The premise of the game is simple. Some demon-looking guy called Banglar became president of this once great and opulent nation, and used his powerful armies to drive it into the ground. You're one of three robot ninjas (the powerful Ninja, the balanced Kunoichi, and the agile Kamaitachi) developed by the resistance, programmed to track down Banglar and kill him and his lieutenants using any means necessary. No survivors. The background setting has this downtrodden urban post-war feeling to it, like those pseudo-apocalyptic settings you'd often see in 80's American action movies, this fusion kind of making sense considering the ninja craze in the West around the late 80's/early 90's. Most of the locales you go through are abandoned streets, malls, subways, parking garages, until the last stages have you assault Banglar's headquarters and his secret base. I like the whole grounded atmosphere of the game, it fits the setting and the fact that you're on a suicide mission really well. The backgrounds don't quite have the fighting game background level of detail the backgrounds in the arcade game had, but they all look nice and distinct regardless.
The soundtrack further reinforces this atmosphere, being IMO one of the best soundtracks on the SNES. Every stage track manages to be catchy yet melancholic at the same time, and the boss themes are full of energy and intensity.
Boss 5 and
Boss 7 are the most stand out, whereas the
final boss theme is pure catharsis after the brooding impending doom of the
final stage theme played to some of the hardest and grueling fights in the game. It's a bit of a missed opportunity that the soundtrack doesn't feature a nod to
Daddy Mulk, the most popular and killer song from the original arcade version.
Character sprites in The Ninja Warriors Again are large and detailed (they're about half as high as the screen height), and are almost arcade-levels of quality for the year they were released in. All enemy designs are distinct (with some enemies having recolors for variations' sake, and with certain recolors having about 33% more health), and the attack animations are satisfying to watch too. Throwing enemies past certain background objects will even break that background object just to make it feel like you're causing more damage. What annoys me to no end is the foreground elements. They serve no other purpose than to obscure what the enemies are up to, and I don't see why they're there at all other than to lend some stages some additional visual depth, which is not worth making it harder for me to see. The best compromise would have been to make the foreground elements transparent, the SNES could handle transparency effects after all. Thankfully foreground elements aren't that widespread in the game, but they're an unnecessary annoyance nonetheless.
The hit sound effects aren't always that meaty, though most enemies do let out an amusing WAH whenever they're killed. When killing a bunch of enemies at once, it'll constantly go WAWAH WAH WAH. The same sound effect is reused for most enemies, only with lower pitches for heavier enemies and higher pitches for lighter enemies. It certainly gets stuck in your head after a while. Only the female enemies have their own WAH, though it sounds more like a Wah! of surprise, as if you suddenly flipped their skirt, not as if you broke their spine. Meanwhile the robot ninja assassins you control never grunt. Silent and deadly.
Speaking of female enemies, in the PAL version the female ninja enemy type was outright removed because of Nintendo of America's policy against violence against women, and were instead replaced with mini-Wolverines. That's a giant shame, because that enemy type added a whole lot to the combat, and you really should be playing the Japanese version to get the true experience. Aside from that and having green blood splatter effects on hitting enemies, the Japanese version doesn't differ that much from the Western version, though the Japanese version is definitely the definitive version.
It being a single-plane beat 'em up (unlike a belt scroller like Streets of Rage) means there's much less space to maneuver in and to control and by extent less enemies on screen, but what little space you have ends up being much more hotly contested. Not being able to move up and down then makes place for a higher emphasis on crouching and standing attacks, and consequently having to block either high or low attacks, much like in a fighting game. You can only block attacks the direction your character is facing, and enemies
will be coming from both sides of the screen, making crowd control all the more important so you don't find yourself surrounded and stunned the moment you recover from being knocked down. The constant threat from both sides is why throwing enemies into other enemies becomes an incredibly vital skill. Each character has several throws, one for throwing enemies left or right, a down-throw which is usually the most damaging attack but can only be used on one enemy at once, and an up-throw which can usually hit all enemies around you or above you. Usually you want to finish enemies off with down-throws for the most damage, but often it's more important to isolate all enemies to one side of the screen. Not like they'll let you do so easily, though. You can't just block everything in a corner and take the occasional potshot, enemies can grab and throw you for massive damage if you spend too much time in a blocking state, much like how you can throw blocking enemies in the same way.
The only major issue I have with this is that blocking is tied to a hold input instead of a press. You have to hold down attack before being able to block, which in reality means you need to perform an attack first before your character actually starts blocking. Some enemy attacks are just too damn fast or you are in a situation where you can't immediately start inputting a block once the enemy starts attacking for you to reliably block attacks, which becomes especially problematic with characters like Ninja who have slower attacks. The problem isn't even the lack of buttons. Only the D-Pad and all face buttons except for A are used, performing a block could have easily been tied to the shoulder buttons. The strange part is that you can block faster than you would normally when you are in a pain state, allowing you to block out of a combo when you are being combo'd by enemies. I have no idea whether blocking being more cumbersome was intentional. It certainly prevents blocking from letting you intercept any attack at any moment and risk making other moves at your disposal feel less useful, but it comes at the cost of responsiveness.
I'm not a fan of using unorthodox input methods such as on-release inputs, double-tap inputs, and hold inputs being used as a means of balance, especially not when it comes to defensive options which often have to be used reflexively, but are hampered because of an additional layer of required input introducing often unnecessary delays to certain moves. There's usually more elegant solutions to let you perform actions with press inputs, and especially in the case of the SNES controller there are more than enough buttons to support extra actions.
One cool thing about TNWA is how its handles specials. Normally your super-powerful special move in beat 'em ups sacrifices a bit of health so you won't carelessly spam it, or instead use it offensively all the time if you're confident that you're not going to get hit. Obviously more careful players may be a little skittish about sacrificing their health, so TNWA offers a neat solution to that with its Blaster system. Each character has a Blaster gauge which slowly fills up over time, taking about 20 seconds to fill completely. When completely filled, the player can perform a Blaster attack which causes a massive explosion and knocks down all enemies on screen while doing a decent amount of damage. It acts as a sort of smartbomb in the case that you are about to lose control of the situation and want to use it to avoid further damage. However, if the Blaster gauge is full, the player also gains access to performing a special combo finisher by pressing Up+Attack for the final hit in a combo, which performs a much stronger finishing move than the rest of your arsenal whose ranges extends to nearly all enemies in front of you. Performing this takes away about 25% of your Blaster gauge, and you can't perform it again until it's at 100%.
The kicker is that whenever you get knocked down when your Blaster gauge isn't at 100%, it will drain to zero completely. But when you get knocked down when it is at 100%, it will stay at 100%. Your Blaster isn't a lame cooldown ability which you can use on a rotation, you actually have to work at not getting hit if you want to use it repeatedly. The special finishers then give you the option for increased offensive ability, at the expense of keeping your Blaster gauge away from 100% and leaving you vulnerable to losing it all when you do end up getting knocked down right after performing your special. Often it's more preferable to use special finishers since it only costs 25% of your gauge and doesn't take as long to use again, but maybe you don't want to in case you're in for a tough fight and want to keep your Blaster at the ready. It's a great risk/reward mechanic as it provides players with a tool which catalyzes their growth in skill (get hit less -> use specials more -> get hit less -> etc.), while still providing newer players with a safety net. Thanks to special finishers, the whole mechanic doesn't feel like it's a smartbomb only there to use for lesser-skilled players.
I'm also thankful your gauge only drains on knockdown, not on hit. In beat 'em ups enemies tend to have lightning fast attacks which you avoid by preventing them from getting in your range in the first place. Getting no damage runs in beat 'em ups is nowhere as easy when you don't have some i-frame dodge or parry like modern brawlers do. This way you can at least block out or break away in time before getting knocked down and losing all your gauge, else a complete loss from a mere scrape by some grunt would feel incredibly punishing and encourage playing incredibly defensively until your gauge is refilled. Getting knocked down in a beat 'em up is definitely a sign that you've fucked up too much than is allowed, and you are given the tools to mitigate being knocked down, so losing out on knockdown certainly is the fairest punishment here.
One thing I'm not too keen on is that the Blaster refills over time, yet the level timer is way too damn lenient. What this means is that if you want to, you can stand still inbetween waves, waiting for your Blaster gauge to refill while doing nothing at all. Of course, the wait is something you'd entirely bring onto yourself and an implicit admission to yourself that you're being a scrub instead of running out there and attacking aggressively. Or not. It's not like that timer on the bottom is ever going to run out, either. There's always fifteen minutes on the damn thing, and most stages are like 5-10 minutes long even if you play carefully. You really have to try hard to get a timeout. If you had much less time to work with (or better, it'd start small and only refill after completing a wave), you'd think twice about wasting time just to fill up your Blaster gauge. The Ninja Master's path would be to press on regardless whether your gauge is empty or not, but some people feel like ruining their own fun just to get an advantage through degenerate strategies such as 'doing nothing while waiting for the gauge to fill'. It might sound anal to prevent people playing the game the 'wrong way', but more often than not people will optimize the fun out of a game if the given tools allow them to, and should at least be
pushed towards playing with more skill.
Although the Blaster functions as a panic button, I find it strange that you can't use it while you are being grabbed and then thrown by enemies, throws being some of the most damaging attacks in the game against the player. Especially considering there's a brief period where you're stuck in an enemy's grab before you actually get thrown, which could be the timeframe where you can activate the Blaster to escape the grab. It just seems a little inconsistent that you can use the Blaster while in a pain state but not when grabbed, isn't being a panic button what the Blaster is for? On the other hand, it does give the Blaster a more preventive than reactive function, where it's better used once you realize you're about to get swarmed and not necessarily when you are swarmed. Though you can use it when you are swarmed anyways, because you can still use it when in a pain state. Being able to Blaster out of a grab would be nice considering how unpredictable and out-of-nowhere enemy grabs can be. Sometimes they will instantly grab you as you enter grabbing range, sometimes they won't. Enemy grabbing behavior is not very consistent, so having a tool which can consistently counter that would help make it feel more fair.
One thing that might be irksome at first in a single-plane beat 'em up is the edges of the screen. Namely, enemies attacking you from the edges of the screen, attacks which you can never even see coming because you can't see the enemies in the first place other than the tip of their blade once they attack. It's a bit of an inevitability in a single-plane game and enemies spawning from the edges of the screen that something like this is bound to happen. You can play around this fact, by not staying near the edges for too long for the same reason that you wouldn't stay at the top/right side of the screen in any shoot 'em up, or attacking towards the edges to hit any enemies standing there (you can then hear whether you're hitting anything or not). You could sidestep enemies hitting you off-screen by expanding the playing field so you have less reason to hover around the edges, display an indicator for off-screen enemies, or have enemies spawn on the other side of the screen if you are near the other edge, though I believe the latter should be reserved for certain enemies with a high attack range or harrassing role while grunt-type enemies will keep spawning regardless so you can't just turn your back towards one edge of the screen to force all enemies to spawn at the other side.
There's three characters to choose from. The redundantly-named Ninja is a seven towering feet of nunchaku-wielding titanium and acts as the power character of the three. He's the biggest and heaviest, and also has the heaviest hit and footstep sounds. He even kicks up dust clouds just by moving around, and unlike with other characters the screen shakes whenever he gets knocked down or recovers from a jump. The game really succeeds at making him feel heavy. His basic combo consists of three punches with the third one initiating a nunchaku flurry which can hit enemies in front of you and standing enemies behind you. Alternatively, finishing a combo while crouching will let Ninja finish it with a single forwards kick. It's generally safer to attack from a crouching position since most enemies will be standing, and you only have to worry about anticipating crouching blows from the front. So it makes sense that the standing combo finisher has greater reach and damage output.
It should be noted that attacking while crouching doesn't come without risks. While standing, you can at least take three light pokes before getting knocked down. When crouching, even a slight poke from grunts will knock you on your arse as enemies start swarming around you. At a glance it would appear that there's no reason to perform any standing attacks ever when crouching attacks are safer, but getting hit while crouching being a guaranteed knockdown and standing combos being more powerful (for Ninja at least) ensure there's a reason to stretch your legs. It should be noted that the same goes for enemies, so if you want to keep an enemy locked into a combo you want to do it when they're in a standing position, or bait them into performing a standing attack first.
What's more, performing the last hit in a combo doesn't only let you execute a more powerful attack, but it also gives you invincibility frames while performing it. What this means is that if you're about to get hit from behind while you're busy roughing up some poor shmuck, instead of being forced to break away or throw, you have the option to continue your assault and if you time it right, you can bask in the invincibility frames while killing the guy in front of you as the other guy behind you tries to damage you to no avail. I like this because it lets you stay on the offense if you're capable enough of reading enemy behavior and attack timings instead of having to drop all your bags the moment an enemy is about to sneeze at you. The best defense is a good offense, basically.
How TNWA handles combo windows is also very different from other games, and took me getting a lot of getting used to. In TNWA the combo windows are
large. So you can strike one grunt, strike one grunt immediately after that, do nothing for a second or two, and if you're playing Ninja, you will perform a finisher instead of a regular hit even though all that time passed. In most games, combo windows where later hits have special properties always have a combo window of like a second, placing the emphasis more on difficult execution. But the liberal combo window in TNWA means you can "charge" your combo by smacking weaker enemies first and then executing the finisher where it's more applicable, without having to spend time building it up in a spot where you're more vulnerable. This actually suits the game greatly given the amount of enemies on screen and the amount of grunts who go down in one hit anyways, serving as excellent warm-up fodder for you while giving you an additional means of crowd control. On the other hand, your combo counter gets reset if you miss or perform a non-standard attack, so you can miss on purpose if you want to beat some guy with a maximum length combo.
Beat 'em up logic would dictate the strongest character is the slowest, but that couldn't be farther from the truth. Ninja has rocket thrusters embedded in his back, which let him zip from one side of the screen to almost the other in no time flat. This lets you quickly tackle into enemies and follow up with a throw, or instead you can press attack while boosting to perform a sliding kick which knocks away the targets in your path so you can keep one side of the playing field clear for a moment. Boosting is done in a crouching position, so when an enemy at the corner of the screen decides to shoot his gun which would normally hit you in a standing position, you can instead zip underneath the bullets towards him to immediately follow up with a devastating combo. Ninja's jump is also irregular, instead he can hover in the air for a brief period of time. From a neutral hovering position you can then spin in the air to intercept airborne enemies, press Up+Attack while doing so to spin slightly upwards in order to hit airborne enemies, or press Left/Right+Attack while mid-air to crash diagonally downwards into enemies. His Down+Jump then lets him jump in the air and then crash immediately downwards at a slight forwards angle, letting you punish enemies performing crouching attacks.
The kick to Ninja that although he is powerful and quick, most of his special actions have a significant amount of wind-up frames or recovery frames, making them hardly spammable. Enemies like to hit you and knock you down just as you're initiating your hover, and there's a good deal of recovery frames after rocket boost (kicking), so gauging the distance wrongly and ending up one foot away from the enemy's face after boosting will be met with a foot to the face. The diagonal crash is faster, has no recovery frames compared to the boost kick, and is (usually) unblockable, but it has more wind-up involved than the boost kick and should be initiated from a safer space first. Only his neutral/upwards mid-air attack I never used because it had too much wind-up which would let enemies on the ground take a stab at you, and was generally never worth it compared to other moves such as throwing enemies or doing Down+Jump.
While Ninja has rocket thrusters, he can't high jump out of the way behind enemies like other playable characters can to reposition himself somewhere safer. He's just too heavy for that. Instead, his Block+Jump "high jump" is more of a "break away" move which has him somersault backwards. It lets you block both standing and crouching attacks in front of you while putting some distance between the enemies in front of you. It's not quite as versatile as a high jump, but it's still useful.
Since Ninja doesn't quite have the on-demand mobility as other characters do, it's much harder to recover after being knocked down as Ninja, especially when you're being surrounded by enemies who like to move around a lot and won't let themselves be grabbed as easily. Instead, he's much more reliant on throws as a means of crowd control and prevent a situation where he's likely to get knocked down from ever happening, so it comes to no surprise that Ninja has the strongest and most versatile throws in the game. He's also the only character who can move while having grabbed an enemy so you have more control over your throwing range. His left/right throws have him simply lift some poor sod off the ground and toss him around like it's nothing. It just... so...
powerful...
His up-throw has him spin his newfound toy around, hitting all enemies around you and knocking them away before letting go of your toy, which is incredibly useful when you're in dire need of some personal space. His down-throw is his single most damaging attack, letting you perform a backbreaker on enemies, but it can only be performed on one enemy at once. After some point you'll start measuring enemy HP in how many down-throws it takes for them to die, that's how much you'll be relying on this. What's more, Ninja's down-throw is probably the only attack in the game which grants you outgoing invincibility frames after performing it, giving you a very small window of invinciblity to do whatever in a neutral state, but more importantly this can be used to chain several down-throws together. If you can hoard all enemies into a single corner, you can repeatedly down-throw them all to death because of the sheer amount of invincibility frames you get. The length and invincibility of the down-throw enemies means the knockdown-recovery attacks of enemies will be wasted and leave them vulnerable to being down-throwed the moment you're done down-throwing another enemy. Though since enemies will keep spawning from both sides, and down-throwing enemies knock them back a distance, you have to walk towards them after your i-frames have worn off if you want to keep down-throwing them, and other enemies won't always let you.
Ninja is fun as all hell once you realize how to become FUCKIN' INVINCIBLE thanks to your many i-frames, while boosting across the screen and slapping motherfuckers with other motherfuckers. The commitment required for a lot of his moves, his design, and the VFX/SFX for his attacks and animations really sell the POWER character archetype he has going for him.
The only particularly painful thing about playing as Ninja, but also sometimes as other characters, is the hitstop. When hitting enemies there is a brief hitstop effect to emphasize the impact, which also briefly delays your character's and target's actions for a few frames instead of applying the hitstop to the entire game loop. You can notice how if you mash attack while hitting nothing you'll attack considerably faster than if you were to perform a combo on an enemy while mashing attack as fast as possible. The problem then arises when you hit multiple enemies with one strike, and when you don't hit said enemies all at the same time. What then can happen is that if said enemy type has a lightning-fast quick jab attack, in the minimal timeframe after enemy A got hit and consequently enemy B gets hit right afterwards with the same attack, enemy A can sneak in an attack before you can land the second attack, while you are still reeling from the hitstop after hitting enemy B. This is especially noticeable with Ninja who has the slowest attacks with the largest wind-up and recovery time and can't throw out attacks as fast as other characters to compensate for this hitstop. It often happened to me when doing a standing combo against several spiked ninjas at once
Kunoichi, the more iconic kunai-wielding red ninja with the blonde ponytail, acts as the "balanced" character of the three, even though she appears to be the agile one at first. Instead of Ninja's 3-hit combo, Kunoichi's main combo consists of five hits, with each hit dealing less damage comparatively, but being faster to perform. Kunoichi moves faster, and her jumps are instantaneous. From the air she can perform forward jumping kicks or a rising katana slice which can hit everything in front and above her, short of crouching enemies. Kunoichi can also jump off the faces of enemies, and chain several facejumps together as you're jumping off enemies' faces from both sides of the screen and knocking them back, which is kind of hilarious to pull off, but also useful at giving you some personal space. Kunoichi doesn't have rockets embedded in her back, and lacks the ability to cover ground while crouching the same way Ninja can. Instead she has to make do with her Down+Jump which lets her do a forwards stabbing motion with her kunai, which is her most useful attack for closing the distance between enemies.
Kunoichi's biggest weakness is exactly that: her range. The slight amount of extra time she has to spend moving into an enemy's range means the enemy is more likely to get a quick jab in before you can even begin an attack. That's why for Kunoichi it's important to get the timing down for crouching under attacks while initiating a crouching combo of your own. Forward jump kicks and forward kunai stabs can help cover some ground, but a lot of enemies have specific counters against these when they're used too close in range, whereas initiating ones from too far away will plain miss, so you can't completely rely on them to get you through. Her lacking reach is also why it's also a big help that her left/right throws move Kunoichi in the same direction you're throwing your bodybag in.
Kunoichi can also throw enemies backwards up in the air, which is useful when you need to disable a single enemy for a longer period of time by throwing them upwards, especially against enemies with quick knockdown recovery times, or when you just need the i-frames. One cool detail is that Kunoichi's ponytail isn't just for show, up-throwing enemies will get tied up in a band of her hair before coming crashing down. Kunoichi's down-throw is rather special, because it is the most damaging attack in the entire game, but you don't get any i-frames while performing it. It's a concentrated assault on your target's groin (in the case of the mini-Wolverines you'll just grab them by the hair and repeatedly bash their face in) where each hit deals even less damage than your regular strike, but the last hit of your down-throw deals especially tons of damage. Although you don't get any i-frames while doing it, you can cancel the attack at any time by letting go of the attack button in case you decide to change plans. Jumpkick/forward kunai slash+4-hit melee combo+full down-throw is the most damaging combo in the entire game, and deals even more damage than your special. That said, it's only against one target. While you're still busy castrating one guy, Ninja can pull off two or more down-throws in the same timespan. Kunoichi's down-throw is a very risk/reward type of move as it's your quickest way of dealing damage, but you can't use it as easily.
Kunoichi's less versatile throws and range is then offset by her high mobility and ability to high jump. By blocking and then jumping, you can jump either left or right, safely over enemies' heads and *somersaults behind you* for a safer throw or combo. You're not doomed to get surrounded and have to deal with it through throws like Ninja does, you have the power to position yourself somewhere more favourable, as most enemies can't hit you all the way up there. But high jumps are far from a win button. You can only block in one direction when high jumping, so enemies behind you can still kick you down to the ground before you reach maximum altitude. This also holds true when you're about to land. Enemies behind you can still intercept you mid-air when you're about to land. Some enemies seem to intentionally hover around the spots you'd land after high jumping, so you need to make sure the coast is clear in the first place before you decide to high jump. This can get very intense against mobile enemies who can quickly reposition themselves as well, as you're constantly fingering for a good spots only for the enemies to keep moving around and deny you one. High jumps are still lenient as you can high jump while in a pain state so you do have a consistent means of escape, but you'll still have to live with the damage.
Kunoichi doesn't have the same power or versatile throws as Ninja does, so instead you have to rely on (re)positioning and crouching under enemy attacks to get some hits in (make no mistake, you still will be throwing a lot). On the other hand, Kunoichi's smaller hitbox means she can safely duck under some attacks Ninja is just too big for, which becomes especially noticeable during some boss fights. Kunoichi is more of an expert character to play, as at a first glance she doesn't have the same crowd control tools as Ninja does and has a much smaller range and power, but once you learn to play Kunoichi and learn how to jump like grasshopper, sting like bee, she becomes a very rewarding character to excel as.
The third and final character is Kamaitachi, the prototype robot ninja who doesn't make an effort to hide his robotic nature at all, with the penchant to cut everything down with his sickle arms. He's the fastest character, he moves even faster when crouching unlike the rest. The best way I could describe him is that Kamaitachi is basically a supercharged Kunoichi. He has the fastest attack speed and his combos can be executed very quickly (so quicker access to his combo finisher i-frames, more over he can execute some finishers after the third hit instead of the fourth hit in his combo), his Down+Jump is Kunoichi's forward kunai stab but with larger reach, he can high jump around, his crouching combo finisher has MASSIVE range, and basically this guy is freaking powerful. So powerful that he's not as fun to use. He doesn't even need to crouch to hit the mini-Wolverines, he can hit them while standing.
His enormous attack speed and range means you don't have to be as careful about your positioning and crouch timing as other characters. Kamaitachi lends himself more to a button-mashy playstyle because of his attack speed, allowing you to stunlock several enemies at once with ease. His huge attack speed also makes it incredibly easy to intercept enemies trying to perform Stinger-type attacks from a distance like forwards jumpkicks and slides. With Kunoichi and especially Ninja you had to be more careful with your attacks if you wanted to intercept an enemy, because the timing for intercepts is incredibly strict. Miss it, and the recovery time after an attack just gets you knocked down. But Kamaitachi can just throw out that many attacks through mashing which supersedes the need for proper timing, which takes away from the rewarding feeling of when you do nail one.
The massive range on his crouching combo finisher and the even faster speed with which you can throw out crouching attacks makes it very easily spammable against most enemies, yet he doesn't have Ninjas wind-up times on a lot of moves to balance this out. Playing Kamaitachi lends itself more to a mindless spammy playstyle because he's just that powerful and fast. There's some fun to be had in that, but basically it makes him an easy mode character who doesn't have the same weaknesses as other characters do which necessitates constant crowd control, positioning, and attack timing.
The only weakness to Kamaitachi is that he can't grab enemies like other characters can. He can't throw grunts at all. Instead you need to walk right up to an enemy, lock him into a combo and then press Left/Right+Attack on any hit in the combo after the first one to initiate a throw. His right-throw kicks an enemy in the gut and launches him forwards, knocking down all enemies in its path, which is also Kamaitachi most damaging finisher save for maybe his special. His left-throw functions the same as Kunoichi's up-throw, except he grabs
ALL enemies in front of him to toss them upwards. Again, supercharged Kunoichi. You need to get really close before you're able to execute a left/right throw, else you'll just perform the regular spinning blades finisher which doesn't deal as much damage. Then again, it isn't too difficult to get close given your high movement speed which lets you get close enough to enemies in time before they can land a hit. His inability to grab is then probably a result of balancing out his ludicrous movement speed so he can't grab enemies all the time before they can even attack. It doesn't matter as much in practice since you can still inch closer inbetween hits on enemies given how fast your attacks are.
Kamaitachi isn't a really bad character, but his ease of use and lower skill ceiling make him less interesting to use than Ninja or Kunoichi. It doesn't help that he feels more like a stronger Kunoichi instead of having his own distinct playstyle, especially if you were to compare the difference in playstyle between Ninja and Kunoichi. He's a suitable character for newer players, in any case.
Enemies in TNWA come in all kinds of shapes, sizes and roles. Cannon fodder, tanks, snipers, harrassers and other nuisances come together to make each fight different and unpredictable. Each enemy has its own unique behavior, mode of movement and ways you have to approach it that makes each enemy type stand out. The bread and butter of Banglar's forces consists of grunts, fellows in green who serve as a constant pressure throughout the fight and will continue spawning until the current wave ends. They die in one hit of about anything and aren't much of a threat on their own, but they are able to hitstun you from behind while you are occupied by a tougher enemy, which then leads into you getting smacked in your face and knocked down. They know how to crouch too. When you're just starting out the game and mashing the attack button while standing, grunts have a strong enough sense of self-preservation to duck before you even get in range so they can have a go at your legs. There is a long enough delay between them crouching and initiating a new attack for you to crouch and retaliate with a crouching attack of your own, so thankfully they can't decide to instantly cripple you (without warning). You really shouldn't treat grunts as human beings, they're there solely to be thrown into something else. Their blood isn't even red like in a normal human being, theirs is green. Meaning they're either androids, or German.
Stronger grunts come in the form of Corporal Mario & Luigi, who have more HP and are slightly more aggressive but can be taken out in a single down-throw, and Sergeant T, who retaliates with lightning-quick punches and kicks if you get in his range, so you either need to bait him into your punching range or enter his range while standing and very quickly follow up with a crouch attack. You have one combo where the final hit knocks enemies down, and the most optimal way of dealing damage is to hit enemies up until the last hit in your combo, and follow up with a down-throw instead. Optionally you can throw in one of your area traversal attacks in there to close the distance. Moving in for the throw or crouch attack is the trickiest part, and requires good reflexes to be executed consistently, which is what makes fighting Sergeants consistently engaging, especially in larger crowds.
Other forces also come in the form of Bodyguards, who behave similarly to Sergeants, but have the dangerous tendency to grab and throw you for massive damage if you carelessly enter their range. This becomes especially noticeable with Kunoichi's more limited attack range, as you find yourself thrown more often. The solution then here is to first 'disable' Bodyguards by throwing another enemy at them and then beating them up as the Bodyguards recover, enter their range with a flying kick they can't grab, or use some other move which can close the distance. This gets trickier when they're paired with enemies who have anti-air capabilities or like to move around all over their place. Basically, walking right into their face is asking for trouble. To keep in line with countering Kunoichi's Down+Jump, it would seem fitting if they could counter Ninja's rocket boost (when not kicking) and Kamaitachi's jump kick with a grab, so you'd have to use the more riskier flying kicks which may not work as well on other enemy types.
Even though most foot soldiers seem to have resorted to knives and fists because of either a massive budget deficit or the idea that bullets won't work on The Ninja Warriors (they still do), the Gunmen seem to have realized the importance of firearms in modern combat. They seem to be embarrassed about going full auto, though. Gunmen like to stay at the edges of the screen and away from the action, instead harrassing you by firing their guns at you. Thankfully they only fire three bullets at you at a time, and you can always crouch under their bullets, or just block them with your robot arms. They don't know how to fire their weapons while crouching. Especially Ninja can use his rocket thrusters to weave right under the bullets and follow up on the Gunmen with his trademark down-throw as punishment for Gunmen desecrating the sacred grounds of men(/robots) battling with their fists in honorable combat. Gunmen don't really care, and can lob grenades too if they feel like it. Basically, Gunmen are there to implicitly tell you "
HIT THE DECK, BITCH", again stressing the importance of switching between a standing and crouching stance in a single-plane brawler like this.
There are also other small drones who'll roll around the field not doing much else, until they reach the edge of the field and start firing bullets at a low elevation, forcing you to block low or jump. Obviously it's much more annoying that the lower lane gets threatened with incoming bullets as having to jump leaves you more vulnerable than having to crouch in most situations when you don't have blocking down either, so thankfully these drones go down much faster and aren't as aggressive, only starting their attacks when they reach the edge of the screen which also makes them more predictable. They're more dangerous, but they take so long to attack that it's your own fault for not throwing them or killing them in time before they start shooting.
Of course since you're a murder machine, it'd make sense that Banglar has his own bipedal android robot forces outside roombas with guns strapped on. He just didn't think of making them ninjas as well. These robots are completely invulnerable to attacks from the front (with the sole exceptions of special finishers and thrown enemies), forcing you to get up close and throw them, or just jump behind them. Now you can't just mash your way through as easily, and have to rely more on your throws. Thankfully, some of your throws also reverse the facing direction of your targets, so they have their back turned towards you when they recover after being thrown, which in the case of robots allows you to decimate their weakpoints in the back as opposed to whittling them down with throws and specials. Robots are slow, and have heavily telegraphed attacks where they can fire a laser diagonally downwards to zap you if you are hovering outside their range, otherwise they will crouch and extend their claws to strike you. Beat up a robot enough, and its head will explode (in TNWA, everything explodes head-first), but its body will continue to chase you until that's taken care of too. Its body can't shoot lasers any more from its missing head, but it acts like an aggressive Bodyguard at that point by constantly grabbing you if you walk carelessly into its range, and remains a massive threat if you don't immediately finish it off after making its head explode.
Banglar's got ninja forces of his own too. Wherever there's a ninja, there's always other ninja clans. In this case, there's jumping kunoichis. I want to call them kunoichis, but we've already got a playable Kunoichi. Again, redundant naming. So let's just call them Jumpers to avoid confusion. Jumpers don't even attack aggressively, they keep high jumping around the playing field while you are busy disposing of the trash on the ground. And just while you are busy comboing some poor fool, they somehow always find the worst possible time to jump behind you and slash you with their katanas, forcing you to either move away, finish a combo, or prepare a backwards throw. They also manage to wriggle out of your grabs faster than any other enemy if you don't immediately follow up with a throw. Even on the ground their katanas have large reach and are capable of blocking your strikes from both elevations, and they take two down-throw combos to take out, with the yellow variant needing three, so they won't go away that easily. You can do a jumping attack to knock them out of the sky, but it won't deal a lot of damage until you aggressively down-throw their ass on the ground, but other enemies will also be asking for an asswhoopin'.
I like them a lot because they constantly keep you on your toes. You constantly want to watch your back in case they do something unpredictable, or instead land behind an enemy you're roughing so they can do their katana attack which has a bigger range than yours. On their own they're not much of a threat. Whenever they're knocked down they'll always high jump again, and after a while you'll develop a knack for predicting their jumping arc and standing on the spot where they're about to land so you can give them a nice warm down-thrown hug, and then follow up with another one as soon as they recover. They fit the harrasser role exceedingly well, and the PAL version made a massive mistake cutting them out entirely.
What I'm not a fan of is how Jumpers (and Bodyguards) can do flying kicks. They just come out of nowhere, have very little telegraphed wind-up, and leave you with very little time to respond, and you'd better hope you're in a situation where you can rely on your i-frames to not get hit by them. Bodyguards can even initiate flying kicks off-screen, there's no way you can reasonably respond to that unless you know beforehand that Bodyguards will be spawning. What's worse, there's nothing in particular I found that will make a Bodyguard or Jumper perform a flying kick. Whether they'll do it or not appears to be entirely up to chance, making it even harder to anticipate and defend against.
That said, I'm not against Jumpers or Bodyguards having flying kicks, I just wished they were telegraphed better. There's an elevator ride at the end of stage 7 which will lock you inside with four Jumpers, which I dealt with by standing in one side of the elevator cart and mashing attack as the jumping idiots died one by one because they kept jumping into my fists instead of actually attacking me. Only the occasional flying kick could knock me out of my rhythm, but it again happened at complete random instead of deterministically kicking my ass with flying kicks if I try to pull off a stunt like standing in a corner and mashing the attack button.
Other ninjas come in the form of Masked Ninjas, who behave like cheeky-ass grunts in that they don't deal much damage, but they specialize in getting close and doing a little damage really fast, which can get you stunlocked easily when other enemies start taking advantage of you being hit. In front of you they'll shuffle around back and forth, but if you turn your back towards them they will come running to advertise their back acupuncture services with a free demo. Basically you don't want to be in the center of the arena or have them be behind you once they appear.
Mini-Wolverines act in-between harrassers and damage dealers. They'll constantly hop around, and their small frame (only being half your size) makes them much harder to hit. On the ground you need to crouch if you actually want to hit them (unless you're playing as Kamaitachi). You can't really use Kunoichi's forwards kunai stab on them because they immediately follow up with an attack whenever they get hit and the forwards stab has too many recovery frames to follow up with another attack before the mini-Wolverine attacks. Their constant hopping also makes it difficult for them to stay where you want them to. Essentially they should be dealt with the same way as Jumpers, as they occupy a role very similar to Jumpers, though mini-Wolverines are more micro whereas Jumpers are macro, if that makes sense. Basically mini-Wolverines are more of an immediate threat whereas Jumpers are a lingering threat, and mini-Wolverines do take priority because of how much more quickly they can hop around and fuck your legs up.
One thing I don't like at all is how mini-Wolverines enter the playing field by dropping from the top of the screen somewhere near the center (not always, but more than I'd like). Their AI works in such a way that the first thing they do after getting 'activated' (recovering from a knockdown or entering the arena) is immediately attacking if you're in their attack range. In fact, all enemies do this, but instead of on top of you, most enemies spawn from the very edges of the screen, which you really shouldn't be hovering near if you don't know what you are doing. Meanwhile these guys can drop on top of you and immediately knock you down before you can properly position yourself. You have to memorize the points when they'll spawn and at what point from the ceiling they'll drop down.
I don't mind enemies spawning around the center of the arena, in fact I like it because it gives you more shit to be aware of other than enemies coming from left and right. Like how in some stages grunts will drop down from a higher point to enter the playing field, but you can clearly see them moving around and dropping down first even though you can't damage them at that point, giving you time to plan and improvise. It feels like bullshit if they would then drop out of seemingly nowhere and instantly knock you down, as mini-Wolverines tend to do. The weird part is that the game already has a more effective method of spawning enemies in the center of the screen, and that's using smoke bombs. Enemies like Masked Ninjas and Jumpers can appear out of nowhere using a smoke bomb (as primarily featured in the Stage 7 elevator ride), and have a brief amount of frames where they are visible and invincible as they appear. So I don't know why mini-Wolverines can't do the same using smoke bombs.
The Spiked Ninjas act as the main footsoldiers of the clan, recovering really fast from knockdowns, possessing several quick attacks with large range, and can even do standing jumpkicks if you hover around their attack range too much which you can't reliably intercept when they're jumping all the way up in the air, and are generally fairly tanky. They can even do really fast high jumps to get behind you. They can also throw you if you stay in a blocking stance for way too long, which really hurts. The only thing I'd love more is if they used their *jumps behind you* move more often, because there's a lot of spots where it's too easy to get all Spiked Ninjas grouped up and stunlocked into a corner.
They're the strongest in line of evolution from footsoldiers, with Sergeants and Corporals technically acting as weaker variants because they occupy identical roles in combat, which in one way could be considered lazy, but having variants to pick between gives the planners greater freedom to balance the difficulty for some encounters so you're not constantly barraged with Spiked Ninjas everywhere, and also smoothen out the difficulty curve for one. There are recolored variants of enemy types with more health, but it'd feel stale if all footsoldier variants were just recolors. Each footsoldier type having a different sprite and behavior also lets you prioritize threats more easily.
One particular flaw in the enemy's AI is that while several enemy types can have several counters to some of your attacks, most short-range attack enemies are incredibly vulnerable against whiffs. You can spam your attack button and keep hitting the air, but eventually the enemies in front of you will end up walking into your attack range and get their dumb asses locked in your combo. At least ranged enemies and enemies with a large attack range don't fall prey to this as much, so this isn't very gamebreaking, though it'd make more sense and discourage scrubplay more of the AI for some enemy type would decide to enter your personal space with a flying kick or quickjump behind you if you try to deny the space in front of you by repeatedly spamming attack and waiting for them to come into your range.
The last unit of the ninjas are the Dragon Ninjas, who can as the name suggests breathe fire. Their dragon's breath has a range which far extends beyond most of your regular attacks and is about one-fifth of the screen width wide, the Dragons can breathe their fire either crouching or standing at random, and it's unblockable to boot. If the Spiked Ninja/Sergeants are the Warriors, the Robots are Knights, the Gunmen/Drones are Archers, the Jumpers/mini-Wolverines/Masked Ninjas are Rogues, then Dragon Ninjas are the Mages, always backing up and staying behind enemies so they can toast you while your attacks can only reach the enemy sitting inbetween you and the Dragon. With them on the field you need to be careful not to initiate a combo too early, and figure out how you're going to disable them. They actually become one of the highest priority targets because of their range, unblockable attack property, and how they
complement other enemies. First you want to deal with this asshole so you can deal with the rest without getting burned. Stunlocking enemies into a corner becomes tricky when a Dragon is hanging around off-screen who you can't see initiate his attack, making it wiser to back off instead. Thankfully, Dragon Ninjas are overconfident and will move ahead of the rest of their pack if you back up yourself, allowing you to lure them out. If there's enough free space for you to move safely back up, that is. Much like the Spiked Ninja he has a mobility move which he doesn't use as much as he'd like. He can teleport around, but I'd rather he'd use it more often to get away when cornered or to "regroup" by standing behind other enemies.
The last enemy type is the Puma, weird freakish biological experiments which resulted in clowns in pulp sci-fi space suits. They are Masked Ninjas on crack, which in turn were grunts on crack. They move around fast and can follow up with even quicker knees to your gut. They can do a slide kick and perform a melee attack outside your range, but unlike the Jumper/Bodyguard's flying kicks theirs is actually telegraphed by having them quickly shuffle back and forth before slidekicking, so you can actually play around this fact. That's not all, though. They can turn themselves invincible to grabs completely. Suddenly you can't use them to exercise crowd control at all or grab them after recovering from a knockdowns to clear the enemies around you. They can be hit by thrown enemies, just not be thrown while in this state. In this state you'll just have to damage them the regular way. The times at which they'll shift into their ungrabbable states are consistent (two Pumas entering the playing field at the same time will both turn ungrabbable at the same time after a while).
As you can hopefully see by now, not only does TNWA have a great variety of enemies, this variety is further enhanced by how well each enemy complements eachother which allows new situations and required strategies to arise. Robots force you to somehow get at their back or throw them around, Jumpers keep harrassing you at the most inopportune moments, Bodyguards discourage careless rushing, Dragons make it hard to get close at all, Gunmen deny the safety of standing around, and even grunts play a role because of their constant presence everywhere. To bring back the RPG comparison, all enemies are like different classes in a party, accustomed to each combat different needs and make up for the other. The enemy types also make great use of the fact that the game is a single-plane beat 'em up, and wouldn't work as well if directly inserted into a belt scroller.
The variety in roles allows for a large variety of combat encounters to be created, in a genre where each "fight" comes down to amount of enemies, enemy types used, and what side of the screen they spawn on. Obviously there isn't as much versatility in most beat 'em up stage design consisting primarily of enemy composition when compared to something like Doom, which is why the general impression I get from most beat 'em ups is that they rely too much on gimmicks such as bonus rounds, weapons, environmental hazards, and other gimmicks to make up for a lacklustre core enemy variety. Meanwhile TNWA's enemy variety is so strong that it easily carries most of the game. It doesn't have the effective AI of some other beat 'em ups which would allow them to cooperate and fuck you over that way, but here all these different basic behaviors and roles manage to just synchronize naturally on their own. Hard Mode in TNWA only mixes up enemy compositions to include more (difficult) enemies and give bosses slightly more health, and it just works. Stage hazards in TNWA are only used rarely that they come off as gimmicky more than anything.
One reoccurring one is falling bombs, which are just annoying. They're telegraphed with hardly visible shadows on the ground for less than a second before the bomb drops and you get knocked down. You barely even get time to respond, and if you're in the middle of a combo you're fucked. Their landing position can be completely random, but instead it feels like the game is just trolling you with these. Sometimes they'll drop somewhere random, but more often than not they'll precisely drop right on top of you. Even when boosting with Ninja you'll often run into a bomb and get knocked down. You just have to rely on your i-frames by throwing things to avoid getting damaged, or jump in the air where the bombs can't hit you. When playing as Kunoichi and Kamaitachi, you'll just high jump your way through all the enemies until you get to a safe spot because of how little time you spend on the ground when continuously high jumping. This is harder with Ninja whose jump has wind-up and isn't instant. So you have to spam the diagonal crash repeatedly and hope you don't get hit.
Normally you just run through, but then Stage 7 has the brilliant idea to lock you into a wave while bombs keep falling and knocking all enemies down, but there's no safe spots and you have to manage to kill all the enemies first before you can get away from the bombardment. You have to spam throws like mad and get mad lucky if you want to survive this without taking damage. I wouldn't have minded as much if the bombs didn't fall as fast and were telegraphed for a while longer so you got enough time to play around them. As it stands it's too stupidly fast and feels like you're being constantly trolled because they keep falling at the absolute worst spots.
Stage 2 has you walk under these rotor blades which regularly turn off and on and damage you when you walk under them when they're turned on. These things are just a waste of time as it primarily involves waiting for the traffic sign to go green while grunts keep spawning (and maybe grab some grunt to push him into the blades for shits and giggles when you're playing as Ninja), and then the screen stops scrolling as two rotor blades effectively split the playing field in three zones with the rotor blades preventing you from moving to any other zone when they're spinning. Only then you have enemies spawning from both the left and right side, so what you'll probably do most of the time is stay in either zone closest to the edge of the screen and keep hitting the edge of the screen and all the enemies behind it. Only then you have to deal with enemies coming from the other side, but not really, because the enemy AI is amusingly braindead to keep walking into the giant spinning blades of death over and over until they end up killing themselves. Although it is silly, it at least saves you some time than having to wait for the blades to stop spinning so you can go beat them up yourself. I don't really like this one because it restricts you space for too long but doesn't have/constantly spawn enough enemies for this one to be engaging. You'll most likely beat up one side and wait for the other to kill themselves. If you get lucky with the rotor timings, you can go beat them up yourself.
Stage 4 also has a stage hazard in the form of a helicopter which will try to shred your ass, but this one actually works, as enemies start spawning and the screen stops scrolling. For one, it's clearly telegraphed (the helicopter first shooting up that car should show what it's about to do to you, even if it's unclear at first), and you can actually play around it. The helicopter gunner will fire at either the left or right half of the screen and then have a go from the opposite direction, temporarily denying you from standing in that half and forcing you to move/camp less. But as he only shoots the ground, you can jump in the air to avoid damage if you can't get away for some reason. What's more, the helicopter gunner will also take out other enemies/his supposed allies in his blind fury, which you can take advantage of by throwing enemies into the respective half the gunner is about to shoot up to have them take more damage. It makes for a great fight, and I wouldn't have minded at all if the helicopter was reused more often. Though it limits you, you can still play around the helicopter and aren't completely restricted in your aggression. The only silly part is that the gunner will circle around a fixed amount of times, so if you manage to kill all enemies before he's done, you have to wait until he's done all rounds which you can easily avoid at that point.
The game can take around 50 minutes to complete, but it doesn't wear out its welcome at all. There's eight stages, with stage 6 being noticeably short for some reason. Unlike most beat 'em ups, TNWA does not have lives. Instead you get a single health bar which gets refilled between stages and can be refilled by finding health items inside boxes. Lose all your health, and it's game over. This does mean that your health bar is relatively large since you don't have any lives to fall back on, but the game still remains difficult enough that you will game over many times. The lack of lives and having a large health bar does further reinforce the feeling that death is the result of many cuts and bruises adding up over the long term rather than making single slip-ups here and there. TNWA has a score bar, but like most games of the time it's just fluff. Instead the feeling of progression comes down to how much you're able to avoid damage and quickly dispatch enemies, which may be a line of thought for the upcoming Once Again remake of this game.
Of course, other than enemies and the rare stage hazard, each stage ends with a boss fight, and in TNWA most of them are damn great. They nail something a lot of other beat 'em up bosses seem to forget. Namely, you've got a game all about crowd control and facing off many enemies at once, and then you're suddenly presented with this one evasive guy with unorthodox attacks, and have to find his opening the hard way. Boss fights are supposed to be the peaks in challenge which you have to surmount with your skill you've built up throughout the game. That a boss fight suddenly becomes about exploiting AI loopholes for a single enemy instead of proper crowd control is nothing short of gimmicky and discordant. It's a beat
'em up, not beat
'im up. Each beat 'em up boss should always come with supporting enemies. Most beat 'em ups aren't designed around fighting 1v1s like fighting games are, or to be more precise, most beat 'em up movesets aren't complex enough to make 1v1s really interesting, nor is the enemy AI complex enough to be a formidable opponent. The complexity and challenge in a beat 'em up is derived from crowd control and target prioritization, which is why again, each beat 'em up boss needs constantly spawning supporting enemies to be any fun. As an example, look no further than Shiva in Mr. X in Streets of Rage 2, where Shiva is an incredible pain at first because of all his counters but gets fairly easy once you learn his loopholes, whereas Mr. X remains consistently chaotic and unpredictable because of all the grunts spawning in from both sides making stunlocking him reliably an impossibility.
The Stage 1 boss, Gigant, takes things suitably challenging enough for a first stage. His kicks and punches have larger range than your attacks, he'll knock you out of the air if you try any air attacks up close, and just walking towards him gets you knocked back down. He's easily chain-thrown as he doesn't really have any recovery attacks, until enemies keep spawning from the left trying to interrupt your combo spree. Normally most bosses have enemies spawning from both sides, but for the first boss it's appropriate that they come from only one side to let you crowd control the situation more easily. Not a hard boss at all once you get a grip on the mechanics. Gigant will also appear as a mini-boss twice later on in the game, where he has the same behavior but much less health. As a regular enemy he can immediately punish you with his hueg range if you allow him to hover around behind some other enemy you're roughing up. I do kinda wish he appeared more often. What is interesting is that he'll be the first enemy you encounter who'll actively try to block your attacks (Jumpers can too, though Gigant is almost guaranteed to do it), as a kind of subtle tutorial that you should get around his block by either crouch attacking, or following up with a throw once he blocks while crouching. You can't just mash that button.
The Stage 2 boss, Chainsaw Bull, has the second-coolest intro of any boss fight in the game. A chainsaw blade suddenly starts carving through a steel door, and Chainsaw Bull slams it wide open right to the beat of the music (most people are surprised when they discover that others also attack to the hits of the music as the intro plays out). At first I thought he was a samurai wielding a chainsaw, which would kind of fit the pulpy fighting ninja warriors theme of the game. But it seems like he's a fireman gone postal. Now he's hanging around in the cabin of some boat. With his chainsaw. You never know when you might need a chainsaw if a ninja warrior starts sneaking through your boat.
He don't fuck around, though. He can charge forwards with his chainsaw across half the screen, he can swing his chainsaw in a semi-circle hitting anything above him or crouched beneath him, and enemies keep spawning in from both left and right. He'll also drill in the idea that bosses have recovery attacks in your head. To keep things a bit more fair, bosses can perform a recovery attack during which they are invincible, if you are standing over them as they're recovering from a knockdown. It's not as easy to keep them stunlocked as you can with regular enemies, so you have to give bosses a little breathing room and the brief hope that they can actually lay a finger on you, before crushing that hope right back to dust. Chainsaw Bull's recovery is his chainsaw semi-circle swing, so you better anticipate it. However, there is a brief vulnerability window in the wind-up of his semi-circle chainsaw swing attack, which allows you to put him in a stun state before he's able to attack again. Though you need proper timing to take advantage of it.
This is also where an important disparity between Ninja and Kunoichi goes to show, as Ninja is too big to crouch under Chainsaw Bull's chainsaw charge, and needs to either block, hover, or i-frame through it, whereas Kunoichi can continue with her crouching combos if he decides to charge in. Kunoichi might have that advantage, but she can't repeatedly spam backbreakers in a corner like Ninja can once he does manage to contain everyone to the corner. Pulling off a tackle on Chainsaw Bull as Ninja right as he's winding up his chainsaw charge is a feeling wrestling games can only hope to achieve. Chainsaw Bull plays like a more aggressive Gigant, with the additional threat of enemies spawning from both sides now. I do wish Chainsaw Bull reappeared as a mini-boss more often.
The Stage 3 boss is the worst in the game. He's not outright bad, just boring to deal with. There is one simple reason for that, and it's that no extra enemies will spawn during this fight, not even on Hard. This boss has some interesting attacks, and can even cloak himself, but it's a bit pointless when there's no other enemies to make it harder to stunlock him. His recovery attack isn't as volatile as with other bosses who will immediately punish you if you stand too close, but instead he'll jump onto the wall and drops two pairs of bombs... which you can easily avoid by just standing right underneath him as he drops them. It's unlikely that you will get hurt by this attack once you learn the trick to it. I more often than not found myself backing off from the boss just so he wouldn't waste my time with this attack. Him randomly moving about and dropping bombs wouldn't be as simple if there were other enemies to shove you around. Him cloaking and being harder to see could be an actual threat factor if there were other enemies hanging about to obscure his vision. Again, it shows just how important it is to have multiple enemies in a beat 'em up boss fight.
He can also do a grab attack similar to Kunoichi's Concentrated Groin Assault, which you can break away/high jump away from at any point. It's just a bit unintuitive that his attacks are so fast and leave you unable to block in the middle of a combo. Usually you can block in the middle of a pain state when any enemy is trying to combo you, but the boss here attacks so fast that that becomes impossible, which feels a little inconsistent and is never communicated properly. At least this guy has the coolest background of any boss fight, with a set of large television screens in the background menacingly showing Banglar's face as he's observing you, observing everything in his decaying empire.
The Stage 4 boss, Silverman, isn't a seasoned warrior or an immortal murder machine, he's just one of Banglar's co-conspirators and flunkies. Out of all bosses he's the most human and weakest one, as he only has two attacks. He's only got a wooden cane to smack around with, but that cane
fucking hurts, and has decent range to boot. It must be that undying human spirit, which should explain the massive beating he can take too. It's also his recovery attack and quite dangerous. You don't need even to be directly standing over him for him to do his recovery attack. Sometimes he will sprint a short distance up in your face to give you The Cane. It'd be unfair to pit just a guy with a cane against an immortal murder machine, which is why Silverman can call in back-up by calling down an
orbital laser on your position. Anything becomes cooler if it has orbital lasers. It's telegraphed with a targeting laser for a second or three before it touches down, and Silverman will jump up a platform where he can't be damaged before calling it, so you have ample time to prepare.
To offset Silverman being so comparatively puny, he also gets the greatest amount of help from respawning enemies than any other boss fight. You can face up to three extra enemies max much like with Chainsaw Bull(whereas most others only go up to two), but especially on Hard the Silverman fight spawns in much tougher enemy types than the Chainsaw Bull fight does. Expect a combination of Sergeants, Robots, Gunmen, Mario & Luigi, and Bodyguards, alongside the asshole with his huge health pool and volatile recovery attack. What's interesting is what causes Silverman to attack. Silverman will only jump up and call down an airstrike,
if you let him. If you constantly keep disabling him and knocking him down on the ground, he won't have time to call one down. He needs to jump up twice before he'll call down the laser, too. However, if you keep knocking him down, he'll keep doing his incredibly aggressive recovery attack more often. So the most efficient strategy here is to get off as full of a combo as possible finished off with a down-throw to deal as much damage as possible. Which isn't as easy when you're surrounded by four enemies at a time. It's easy to go for a throw in order to control the crowd, but then Silverman comes knocking down your door again. And some of the enemies like Gunmen and Robots definitely require your attention if you want to be able to hit Silverman without getting hit from behind at all. Meaning you want to get off as many hits as possible, as knocking down Silverman may not necessarily be the best option, but it can be if he's left unscathed for too long.
Though the spawning order for the respawning enemies is fixed, how they behave isn't, leading to a highly unpredictable and random fight. But it's that chaos which makes this fight so great, it perfectly encapsulates the dynamic of the entire game. Constant threat management, crowd control, and careful positioning all come together to challenge your mettle. It's a bit of a shame that this fight is a lot easier with Kunoichi. Silverman's cane attack can hit Ninja crouching in front of him, but he can't hit Kunoichi crouching in front of him because her crouching hitbox is smaller. As a result, Kunoichi can constantly slash crouch combos at Silverman's legs and the enemies behind him without getting hit by him regardless of whether he is doing his recovery attack, whereas Ninja just has to back off if he doesn't want to get caned and figure out how to get back into his range. It's inevitable that some bosses will be easier with certain characters than others in any type of game, but here it feels like Kunoichi got a giant free pass that isn't even the result of her movement, but her hitbox being slightly smaller.
Being able to crouch under Silverman's cane ruins one important part of the dynamic that makes this fight great otherwise, and only leaves the other enemies as the main source of challenge here, turning large parts of this fight into spamming the crouch combo until the more special enemy types start spawning in. Kunoichi being able to crouch under certain attacks Ninja can't is an acceptable trade-off for her lacking reach and Ninja being more adept at throws and closing the distance, but I don't think it should apply to recovery attacks, and that they should be able to hit a crouching Kunoichi like Chainsaw Bull's recovery attack to prevent Kunoichi from crouch combo spamming her way through.
The Stage 5 boss is Sensei, the real all-human master ninja. He likes to do flying kicks, *teleports behind you* out of your combo, and do this attack where he makes several pillars of fire rise up out of the ground, making it tough on you if you're trying to avoid the boss in favor of beating up some of the respawning grunts on the edges of the screen. On Normal he isn't too difficult. You can first get rid of the Spiked Ninjas and then keep stunlocking him to death with combos because on Normal the enemy spawn rate isn't too high, but on Hard this fight gets proper going. There can only be two additional enemies max here, but unlike with the Silverman fight you will be facing enemies of the more harrassing and more
dangerous kind. Dragons, Jumpers, mini-Wolverines and Spiked Ninjas will make it incredibly difficult to get one in on Sensei without getting owned yourself, but killing one of the adds will immediately spawn another. As the spawn order is fixed, you might want to keep some adds alive longer so you don't have to deal with a Dragon, or instead prioritize the Dragons first if they end up spawning anyways.
This fight is pretty damn tricky because you have tricky enemies spawning in from both sides and Sensei keeps using his flying kicks and teleports out of your combos to move from one side of the screen to the other, making it difficult to keep everything contained to one side of the screen and possibly reversing the tables on you when you're surrounded by both adds. Ninja has an easier time because he can quickly throw out some Backbreakers, whereas the chosen enemy types for the adds make it difficult for Kunoichi to pull off a full Concentrated Groin Assault. It's a fun fight where you constantly have to adapt to Sensei's erratic behavior and a new enemy entering the fray who is a particular pain to deal with.
The Stage 6 boss is actually a pair of upgraded Gigants called Phobos & Deimos (a remix of Boss 1 actually starts playing for this fight, my personal headcanon for this fight is that since you fought two Gigants up to this point in the game that Phobos & Deimos are those Gigants you beat earlier, but with a vengeance), and they don't fuck around. While this fight has no adds, the Gigants can slide kick across the screen, they have a proper recovery attack this time around, and they have a synchronized quick jump where one will jump to your left and the other to your right at the same time, which makes it difficult to keep things organized. The healthbar for both guys is shared and it's the largest out of any boss fight in the game, but on the plus side you can damage both of them at the same time for double damage, which is one of the keys to victory in this fight.
One major factor in this fight is getting both Gigants on one side of the screen. Throwing one into the other has you back off or block to avoid their recovery attack, and high jumping isn't always viable considering the Gigants can knock you right out of the sky if you try to jump from a poor position. However, as Kunoichi you can also make use of the brief window after both Gigants jump away from eachother to execute a Concentrated Groin Assault on one before the other comes hovering behind you. The slide kicks are tricky to deal with too. Sometimes both Gigants will try to slide kick you, sometimes one will and the other will walk behind you and make moving backwards/forwards a bit trickier. You can low crouch to block the slide kick, but the ensuing force of blocking the slide kick will push you back to the corner of the playing field, and the Gigants will follow up with a throw if you don't break out of your block ASAP. You can jump to avoid it, but the other Gigant may then swat you down. Sometimes you might have one Gigant in a combo, and then the other starts winding up his sliding kick, during which you can decide to break away somewhere safer, or continue the combo and hope you can time it right that you can perform your finisher and i-frame through once the other guy is about to hit you with his slide kick.
Even though there's just two enemies, they're mobile and aggressive enough which gives this fight a lot to consider. The only disappointing part is when they both don't slide kick or sync-jump after recovering, instead shuffling towards you as they're basically overlapping eachother, giving you what amounts to a free window for a combo, though it feels cheap because whether this happens feels like it comes down to dumb luck.
The stage 7 boss, Green Dhalsim, sure has the coolest intro (ambushes you in an elevator and then sends it crashing downwards where the fighting begins) and also one of the coolest boss themes. It's very difficult to get in his range. When you know what to do you can keep him under control, but often the other two adds will break things up and make you figure out how to keep Green Dhalsim stuck in a loop you want. Dhalsim is tricky as shit, as he keeps somersaulting across the screen, doing crouching whirlwinds if you try to get up close, and he can even extend his arms Dhalsim-style to grab you from medium range. And if you turn your back to him, for example to grab another enemy for throwing purposes, he'll run up you really fast for a quick backstab. Masked Ninjas cannot even compare. From the start the fight doesn't fuck around, as the two adds to complement Green Dhalsim's unpredictability are Pumas, who also like to make your life difficult with throw resistances and sudden knees and elbows to your back.
Green Dhalsim doesn't quite have a recovery attack. Instead, the trick to keep him locked is to keep standing, and then immediately crouch once he does a guaranteed standing attack after recovering, following up with a combo of your own. It's a bit easier said then done when you have Pumas hovering about you, which are then followed up by Robots and Gunmen in that order if you take care of the adds first. This fight is a bit special because Green Dhalsim only prefers to enter your range on his own terms, whereas any attempts at your part to enter his will be met with swift dismissal. You'll have to manage by knocking him down by throwing an enemy at him first. But again, Green Dhalsim won't let you grab an enemy that easily either. A very engaging fight, where the central philosophical theme is "how do I get in this fucker's range?".
The final boss is Banglar himself, except not really, because he's accompanied
every (regular, so no Gigant) enemy type in the game, and he's piloting a funky ass machine which does nothing other than create three sets of laser walls in both areas between the center and edges of the field, leaving only the center and edges of the field as permanent safespots. The practical application of such a machine may be a little vague, but engineers devised such a machine to create a
great fucking final boss fight.
Banglar is safely encased behind the bulletproof window of his machine, and the only way to damage it is to throw enemies at it repeatedly, which involves using the up-throws on Ninja and Kunoichi while standing in the center of the screen as enemies surround you from both sides, though Ninja can use his left/right throws to hit Banglar as well if he moves a bit off-center, and Kunoichi can do the same for larger enemies only. Kamaitachi rears his overpowered head again by being able to cunt punt enemies from the very edges of the screen toward's Banglar's seat without ever having to really move. But for a game like this, it's nothing but fitting that the final boss fight is all about throws.
Like any good final boss fight, it's a major exam of everything you've learned up until now, as shown by throwing every enemy type in the game at you. There is a fixed spawn order to the enemies too from easy to diffcult that lends the fight itself a satisfying feeling of progression. First it'll be grunts, Mario & Luigi, Sergeants, before moving on to Spiked Ninjas, Jumpers, and then Robots and Pumas. Although the main focus is throwing enemies at Banglar, some crowd control might have to be enacted on the ground so you don't get poked. Standing in the central safe spot waiting for enemies to come to you can backfire quickly depending on the enemies present, so you'll have to go under the laser wall emitters to grab an enemy to throw. The laser walls add another layer of player positioning to the fight, making it dangerous for you to go outside for too long, but asking that you keep the safespots clear of enemies as well. At the same time the laser walls can knock down enemies as well, which helps move the fight along faster by damaging enemies so other types can be cycled through more quickly and keeps things fresh.
Even though the spawn order and the order in which laser walls are emitted are fixed, it's amazing how chaotic and unpredictable this fight can still be. There's very little in the way of surefire strategy here, especially considering you'd have to account one for every single enemy type in the game. It's pure on-the-spot thinking and improvisation. I don't think it's the hardest fight in the game (I'd give that award to Sensei or Green Dhalsim), but it sure is thematically satisfying as the end of the game. You knock Banglar out of his seat, which immediately kills him (portrayal of death under 90's Nintendo had its limitations). Mission accomplished. But because you're too dangerous to live, your handlers detonate the bomb in your chest, taking the entire facility with you.
A revorution broke out. And everything became to an end. The troubled country seemed to be finished by the death of the wicked machines. But the peace did not came.
Because Ninja Warriors, they are the immortal murder machines...
The Ninja Warriors Again has certainly earned itself a place in my list of favourite games of all time. The core movesets are so strong and the enemy variety so well designed that they carry the whole game, with an excellent soundtrack and graphical presentation as a cherry on top. Seriously, go play it. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say there's nothing quite like it. Most beat 'em ups are belt-scrollers because they just started that way, with the more popular examples such as Final Fight, Streets of Rage 2 and Double Dragon also doing the same. You've got the Spartan X games, though they play more similarly to something like One Finger Death Punch, and Aztez which I've incidentally covered last time is definitely more stylish action than crowd control-oriented. I'd certainly love to see a more traditional beat 'em up try tackle a single-plane environment.
