The Last Ninja (Commodore 64)
While I have played Commodore 64 games in the past, it was usually only for a few minutes each and I hardly remember them. Now that I’m trying to look more into British microcomputer games though, I didn’t want the first Commodore 64 game covered on the site to just be whichever one I happened to pick up first. Looking into definitive Commodore 64 game lists often came up with games that seemed to be better remembered for versions on other systems though, but eventually The Last Ninja came up. Its discussion as a C64 classic made it feel like the perfect pick, but as I began to play it, more and more it seemed less like this game embodied gaming on the Commodore 64 and seemed to have cemented itself in people’s memories because it attempted to defy the limits of the system it was made for.
Most of this comes down to the game’s isometric perspective, the game viewed almost as if you are a camera in the upper corner of the area looking in on the adventures of the heroic ninja Armakuni. By necessity the skew caused by this angle means that walking down the game’s paths requires mostly diagonal inputs to traverse. This is certainly easy enough to adapt to, but the issues arise in the requirements made of your ninja’s movements. Simply picking the direction he is looking is a little harder than you expect, the player needing to turn him with multiple inputs since simply pressing backwards will make him walk backwards. This does give you the opportunity to back away if you’re in a fight or don’t want to turn around, but there are many moments where you are working within limited space and every directional input could jeopardize your footing. Most navigation the little quirks in actually turning Armakuni around won’t harm you, but the isometric perspective is unfortunately paired with perhaps the worst bedfellow it could have: precision platforming.
At a surprisingly high amount of points in this short experience, you will be called upon to jump across things like swamps and rivers. Even if you leap towards the logs in the swamp water or the stepping stones in the rivers, their appearance is sometimes deceptive as Armakuni can seemingly slip through some parts of them while being able to stand on thin air at others. Dropping into the water is an instant death and you have three lives by default, collectable apples able to give you extra lives but figuring out where it is even safe to stand in these unclear river hopping sections likely requiring many deaths before you finally figure out the exact placement you need to be for one jump. Unfortunately that will be just one of many jumps per crossing, and then you might potentially cross the river again once you’ve done your business on the other side. A few things do help a little, you have infinite continues and it starts you at the beginning of the current stage so some progress is kept. Your unusual movement can be helpful in some ways, if you remember a series of inputs for when you enter the screen with the rivers you can start to get it down to a science. However, the fiddly nature of repositioning yourself in these jumping trials can also make it hard to even try and line up for the next leap even when you thought you had it figured out, so even though the first level’s stepping stone segment is optional, there are many required moments of awful jumping that weigh down the early stages they dominate.
Eventually the game does move away from the precision jumps and improves for it, but it’s still not without some flaws caused by the specific perspective chosen. One of the ones that doesn’t destroy the experience but leads to constant small adjustments until things finally work out is item retrieval. Most of the game’s levels involve navigating around a set of interconnected screens looking for the items vital to making progress, and while some of their uses can be a bit tough to figure out and it’s hard to know what vital items can be found, there are shrines you can meditate at to get a hint at an item you’re missing so you don’t leave behind anything important. However, merely picking these up can be a hassle, as the only time Armakuni will do so is if he is perfectly lined up so that when he crouches, his hands are placed over the object in an exact manner. This manner is not how Armakuni would perceive it but is instead based on your view of things, Armakuni’s pick up squat needing to have his hands overlap just so with the inventory item, and while there are no lethal consequences for being mere pixels off the hard to determine required spot, it does have the same problem of trying to micromanage your movement’s peculiarities that jumping hits on.
Eventually you will pick up those items though, but sometimes those items have issues after you pick them up. Some of those are simply trying to puzzle out why you need that item, but that light confusion feels like an acceptable part of the experience at least and is far less of an issue than when you need to nail a target with limited use items. Early on for example there is a dragon you need to hit with a smoke bomb, but hitting the exact right spot is going to require some trial and error since the space where it will register is just as hard to determine as other moments of spatial confusion. Smoke bombs are limited, so if you run out, you can go grab more… on the other side of a swamp you need to jump. Later in the game there is a sleeping gas you need to hit a dog with that has similar issues but it is functionally infinite so a solution to the problem exists, although naturally such precision in a game not fit for it should have had a better solution rather than repeatedly trying to knock out that dog and struggling to find that precise way it needs to be hit.
Of the game’s six stages, the first three feature the required jumping segments and suffer for it, but the jumping isn’t the main focus of the play. Puzzling out how to expand and utilize your inventory is a key part and it’s a serviceable element of the experience, but the combat is given a lot of focus and is both hampered by its limitations but strangely fascinating for them. The opponent, be they ninja or skeleton, needs to approach to start attacking. Equipped weapons change how they’ll try to attack and you can get a small little arsenal of your own, potentially able to kill a foe before they reach you with limited shurikens but able to defend yourself at close range with a few options. A sword, staff, and some nunchaku can be used against enemies and have different strengths and weaknesses like power, range, and how exactly the strikes are executed, but you can always kick no matter what is equipped if you need to make up for a specific shortcoming. You can afford to take some damage in a fight too and respawns outside of game overs are kind so you can weather blows if necessary, but movement in fights is very important and one of the few areas in the game where the movement doesn’t let things down immensely.
Positioning yourself for these fights can be a little awkward since clarity on what works is not this game’s strong suit, but a defensive approach can let enemies walk into your strike zone and then you can maneuver about to either make tactical retreats or set up for more attacks. Early on enemies stay dead but even when they start reappearing after defeat later in the game, if you walk between screens a foe can’t follow you and a legitimate tactic arises where you can fight as best you can, run off before you get injured too much, and then run back in for round two. You can also sometimes simply try to slip by the foe if you think that the safer option, and while many are good at blocking you and it can be hard to tell if you can squeak by in all but the most obvious cases, it still adds a small additional layer to the fight. While the final boss traps you in the same room to remove this option, sometimes if you do slip by a foe they might end up committing seppuku in shame and you’ll have won a fight just by worming around a foe properly.
It is a shame that the visuals are so unreliable despite looking fairly good for the console, areas like the palace garden surprisingly lovely and the dungeons appropriately dreary. The game’s soundtrack is also surprisingly strong and might be the best part of the experience, sometimes evocative even just on the load screen between stages. The story for this particular adventure is that Armakuni literally is the last ninja left. His clan heads to Lin-Fen island every ten years, and the power-hungry shogun Kunitoki uses this to his advantage. Laying a trap and slaughtering all ninja who arrive, Kunitoki aims to use the Koga scrolls to create his own army of loyal ninja but doesn’t realize that one real ninja had stayed behind to protect the shrine while the others were out. Armakuni learns of his clan’s fate and heads out to reclaim the scrolls and get revenge for his fallen allies, and the game does a very good job of playing into the trappings of ninja fiction with its musical backing. Supernatural elements like the dragons and skeletons just seem present for the sake of it, but there are also more interesting traps tied to the ninja aesthetic and there are a nice set of interior and exterior areas that do help build up a visual identity for Lin-Fen island. It’s no surprise this game wowed people aesthetically, but the price the action paid for it simply wasn’t worth it.
THE VERDICT: Some superb music and a spot-on ninja aesthetic makes The Last Ninja artistically impressive for a Commodore 64 game, but the choice to use an isometric perspective ruins so much of the experience. Simply picking up items is a hassle and it’s a frequent necessity so even such a small moment is unusually fiddly. River crossings are guessing games with frequent frustrating deaths as you figure out how to cross with bad movement controls and unreliable visuals. The inventory puzzles are fine enough but certainly hurt by all the awful action involved in solving them, but the fights are at least more palatable since the awkward movement leads to a certain fighting style where you have room to learn the ins and outs and exploit them. The Last Ninja squeezes out some acceptable moments amid the hair-pulling ones, but irritation defines the adventure more than any actual cool ninja action.
And so, I give The Last Ninja for Commodore 64…
A TERRIBLE rating. Jumping across stepping stones and swamp vegetation really drags this experience down, and for one that is six stages long it really didn’t need three of them dominated by losing lives to trying to figure out how the game even expects you to navigate needlessly hard jumps. Some of the awkwardness with picking up items isn’t good at all but the kind of thing you could stomach if the rest of the experience had more to offer, but it does feel like even the combat is more you having to adjust your expectations within the boundaries placed on you rather than something that really impresses with its design. The fights can be a little bit strategic and more interesting for it, but those short battles can’t make up for little flaws in lining up important smoke bomb throws and other constant nuisances. I rarely recommend purely cutting out one feature in a game but the river-crossing platforming really isn’t satisfying even after you’ve learned through constant failures the exact positions required to execute things well, especially if you know there might be more crossings up ahead. Isometric platforming is possible but trimming it’s presence would pretty much only be a boon here, and focusing more on puzzles and fights could have maybe allowed those to get more attention and depth. More generous detection ranges for picking things up or trying to hit something with a thrown item would do a lot to remove pointless problems as well since those feel like pure flaws rather than a challenge that simply went awry during the designing phase.
The Last Ninja’s few upsides, the excellent music especially, are weighed down too heavily by the frustrations and needless issues the isometric perspective introduced to really appreciate. The game hopes you’ll tolerate its worst moments simply because it can dazzle you with surprisingly good music and visuals, but even at moments that are less flawed like the combat you still have tangible struggles tied to the perspective. Some you can get around or you can even learn to incorporate the limitations in how you approach things, but The Last Ninja’s big problems define it more and thus what was meant to be an attempt to play a definitive Commodore 64 game instead lead me to playing a game that tried to be more than it could pull off on the hardware.