Ninja Issen review: a one-person love letter to arcade ninjas

Nobody paid us for this review, and the game did not come from the developer.

At the arcade, the ninja cabinets always had a crowd. The hero threw stars, swung a blade and ran up walls, which was pretty much everything we wanted to do ourselves. Ninja Issen was made by someone who carries that same memory. On its Steam page, the developer calls it a game made out of admiration for the ninja games of the classic 8-bit and 16-bit era.

A game one person made

ASTEROID-J, the studio behind Ninja Issen, is one person. Jang Won-sun spent sixteen years in the game industry. In an interview, Jang said that without a hit on the résumé the doors started closing, and that going solo was the way forward. That tells you what kind of game this is: not the product of a big team splitting up the work, but one person pushing something they love all the way to the end. Before launch, more than 400 visitors came through its booth at the G-Star game show in Korea.

Throw the sword, go where it lands

Everything in this game turns on the teleport. Kiba, the hero, throws his katana at a spot and blinks to wherever it sticks. He uses that one move to cross the gaps between tall buildings and to slip past traps. Because the weapon is also the way you move, deciding where to throw the blade is the same as deciding which way to go.

Shuriken handle enemies at a distance, and they can knock incoming shots off course. Katana up close, shuriken from afar, and when the way is blocked, throw and follow. The old ninja games did all of that with two or three buttons, and this one keeps the controls just as tight.

Every boss is a pattern test

A boss waits at the end of each stage. Knock its health down far enough and the fight shifts into a new phase with meaner attacks. On some bosses you can break off parts of the body, and the attack pattern changes with them. Memorize the pattern, find the opening: the same lesson we paid for one quarter at a time.

Memorize the pattern, find the opening. The lesson we paid for in quarters still works here.

What it meant back then

Hardly anyone made it to the end of an arcade ninja game. We were always short on quarters, and there was always someone behind us waiting for a turn. So the games we never finished stuck with us longer than the ones we did. Ninja Issen gives you that ending you never saw, and this time you can take your time at home.

Playing it now

The stage is a cyberpunk city full of neon, so this is not a straight copy of an old game. Still, the waves of enemies and the thrill of cutting them down in one pass follow the arcade playbook exactly. Games made by one person show clearly what that person loved. In this one, you can see how much its maker loved the old ninja games.