The Last Ninja

The Good
Featuring a good combination of action and adventure, The Last Ninja appealed to a larger audience on a lot of formats. The conversion was almost uncanny from the C64 (though lacking the music and sound effects).

The game featured a large arsenal – punches, kicks, a sword, nunchakas, a staff, shurikens and smoke bombs. Though you have to fight your way to getting most of these weapons you can use the ones you have already to get more. Some items had to be used in conjunction to get others.

I’m glad the game included the ability to save/restore as you could then do your best against an enemy or obstacle and save your progress.

The Bad
On both the C64 and PC, the game featured a really weird control system. Due to the isometric nature of the game, the diagnonal keys were used, in conjunction with the direction keys for controlling the ninja. When facing in a certain direction, let’s say towards the bottom right hand corner of the screen, you could run forwards or backwards while facing in the same direction. To turn the ninja around to face in the other direction involved pressing the right, diagonal up+right, up and up+left. This made fighting enemies who attacked you from another direction other than right in front of you hard. It also affected how long it took you to pick up an item. You would have to navigate the ninja around for quite a while before you got him into the correct direction and position.
Once you get used to it though, it’s not so bad. I recommend a joystick.

I also felt there was way too much emphasis on jumping as a skill in the game. There were 3 different types of jumps – short, medium and long. Screens where you would have to navigate rivers or swamps by jumping on stones or logs to get across, were a nightmare until you learnt a route using the same jumps every time.

The Bottom Line
An enjoyable action/adventure game wherein the main character is a ninja with a wide assortment of weapons. Although the difficulty level is quite high and it takes a while to get used to the control method, those who persevere are rewarded.

The Good
It was a very competent port of the C-64 game, for the PC was not well known for it's arcade machine qualities at this time.

The ability to fight, throw weapons and sneak around was pretty cool. The graphic style was also interesting.

**The Bad**
As stated in the previous review, the isometric view REALLY made control hard. On top of that, the Ninja COULD NOT SWIM! One touch of water and the Last Ninja was extinct! (I've never understood this arcade contrivance...)

Thus, the game became incredibly frustrating as moved your Ninja pixel by pixel across the swamp and river terrain, trying to get that EXACT placement for the EXACT right jump, or you get to play the whole sequence over again, minus a life. Fun.

**The Bottom Line**
While there were other games of its genre, the mixture of hand-to-hand, ranged combat and maneuvering around isometric terrain made it pretty unique.