Arcade Archives Ninja-Kid II

Genre: Action-Platformer / Arcade

Players: 1-2 (Local Alternating), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

Ninja-Kid II is an Arcade-style Action-Platformer originally released in Japan only in 1987 in arcades. This modern release sees the game coming to PlayStation 4 in 2015 and Nintendo Switch in 2018.

Ninja-Kid II refines and expands on its predecessor, now with both horizontal and vertical-scrolling Action-Platformer stages, with players still taking out enemies while avoiding their attacks. The control is tighter, there’s more variety in enemies and weapons you can use, the environments are bigger and more varied, and… despite being a huge improvement, it’s still not an especially great game. The controls are still a bit clunky even with the improvements, and there are some enemy attacks that seem unavoidable.

This release of the game includes a new “Hi-Score Mode” that challenges players to score as much as they can in one run before seeing a game over screen. There is also a new “Caravan Mode” that does much the same, but with the limit being five minutes. In addition, this release of the game includes “Early Version” and “Later Version” releases, as well as various display options, sound options, challenge modifiers, button mapping, and online leaderboards.

Overall, I think Ninja-Kid II is a clear improvement over its predecessor, but it still has issues, and with plenty of other great Action-Platformers to chose from on Nintendo Switch, it’s difficult for me to recommend this game.

tl;dr – Ninja-Kid II is an Arcade-style Action-Platformer that has players taking out enemies as a ninja. This is a huge improvement over the original game, but it still suffers due to clunky controls and seemingly unavoidable enemies. Despite the improvements, I can’t recommend this game when Nintendo Switch has so many better alternatives.

Grade: C

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