Looks can be deceiving though – according to the game’s opening story which only plays after idling on the title screen, it takes place in the then-near future of 2029, where the evil Lord Garuda (what exactly he’s lord of is never explained) has taken over America’s ‘largest city’. Main character’s Hayate and Kaede both have similar sprites to Gaiden’s Ryu Hayabusa, with Hayate even sharing his purple color scheme, and both start out with swords with similar timing and range to Hayabusa’s standard attack.

While it lacks Gaiden’s cinematic storytelling outside of an opening and ending cutscene, it shares much of the same aesthetic – a fast paced action platformer starring a Ninja in a setting largely inspired by the American action movies of the late eighties. That’s not quite a fair assessment really, though it may be hard to see the difference between the two games just looking at still screenshots, or even playing the game for the first few minutes. And then there’s Shadow of the Ninja, which to this day is doomed to live in the shadow (ha!) of Ninja Gaiden. Perhaps this was because many of their games, albeit typically well polished and solidly designed, aped so liberally off of other, better games Abadox: The Deadly Inner War, with its auto-scrolling shooting inside of a living planet nakedly steals its premise from Life Force, while the cult classic action platformer Power Blade mixes Mega Man’s level selection and ranged combat with the extending power meter that was popular among many action games at the time. At the time they were mostly known for their action games however, though never to the same levels as heavy hitters such as Konami and Capcom.

It might be hard to see, considering they’ve spent the last two decades mostly releasing iterations on the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory series, but in the heyday of the NES, they would develop several titles every years across many different genres, including the niche strategy and RPG genres with games like Palamedes and Dungeon Magic. This game is featured in our new NES Cult Classics book! Please check it out!Īt one point in time, Natsume was quite the prolific developer.

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