Developer: TOSE
Publisher: Bandai
Release Date: October 1986
1986 is probably the least important year for Nintendo first party releases between 1985 and now. This has much to do with the slow method they went about releasing the console naturally. After the test market in 1985 they spent the first half of 1986 slowly rolling it out all over the country. Because of this there is a big gap between releases. After the October 1985 launch there weren’t any games released at all until June of 1986. That’s almost eight months of the console’s life with no games being released. Even when they did start to release new games, they weren’t exactly new. 1986 is when they released most of their arcade backlog. Sure, it was nice having high quality console ports of Donkey Kong and Popeye, but these were games that had already been ported to death, and other than a few oddballs like Donkey Kong Jr. Math and Gumshoe there wasn’t much to pick from if you wanted something new. Luckily, in October the very first batch of third-party games started to come out. Other companies were encouraged by Nintendo’s growing success and wanted to get a foot in the door before Christmas. There were four games released in October 1986: Data East’s Tag Team Wrestling plus three published by Bandai and developed by prolific underdogs TOSE. M.U.S.C.L.E. was based on a popular toy line and made sense as an NES release, but the other two, Chubby Cherub and today’s entry Ninja Kid, are such kooky games that they could’ve only come out at a time when a console was starved for games. Ninja Kid is fairly well known, but it sure is one of the odder action games to ever grace the NES. Everyone has played, some people like it, and almost nobody understands it.
Ninja Kid is a strange one. At a time where home players were starting to desire straight-line games with definite beginnings and ends, Ninja Kid boldly goes nowhere and has no point. Alright so that’s a little bit unfair because there is the goal to get a high score, and of course to have fun. It’s just set up to look like a game that has and ending but never gives you one. In it you get to traverse maps with a random layout of temples which each contain one of four levels with one of four layouts. It’s a game full of contradictions. It’s complicated and simple, random but repetitive. You could play this game for a long time without knowing what it was even about. I think most people still probably have no idea. The manual isn’t much help either because it makes the game sound like it has an ending. I imagine countless kids renting this game in the pre-internet days and playing it for hours trying to find the point. I love kooky arcade-style games, but it’s hard to rank a game particularly high when you can’t even figure out what you’re supposed to be doing.
I will say that at least the game controls well. There are four different types of levels that are all fairly self-explanatory. In Dog Fight you fly and shoot things. In Guerilla Warfare you run and shoot things. In poison fields you run and collect things, and in Blazing Inferno you light candles using a floating flame. None are particularly memorable on their own, but they have a certain early NES charm. They still don’t make a lot of sense though. The powerups aren’t much help considering most enemies die in one hit. It’s also full of weird collectibles that seem to do nothing but raise the score. When you complete the goal of each level two doors will appear. One takes you back to the map while one takes you to a boss fight. Ninja Kid is such an odd game that I have no idea if I want to be fighting the bosses or not. They can impede my progress, but they are worth a lot of points and there’s not much progress to be made in the first place. They are at least worth seeing because they are so large and strange looking. I’d say the graphics are the game’s best feature. It has a such a vibrant early NES look that couldn’t have existed on any other system. It’s a game that will give you instant nostalgia even if you never played it back in the day. It just has such a distinct NES look and feel that you may play it just to feel like a kid again for a few minutes. It’s a shame about the music though. It’s a constant loop that lasts at most three seconds. It’s better than silence and not overly annoying, but certainly lazy.
So how do you rank a game like Ninja Kid? It’s certainly a singular game. It’s a weird, pointless action game that was both timeless and obsolete even in 1986. It’s certainly not what people were looking for. It was a year saturated with arcade game. Ninja Kid is an arcade game disguised as an action game, but it didn’t really fool anyone. If you play it, enjoy the old school look of it, but don’t expect to feel like you accomplished anything after playing it. I liked Fester’s Quest better because at least I felt like I was going somewhere. So that’s where Ninja Kid is going. It’s right under Fester’s Quest at #89 overall and #24 on the NES list. It stays out of the red, but it’s certainly not one I overly recommend.
NES Quality percentage: 19/35 or 54.28%
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