Ninja

1986 video games Atari gamesCommodore 64 gamesAtari ST gamesZX Spectrum gamesAmstrad games

arcade gamesfighting games

The 1980s was an era when ninjas took over the Western culture with the (completely false) image of wearing all-black clothing assassins.

The 1980s was an era when the Western culture was invaded by the concept of the hooded assassins, wearing all-black clothing and silently penetrating even the fanciest building security. It was mostly a false image that had very little with what ninja used to be in reality, but a shadowy figure throwing daggers or metal other pointy things looked so much better in the movies. And this image, of course, leaked into the video games, including this one, entitled in the least creative way - Ninja.

It was one of the first fighting games, you walk around a Japanese palace and try to collect every single one of the idols that are spread around the place. Unfortunately, almost every single room in the palace is guarded, and you will have to use martial arts or your weapons to deal with the guards. There are three main types of the enemies: thugs, karatekas and ninjas. Thugs are the weakest, karatekas could be challenging, and the ninjas basically have the same skills and weapons as you.

You can collect daggers or shurikens and throw them at your enemies, but if everything fails, you can always reach for the good old samurai sword and bring some bad news to your enemies. There are 21 rooms, the enemies and the idols are randomly placed at the beginning of the game, which means you can get slightly different gameplay each time.

Overall it was a surprisingly good game, with good character animations, fun to play, a bit repetitive though, but to be fair, which fighting game does not become repetitive after a while.

comments

Don’t know why people thought Karateka was better than Ninja - here you had freedom to move between the rooms (if you cleared them first, of course), you could gather the throwables and approach the opponents in different ways.
Jupooper (01-09-2025 08:10:57)

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Ninja screenshots

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