Title: Super Ninja Boy (NA) Super Chinese World (JP)
Release Date: 12/28/91
Developer: Culture Brain
Publisher: Culture Brain
Super Ninja Boy is little known RPG from the people at Culture Brain. This series, which has its roots on the NES, is similar to the Ganbare Goemon series in style and oddity. Not one I was looking forward to revisiting, but we do what we must.
Background
We have seen Culture Brain once before on this blog with Super Baseball Simulator 1000, a pretty lackluster baseball sim. As I mentioned in that post, Culture Brain is kind of the king of esoteric RPGs from the NES and SNES era, with them developing Hamster Monogatari (a hamster simulation series) as well as the NES hidden gem Magic of Scheherazade. Their most developed series is the Super Chinese series, which is a primarily Japan only series (in fact this game would be the last one released in the United States). Culture Brain, as a company, is now defunct.
The Super Chinese series follows two ninjas, Jack and Ryu, as they defend their homeland, China Land from outside forces. In this game, China Land is visited by aliens, led by an Emperor named Rub-A-Doc. Though the aliens come in peace, soon after their arrival China Land starts to become populated with monsters, so Jack and Ryu as are sent to investigate. They learn that, in order to defeat the monsters, they must gather the seven "auraballs." It turns out, of course, that Rub-A-Doc, is actually the villain Robo Doc (a staple villain for the series) and he must be defeated.
Gameplay
The game is a mish-mash of different genres and influences from other NES and SNES titles. The best way to approximate it would be a mix of an early Dragon Quest with a dash of Zelda II. There is an RPG element where your character must go around towns and talk to NPCs until the next part of the quest unlocks, an over-world where the player may go from town to town or dungeon to dungeon, and random battles. The intriguing part is how random battles and boss battles are handled. The random battles are down in a 2-D plane beat-em-up style. You have a certain number of pre-selected enemies you must beat, and you can use your fists, kicks, jump-kicks, or Ninpo skills to defeat your enemies. If you are defeated, then you get transported to the last town you visited and taxed a certain amount of money (similar to Dragon Quest with their church system). You can equip weapons and items to make your journey a bit easier as well. Boss battles, though, are a bit different, as they are handled in a turn-based style, a la Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. There are even platforming sections in this game to spice things up even further. It is definitely a mutt of a game.
As a novelty the game is pretty neat. It is a quick and breezy game that is able to be beaten in 6 and 10 hours, and the gameplay is varied enough to keep your attention during that span. The game gives a nice amount of upgrades, too, that help with progression and keep combat and RPG stages interesting. These include items such as the Spider Claws which allow you to climb on the ceiling, or the hovercraft which allows you to travel over closed off areas on the over-world.
The world is colorful, silly, and cheery for an early SNES. The characters are all caricatures of Japanese or Chinese stock characters and pieces of folklore, or wonderfully weird amalgamations of these ideas. The color palette is bright and happy, with strong greens, reds, oranges, and blues.
The story does not take itself seriously at all, which is kind of refreshing for an RPG. It has that Dragon Quest "problem of the village" motif going on, where each area you encounter has some silly problem that the player character must deal with. The opening town has kidnapped people and jewels stolen from the Emperor, and another town has a demon that has cursed the local Samurai to become lazy and indolent. You will fight a whole manner of silliness, from Robot Clones, to lions with the bodies of drums, to street gangs, to walking temples, to shark warriors, to foxes and tanukis that ride airships. At one point, you get a shark submarine to travel around the world. Like I said, it is an incredibly zany game.
On top of that the game is 2 player co-op, which certainly is a novelty for RPGs from this era.
Now this isn't to say that this game is a hidden classic. It certainly has a fair share of problems. As usual, when a game pulls from a great many genres it fails at achieving competency with any of the genres or games that it pulls inspiration. As a beat-em-up, it feels like you are fighting in water. Your jumps are floaty and the attacks feel like they have the slightest delay. Most fights seem to be won just if you are hyper aggressive and hit/stun the enemy first, then pick them up and throw them, rinse and repeat. The only time the enemy can defeat you is if they attack your from both sides, or mob you from the front. It can be frustrating in the later battles when enemies are a lot more spongy and populous. The encounter rate, as well, is incredibly high, and with battles taking about 45 seconds to a minute and a half, this can be quite annoying.
As an RPG, this game has several issues. For one, the game has the bad habit of early Dragon Quest where it doesn't offer clear instructions for your next goal. You will have to wander around and chat with every NPC until you come across the one who unlocks your next destination. Even worse are the cases where you will come across a boss who has plot armor. In other words, they can't be defeated and will wipe your party until you find the item or talk to the person who can help you. It comes off as contrived and it is really annoying; your skill or level as a character isn't holding you back, but something arbitrary like "talking to someone TWICE in order to be given the lightning spell to beat a pair of clone warriors, which makes no sense until after you use it and it reveals that the clones are robots." That last bit took me TWO hours to figure out.
The game also relies a good bit on grinding; if you don't keep up with the pace of enemies, fights will either take way too long or the odd hit an enemy gets in will kill you outright. When the game goes into its boss fights, the other Ninja is controlled by the computer. The AI of this computer is DUMB. It will just do random attacks, even if the boss character is impervious to those attacks. I don't know why they chose to do this, especially since both characters share stats and leveling up together. It was a really, really strange design choice. None of the bosses are terribly difficult as long as you have been grinding and bring plenty of items into the battle. Some of the fights are "lock and key" style fights where you need to bring the proper items, which can be annoying.
Finally, the platformer sections are annoying in that death can come pretty darn quickly if you fall down a pit. These platformer sections, as well, rely on you climbing walls, clambering across the ceilings, performing specific ninja jumps, and other maneuvers; each of these moves can be quite finicky and tough to pull off, leading to frequent and inadvertent deaths. Remember, if you die, you go all the way back to town and would have to do the dungeon all over again (thank goodness for save states).
Music
The music is well composed BUT it relies on this horribly tinny xylophone sound. It is really grating on the ears. It's a shame because, otherwise, the music wouldn't be that bad.
Ads, Art, Commercials
I could only find this one single magazine ad...
Final Verdict
This game is certainly a novelty, but it really isn't that fun to play aside from just trying it out. For collectors out there, the game is relatively cheap.
No comments:
Post a Comment