Submission #738: KaitouKid's GBA Ninja Five-O in 22:19.77

Joe Osugi, bizarre 'anti-terrorist ninja', is called in to assist the local police, who seem to be completely useless in rescuing some hostages.

The game is basically a series of rooms connected together. Your job is to rescue the hostages and then escape the stage through the red door. You have in your arsenal a three-level shuriken, a sword, and a grappling hook that seems to have been stolen from Bionic Commando. Joe also has two types of special abilities: To make himself invincible and to attack all enemies on screen.

The game is quite stylish and I feel I've made it interesting. I played in 15% speed for the most part, dropping to 6% when needed. I'm positive the routes I've taken are the fastest, though I'd love to see someone beat my times. The strongest attack in Joe's arsenal is undoubtably his jumping sword attack. The next seems to be the level 3 shuriken. Sadly, all of this guy's attacks tend to cause recovery time.

Bank: Nothing special happens here, aside from some heavy invincibility spamming in the third stage. The more enemies you kill, the higher your green gauge goes. You can use invincibility any time before it fills up. Once that happens, you can then use the full-screen attack, also seen in Bank stage 3. In case anyone was wondering, throwing a shuriken at the right time gives you a slight horizontal boost to your jump. This is why I sometimes throw one when I don't appear to be aiming at anything. Also, the reason I don't spam the sword jump on the boss is that he gets knocked back too much on it. It's much easier to keep him on the upper platform for manipulation purposes.

Factory: Flamethrower obstacles introduced here. The second stage suffers because of these. The lack of any large groupings of enemies also means I didn't have much invincibility to spam to slip past them. The second stage also introduced walljumping, which is a royal pain to have to deal with. Joe's feet must be touching the wall before you can rebound... only he doesn't like putting them there. Stage 3 went fine except for the slight error against the armor guy holding the red key. The Factory taught me that dying frogs sound like a 60-year old smoker saying "Hyah!" Spamming the sword jump on the boss on the upper level is definitely faster. If you stay below, he hops on and off the frog every few hits.

Airport: Stage 2 is probably one of, if not THE, longest in the game. It has a lot of rooms, some of which you have to revisit. I'm slightly annoyed that I had to wait for one electrical obstacle, but I just didn't have enough invinc. power to slide past. Stage 3 has to be the most tedious, since you're in an airplane at that point and have to deal with a lot of identical rooms. The boss had a hostage, so I had to use shuriken on him until he changed to his dragon form.

Caves: The caves made me hate spiders even more. The bats were hard to deal with, since they fly at you if you get in their general area. The hostages in this 'world' are in cages rather than being held at gunpoint. You have to press Up to free them. Another slight error in Stage 2 when I shuriken an armor guy. Stage 3 made me hate crawlspaces, too. The boss was annoying in that I could only hit him once or twice before he moved. He also had fairly lengthy periods of time where he was invulnerable to attack.

Base: The final set of levels are totally different from the rest. Stage 1 is a race to the bottom of the area - I mistakenly double sword jump an armor guy early on - while avoiding tons of lasers. There are no hostages and only the red key exists. Stage 2 is more of the same, only primarily dealing with crawlspaces. Stage 3 holds the final boss this time - the same dragon guy from the Airport. He also didn't like being hurt more than once or twice at a time. The final stage is a Metroid-like dash to the top of a trap-laden area to stop a missile countdown from reaching 0.

So that's it. There are a few small mistakes, but I'm overall satisfied with how it turned out. The only way I can see this being improved by a decent length of time would be to use frame advance and being very careful of how you swing - for some reason, the shorter your grappling line is, the higher you can propel yourself upon release.

At the very least, I hope this brings some interest to an otherwise obscure game. And I hope that my routes can be used to anyone who might attempt to beat my time.

Bisqwit: I'm glad you didn't stop despite the challenges you encountered.
The techniques looks good and it's quite fast-paced as it is now, so I can't quickly find things to blame in this movie. Processing...