Ninja Spirit

STORY / GAMEPLAY
You are a young ninja named Moonlight, who lost his father from a mysterious half-man half-beast creature! You begin your quest to avenge your father's death and fight your way through an "alternative" feudal Japan. Ninja Spirit is divided into seven different stages like forests, wastelands, swamps, temples and even rock cliffs. On each stage you need to find the way to its exit where you will confront a powerful level boss. Moonlight carries a magical sword called "Righteous Cloud" which can slash into pieces anything and everything that moves around him. During your quest, you will find some extra weapons including the "Swirling Leaf" (a type of shuriken), the "Bamboo Thunder" (a type of bomb), and the "Rising Dragon" (a Kusarigama). There are also several power-up items to collect like the one that unleashes multiple ninja ghosts that assist you during battles. The most unique feature of the game is the platform version of Gradius Options -the aforementioned ghost ninjas that mimic your moves and add greatly to your attacking prowess. Ninja Spirit is certainly a more advanced ninja-action game than Shinobi or Kaze Kiri and surely worths to add it to your collection.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The PC Engine Ninja Spirit version features great sprite animations with detailed characters and backgrounds, although its rather dark colors. There is also a pretty smart dual playfield parallax scrolling effect. The game's sound is great and features some "catchy" Chinese-style tunes and impressive sound effects, that unfortunately get a bit repetitive after a while.