The blurb on THE NINJA WARRIORS ONCE AGAIN Amazon page is “Significantly enhanced remake of one of the best Japanese side-scrolling beat-me-up games of all time!” This bit of hyperbole could be mistaken for a selling point, or, it could be the absolute truth.

Looking at just the first few words and then turning the game on, we can a see the first half of that sentence is true. It is perfectly beholden to the trappings of the original game. A distant shot of a city under sunset, a humming bassline greeting us behind a scroll of text. The world is in peril, the final battle has begun. Scrolling text tells us we’re playing THE NINJA WARRIORS. There’s a start screen – then there is a character select, videogames should always happen so effortlessly.

A lot of games have done the throwback beatemup this year: Have meditated on the genre and its trappings. Two of those games DEEP-HELL reviewed earlier this year. They both offer charm and emotion, meditations on the craft and nostalgia of the genre. After all though, the best way to prove you know what you’re talking about is sometimes through pure execution.

THE NINJA WARRIORS ONCE AGAIN is pure execution. There are almost no frills in this package. No scoreboards, nothing to distract yourself with. Get one of five Ninja to the end of the level without dying. With an arsenal of suplexes, shurikens and swords – there’s nothing else you need here. Every button press and combination does something necessary. Flip through the air, clear the screen with explosions. Throw a fatigue-wearing clown across the screen like a human bowling ball. The bread and butter here is rich, if you have the appetite to dive all of the way in.

Weekends could be spent figuring out the different options available to you. Each Ninja is completely different. One is a lumbering titan, swinging nunchucks that fill a quarter of the screen. One of the unlockable characters literally fills the screen. No less love is payed to either character. Here is a tip if we ever play videogames together: I am predictable so the fastest characters are always my favorite characters to pick, this is a trend that started with Lancelot in Knights of the Round and extends until the present moment.

What surprises me the most about the presentation here is it is strinkingly close to the original. In updating an older game, the choice was clearly made to preserve the aesthetic. Nevertheless, more than a handful of them do not have sensibilities approaching the pixelart of modern indie games. In bringing this game here and now, it needed to have upgraded fidelity. Characters are smooth but not late 90’s Capcom smooth. In other words, it strives to match the appeal of the original while not disconnecting itself from it. Most notably, the palette of colors reflects the trend for arcade games of that bygone era to favor a low contrast, washed out look. Not everything needs to be blaringly high contrast and pastel, nor does it need to be sharp and crispy like River City Girls.

No matter how slow your character plods through levels, here is a game about breakneck speed. If you aren’t moving and using abilities as soon as you can, you’re dead. On higher difficulties this is more clear – bossfights are constantly being invaded by special varieties of enemies. Surrounding the player encourages them to be offensive, and this is a game about being tremendously violent at all times. Rocket forward on jets, or flip through the sky and chop through enemies, both are the only ways to stay alive.

I wonder what kind of nostalgic statement is being made here? A completely pure remake of an arcade and SNES game that are more folklore than fact. The original NINJA WARRIORS and its sequel we’re mostly games played by emulation aficionados. I doubt that many Saturday mornings were spent playing the original game, unlike last years Wild Guns Reloaded. If this is jut another product in the pile, should we pay attention to it? While it’ll no doubt reach some kind of audience…does it add anything? Does every videogame need to add to the conversation anyway? No: They don’t! That’s our opinion, and that’s 100% fact right there.

Sitting in the dark and forcing my way through challenge after challenge in this – even though I did the same thing twelve years ago on a keyboard.

Yes, THE NINJA WARRIORS ONCE AGAIN begs to be played. What’s most exciting about the remake is that it varies only slightly from the original in execution. It’s smoother and faster, but THE NINJA WARRIORS has always been this good. Some works are special enough they deserve more fidelity than they might have originally been offered, and rarely is it done as capably as here.
Though it certainly helps that almost all of the developers who worked on the original are here. From the original team to Taito’s old in house band. The developers may not have had more to say here, but they may have wanted to choose how that message was presented. The slicing and killing still feels so great.