Current Events > The Mystical Ninja game on Game Boy was hot garbage.

(+) Yeah! (+)

It was one of the only four games in the series released outside of Japan, no doubt released to capitalize on the success of the fantastic N64 game of the same game, and it's the game that I actually got as a child (we rented the N64 game several times, but never finished it because we never had a Controller Pak to save progress).

But I looked up this game again after all these years, and remembered that this game is just not good.

• The gameplay is really nothing special; even by the standards of the Game Boy, it's like a poor man's Zelda game, but with your only items being the character's main weapon and shuriken (which you get loads of just by playing, so there's no reason to buy them at the stores).
• There are only three playable characters: Goemon, Ebisumaru, and Sasuke; Despite her prominence on the game box, Yae goes off on her own at the start and gets kidnapped. However, there's absolutely no difference between each of the characters in stats or abilities, so why not just have Ebisumaru get kidnapped instead and have Yae playable? Even worse, at the end of the game, she just frees herself from the main villain who then just runs off.
• There are only five areas in the game, and environments are constantly repeated (town, cave, boat, castle).
• You have one Life and no Continues, with the game using a password system based on Japanese memorabilia to have to continue where you left off. However, the passwords put you at the start of the level, so you still have to fight your way back to where you were.
• It's not enough that you beat an area's boss; they also challenge you to a minigame in order to truly defeat them. Some of these minigames require you to mash the buttons so fast that even adults will have a hard time, let alone the small children to which this game was clearly targeted towards (yet somehow, they let the word "Damn" slip by). If you lose the minigame, then it's an automatic Game Over, meaning doing the entire level over if you put in the password, only to probably lose again and again because the AI mashes at a rate that even turbo controllers struggle to match.

This game should have been left to rot in Japan.

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you can leave out "mystical ninja"

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Doesnt even have screen shots on the back of the box. I shoulda known.

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There were worse games on Game Boy.

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Bass_X0 posted...

There were worse games on Game Boy.

I'm sure (I had Home Alone, for example), but it doesn't change the fact that GB Mystical Ninja was also pretty lousy.

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99% of games on gameboy was hot garbage even at the time

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Correct.

The mini-games being frustrating feels like a cheap attempt to drag the game lengths. For a game that came out in '98 ('97 in Japan), there is no excuse for this game being as bad as it is. The DX version of Link's Awakening came out only a months later in December of '98.

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