It's new to me: Ninja JaJaMaru-kun

The first game in the long-running Ninja JaJaMaru series is actually a spin-off of a different game by a different company. The 80s, everyone.

This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Back in the 1980s, when commercial home video games were a much newer concept than they are now, you occasionally had some real oddities related to rights. Think of Hudson Soft building a franchise out of not being able to port the arcade game, Wonder Boy, to the Famicom: the rights to the name and characters of Wonder Boy were already licensed by developer Westone to Sega for the Master System port, so the studio and Hudson Soft made a side deal that essentially boiled down to, “sure, copy these gameplay elements directly, just draw your own stuff and come up with your own names.” Hudson then took this new-look Wonder Boy, known as Adventure Island, and built out their own franchise with it, with gameplay that differed more and more over time from its original licensed source material.

In another instance also featuring Hudson, Tecmo’s arcade game Star Force was ported to the Famicom and MSX by the Japanese developer, and this version rose to prominence in no small part due to Hudson choosing it for their caravan competition. They held onto the rights to this port for years and years even, re-releasing it in compilations down the road alongside Star Soldier games developed by Hudson that were, in no small part, extensions of their port of Star Force. They essentially made their own Star Force games with a different name like they did with Adventure Island, and held onto the series for far longer than Tecmo did. It wouldn’t be overstating it at all to say that the Star Soldier games, despite launching from Hudson’s association with Tecmo’s title, are the better-known ones.

Ninja JaJaMaru-kun isn’t in exactly the same boat as either, but there are some elements of both situations there. The original game in the series, Ninja-kun: Majou no Bouken (Ninja-kun: Adventure of Devil Castle), released in arcades in 1984. It was developed and published in Japanese arcades by UPL (a studio that shoot ‘em up fans might know from Bio-ship Paladin or Atomic Robo-Kid, and fans of hyphens might know from their love of hyphenated titles), and was brought overseas and renamed Ninja-Kid there. The game would receive a sequel in 1987 — titled Rad Action in North America for some reason despite being a direct sequel — before UPL laid the series down to rest.

In between the release of the two Ninja-Kid games — which it should be pointed out are different than the NES game, Ninja Kid, that hyphen is load-bearing — came a Jaleco port of the original to the Famicom. There’s nothing particularly notable about that port, save one thing: Jaleco decided that they wanted to make their own Ninja-kun games. This was a UPL series, however, so Jaleco made a little change and renamed their new series to Ninja JaJaMaru-kun, featuring a a different kid ninja whose sprite looked exactly the same as the other one as protagonist. Yes, the game looks an awful lot like the Famicom port of Ninja-kun, in terms of some of the sprites and basics of the background designs, but these are significantly different titles, too.

Whereas the original Ninja-kun featured three short vertical-scrolling levels that would loop and become more difficult upon completion, Ninja JaJaMaru-kun switched things up so that there would be obstructions in the way of your ascension, a wider playing field that wasn’t continually scrolling, no, but did go well beyond the single-screen platforming style of the time, and bumped up the number of stages you’d play through before the true looping began. Oh, and there’s a magical frog companion you can occasionally ride that freezes time and allows you to straight-up eat demons.

Here’s a look at the gameplay of the original Ninja-kun in its 1984 arcade form, courtesy Hamster Corporation’s trailer for its release as an Arcade Archives title:

Pretty simple! Defeat enemies, collect items, keep climbing, level complete. Granted, that’s the beginning, but you get the picture from a game with three levels that loop and are more difficult on followup runs. And here’s what Ninja JaJaMaru-kun looks like on the Famicom:

Larger stages, destructible ceilings, enemy souls floating away for you to collect to score more points. Plus, items hidden in those breakable blocks that can lead to a speed boost, more powerful attacks, a whole bunch of points, brief invincibility, a tram car you can use to quickly run over foes in your path, and the eventual summoning of your frog buddy, Gamapa-kun, through a ninja art that’s only available if you’ve collected three different power-ups or have acquired four 1-up items. There’s quite a bit going on here, really.

At its core there’s a real simplicity to Ninja JaJaMaru-kun, however, and that simplicity is either going to cause you to have a good, albeit brief time with the game, or dismiss it outright — a history of reviews that do one of these two things is the proof. I enjoyed it well enough, but can also easily understand why others might not. Sure, it’s simple, but that helps you get into it and learn its little secrets, which better prepares you for the more difficult loops in a quest for a high score to be proud of. If that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to you at all, well.

As JaJaMaru, you are equipped with a shuriken. It doesn’t travel very far, and you can throw just one at a time, but other than jumping on the heads of your foes — all modeled after various yokai — that’s how you can defeat enemies without the aid of a very hungry and time-stopping frog. The shuriken can be upgraded so that it travels further, faster, and can harm more powerful enemies — stronger yokai like the Headbone, a skeleton in ninja garb who throws bones at you, require the stronger shuriken or for you to jump on their head and smush them down into a more vulnerable state first before defeating them with the basic one.

After an enemy is defeated, their soul rises from them. Not from where you defeated them, if they fell down, but from the floor they started the level on, which makes chasing down these ascending souls difficult, but still worth it due to the point bonuses. The faster you finish a stage, the more points you score, and the longer it takes, the more difficult it becomes to complete it. The Catfish Pirate Damazu-Dayuu, who kidnapped Princess Sakura and kicked off this whole adventure in the process, normally leaves you alone during these stages, letting his minions do all the heavy lifting, but sometimes he’ll start throwing out a bunch of bombs to make your life more interesting and/or worse. In addition, if you take too long to clear a stage, a magical flame starts to float around and tries to set you on fire, so you have to contend with that as you navigate the level trying to chase down the last foes you need to defeat in order to proceed.

On occasion, Princess Sakura will drop a cherry blossom leaf from above the stage: collect three of these to open up a bonus stage, where you can score quite a few points if you succeed. The Catfish Pirate will throw down either bombs or fireballs at you from above, and you can throw shuriken straight up at him to put a stop to it. The first is fairly easy, but later bonus stages might feature multiple Catfish Pirates. That’s more points, yes, but also more fireballs.

There are seven different enemy types in Ninja JaJaMaru-kun, with the earliest and easiest worth all of 100 points to defeat, and the final one worth 500 points just for defeating them even before you collect their soul. The way the game gets more difficult isn’t by throwing more enemies at you: there are eight per stage, in every stage. The difficulty comes from which enemies show up to take you down. There’s a “boss” enemy that’s more difficult than the other seven, but consider that an introduction to them. Eventually, they make the entire level, save whatever the new “boss” is, out of that foe, and what was once a tougher enemy is now the normal one.

The Headbone foe is the fourth that you’ll fight in Ninja JaJaMaru-kun, meaning, it’s quite a few stages before you ever even see them for the first time. By stage 10, however, every enemy is a Headbone who throws bones faster than you can throw shuriken, and requires an upgraded shuriken to defeat. Save the Pin Cell, a one-eyed yokai who you takes no damage from either of your shuriken types unless you’ve jumped on his head and squashed him down first.

The animations for this sort of thing are all comical: JaJaMaru’s eyes bug out when he’s stunned, the foes being squished down just looks goofy but in a fun way, and when they’re stunned due to falling through a floor you break open underneath them, they show a bit of panic in their expression. It’s pretty impressive stuff for 1985 on the Famicom, or at least cute enough to be memorable at a time when that extra level of detail might not easily make it into a game due to a lack of familiarity with the hardware. Remember, again, the visual differences between the original Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 3, which were released all of three years apart. Ninja JaJaMaru-kun bothering to have these extra animated details in the same year the first of those came out is notable!

Ninja JaJaMaru-kun sold around one million copies in Japan and ended up launching its own series, one that’s still going. Jaleco explored other genres over time: the first sequel, JaJaMaru's Great Adventure, is a scrolling platformer. Ninja JajaMaru: Ninja Skill Book, released 1989, is a role-playing game. JaJaMaru Gekimaden: Maboroshi no Kinmajou, 1990, is an action-role playing game. Ninja Taro is an action-adventure title, Maru’s Madness is a bit more action-oriented… and so on.

Ninja JaJaMaru titles were released with regularity from the series’ start in 1985 through 2004, and then things went silent for nearly a decade before a 3DS release, Ninja Jajamaru-kun: Sakura-hime to Karyu no Himitsu, appeared. Now, much of the series, even the Japan-exclusive releases, are available in North America through a couple of collections that City Connection, the current rights holder of Jaleco’s catalog, put together. Ninja JaJaMaru: The Great Yokai Battle is a brand new game made in 2019 using sprites in the 1985 style but in a fast-paced, updated version of the original’s gameplay that makes it feel both familiar but like something entirely new. As a “bonus” to that game, there’s a downloadable content pack that includes localized ports of six Ninja JaJaMaru games: the original, Big Adventure, Operation Milky Way, Super Ninja Kid, The Great World Adventure, and The Great World Adventure DX. These include save states and display options (though, some of the display options, weirdly, can cause slowdown that makes what can be somewhat annoying music even more grating).

Additionally, a pair of RPGs were released in Ninja JaJaMaru: The Lost RPGs. All of these are available on the Switch, Playstation 4, and through Steam, with the first game in the series also part of Nintendo Switch Online, so what was once a series that rarely left Japan is now available basically everywhere. It’s not for everyone, maybe, especially the simple Ninja JaJaMaru-kun, but if you’re into these old-style platformers and checking out what was popular in Japan and unknown elsewhere, then there’s likely something here for you to explore.

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