. And probably the biggest reason for that is the control scheme. The two separate attack types in Ninja Princess just give you so much more control compared to the typical machine gun + explosive moveset that you get in most of these games. This sounds like a small thing but truly compared to something like Commando, where you end up running into a lot of enemies in close quarters, it is so much easier to handle enemies that are right on top of you with two separate attacks.
Other nice things about Ninja Princess are that it allows for you to move backwards and scroll the screen back down if you need to run away from enemies to get some breathing room, and it also does not have respawning enemies. Every single ninja you take out is gone for good (unless you die) which is a huge improvement over endlessly respawning bad guys. You can also hit both buttons to use your ninja magic to disappear for half a second and dodge certain death, which is very satisfying to pull off. All of these factors combine to make a vertical run and gun that feels much cleaner than normal.
The SG-1000 graphics are primitive but this is a style that I adore. I’m a shill for it and always have been. The art direction is actually really nice here too, with each level having a bit of character and combined with the map screen it does actually feel like you’re going somewhere, which is a rarity for a game of this vintage. The levels where you are scaling the castle walls stand out as a highlight visual but really a lot of the levels do a nice job of representing a different part of the castle complex.
In addition to running around picking off enemy soldiers, you need to collect all five of the hidden red scrolls and find the secret passage on Level 10 to access the 13th and final level; without them you will proceed to Levels 11 and 12 and get the “fake” ending and loop back to Level 1. Of course, there’s not really much difference between the endings and you’re still getting basically the full experience by just completing the 12 normal levels without finding all the scrolls; you’re only missing out on a short final level and a congratulatory text box. There’s no cutscene or anything exciting for the “real” ending and quite frankly the last level is one of those pick-the-right-path mazes and is probably the worst level in the game anyway.
Figuring out how to get all the scrolls without a guide is borderline impossible, but that’s par for the course for this type of thing. As I said the real ending is nothing exciting and honestly getting all the scrolls feels like an extra challenge for sickos, but I would consider just getting through Levels 1-12 without the scrolls to be beating the game and getting all the scrolls to be more like extra credit.
As one would expect of an arcade port from this era, it’s a tough game, but thankfully no save states are needed here since there is actually a secret code that allows you to select any level (except the final one) and the number of lives you want to begin with. This means you can give yourself ample lives to complete the entire game while also collecting all the scrolls. So it’s definitely very accessible to the modern player even on original hardware, as long as you know the code (On the title screen, press UP, DOWN, UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, DOWN, UP, UP, DOWN and UP.)
Can I also just say that Ninja Princess might have the funniest attract mode I’ve ever seen in a game? She does not do anything in the demo footage besides get killed. She gets killed by ninjas, she gets killed by dogs, she gets killed by ninjas again. There’s not any actual gameplay demonstration, it’s just the princess standing around getting got over and over.
Overall this is one that checks all the boxes for me. Brilliant visuals, simple but engaging gameplay, controls that work super well, and (with the secret code) a highly accessible experience no matter your skill level. There are not a lot of 1985 games that I can say that about.
I followed up with a look at the Master System version, which is just titled “The Ninja.” It’s got some slight differences, most notably that your princess character is gone and now is the one being rescued by a generic ninja guy, hence the title change. Some of the levels are changed; there’s now a level with rolling boulders and one with a horse stampede and one where you’re on logs going across the castle’s moat. The moat one is a cool set piece but the others feel a bit out of place and don’t really mesh with the game world in a way that makes sense.
The smooth scrolling is a slight improvement over the SG-1000’s flip scrolling though honestly I didn’t have any problem with the flip scrolling when I played. I also find The Ninja’s graphics much less appealing even though they are more technically advanced. The realistically proportioned humans don’t look quite right and move around in an uncanny way. It also doesn’t have the level select code so you’ll probably need save states to get through the whole thing. So while The Ninja is still a fun game, I do think it’s inferior to the SG-1000 Ninja Princess, which really was just stellar.