Super Ninja Boy is a very unique game because it’s sort of trying to be 3 different games at once. For starters it is a turn based RPG for the big boss fights. Then it becomes a full platformer adventure for some of the minion encounters. For the others it becomes a 2D beat em up. During the hub world you have an overhead style like Final Fantasy. The game has you travelling the world on foot, then in a boat, and then in a giant mecha. It’s tackling everything but unfortunately excels at nothing and that’s probably what doomed the title.

You play as the Super Ninja Boys who are needed to save the world. Villains are emerging from all parts of the planet and some of them aren’t even human. Their father (Or uncle) went missing as well. These two have formal training but are they really ready for an adventure like this? They will really have to travel the entire world so this is no picnic. At the same time, these two boys know that they are the last hope for humanity.

The story’s fairly forgettable but it does have a fun script. I appreciated all of the one liners and burns that came up during the game. There are quite a large number of villains running around as well. Now like I said before I do think the game is too ambitious. If they had just picked one genre they could have succeeded. For example, the reason the overhead part fails is because the encounter rate was set up to be way too high. You have a minion trying to attack you every few seconds. Your odds of fleeing are near 0 unless you are considerably stronger than the enemies. The other problem is that you barely get any EXP from fighting minions so it’s not like you can easily power level.

Eventually you will need some level ups but the grinding sessions are annoying at best when they show up. It’s just not something that you really want to be doing at this point in time. Then for the RPG battles, they have a ton of RNG at every point. None of the attacks have descriptions or show how much damage they do so you really have to wing it here. Trial and error is how you get used to all of the attacks and that feels like sloppy game design to me. There should be a better way of knowing what’s next.

There is no map in the game for the massive hub world so good luck remembering where everything is. If you take the wrong path then you have to play through a whole platforming level before you return. This gets old quick. I can safely say that the game would be really difficult to navigate without the rewind feature. At least that helps to mitigate the worst parts of the game’s design. It doesn’t mean that you are totally safe or anything but at least you can quickly retreat.

These all feel like pretty basic game design choices as well so I don’t know how the game launched like that. It’s a shame because the novelty of actually having multiple games in one is a pretty good one. I would like another game to try this in the present with a big budget studio behind them. If the game pulls that off then it will have really made history. Well, at least you can’t say that the game is short. It’s a true RPG through and through and it took me even longer than all the estimates had guessed.

I suppose most gamers were able to figure out where they had to go right away. I definitely can’t say that was true for me. I really had to put on my thinking hat and exploit the rewind to visit a lot of towns at times before I found the right ones. The NPCs aren’t typically handy and there is also a glitch where sometimes you will enter someone’s house twice and stay in a bit of a loop. More sloppy game design, it just doesn’t stop.

Overall, Super Ninja Boy made quite a lot of mistakes. So why am I not calling it a bad game? Well, for all its faults, the game still does some things right. It does provide a lot of content, the story can be fun, and the actual beat em up/RPG gameplay isn’t bad. It’s just the various mechanics around those which really hold the game back. So while I won’t say that it’s a good game by any means, it does enough to stay in the middle. Just make sure you beat up as many enemies as possible and you will shorten the grinding time needed. Learn which enemies go down quickly and ignore the ones that don’t. No enemy that survives a lot is worth fighting. Trust me on that.

Overall 5/10