Game Journal: The Ninja Warriors Once Again (No Death Clear, Hard)

I cleared The Ninja Warriors Once Again (a.k.a. The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors), a 2019 PC/console beat 'em up game from NatsumeAtari, on the hardest difficulty.

The Ninja Warriors Once Again is a remake of The Ninja Warriors Again (SNES), which was just called The Ninja Warriors outside of Japan. The remake was developed by the same core team that made the SNES game back in 1994!

I liked the game itself, although the process of going for a no death clear was frustrating. The game is very long by arcade standards, the first 4-5 stages are very easy (once you're good enough to be going for no death attempts) and you can trivially heal back up to full health in lots of places, so the first half of each run felt like a chore compared to other arcade games which either stay difficult for most of their runtime or have more long-term resources to manage throughout the entire run (lives, bombs etc). The reason this run is a stream highlight and not a clean recording is that I got bored playing the game alone and needed to talk to my stream chat to take my mind off the early stages of the game. If all of those things were fixed, I would have loved to have a much harder difficulty mode in line with other arcade beat em ups, with more aggressive enemies etc.

That said, playing through the game with continues is still fun! It looks beautiful and it's a great place to start if you're interested in beat em ups, especially if you don't mind the stage 1 boss having super armor.