Mystical Ninja 64

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Created 4/18/98 Last updated 4/18/98

Made by Konami
1 Player
12 Megabytes?

Graphics 9 (Huge environments, detailed main characters varied textures, but lots of glitching)
Sound 7 (Lots of yelling by main characters in Japanese.)
Music 9 (Main game music is like Mario 64's but more japanese. the 3 musical numbers have full voice with subtitles! Awsome!)
Gameplay 8 (Like Mario 64 meets Zelda 1, but lacks Mario 64's jump combos.)
Overall 9 (Fun. It took me 10 hours and 15 minutes to beat.)

I remember playing Legend of the Mystical Ninja on the SNES a couple (OK, maby like 6) years ago. I liked its stearotypical japanese graphics, music, sound, dialogue and cinamtics. Another great part was the mini-game, such as horse racing, and even the full first level of Gradius. Sadly, this sequal of sorts lacks mini-games, but it contains the other good parts of the first title. You just have to see the excellent real-time intermissions, complete with japanese singing and english subtitles. I watched them over and over and over. The environments are huge and wide open, just like Mario 64's. You can see forever in some of them. There is fog, but it is only for look, as there is no pop-up. Occasionally, the frame rate will stutter, but never to the point were gameplay is affected. I was surprised by the great variety in textures, so that every dungeon looks different. The animations for the 4 main characters is very good, and Goemons friend skips when he walks and flails his arms when he runs, so he looks gay. Its funny because he gets made fun of. The sounds are decent, but not that special. The music, as mentioned before, rules. Too bad the chacters don't have combo attacks and combo jumps, like Mario. The game would have been so much more fun. All in all, this game gives great hope to those waiting for a graeat RPG to come to the N64. I kept picturing how good a 3-D Secret of Mana could look using an engine simular to this one. Too bad Square has given up on Nintendo. Anyways, this is a good game. Oh, yeah, the Giant Robot parts rule, and the storyline is funny in a Tick sort of way.

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