Planet Bob - Last Ninja 3

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Hi there!

 

Three years after the 2nd part, System 3 finally completed their trilogy with:

 

Last Ninja 3(1991):

 

 

BUT... it was not the great finale everyone was hoping for

 

In theory, System 3 did everything right. They hired a superstar team to do the job:

 

Former Palace programmer Stanley Schembri, who previously did hits like Barbarian, Cauldron II or Antiriad

 

Also former Thalamus staff, programmers and artists behind cult classics like Armalyte and Hawkeye

 

And on top of that, the Maniacs of Noise for music.

 

I think in 1991, you couldn't imagine any better team for a C64 game.

 

Still... Last Ninja 3 is missing the magic of the earlier Twiddy/Riley productions.

 

The graphics are too crowded/busy for my taste and are also missing some variety. After a while it looks all the same too me, everything dominated by rather dull brown/grey earth color schemes.

 

The music feels more like muzak. Technically Ok, it's neither pushing you forward like Matt Grays LN2 tunes nor as beautiful as the LN1 tunes. It's also missing any loading tunes inbetween levels. It's more just creating an athmosphere in the background.

 

The levels are basically just more of the same, with no real highlights. The screens are connected in rather odd ways, so you're never getting a realistic feel of the map, instead you have to memorize which exit leads where. The riddles are few and rather simple. The major challenge is guessing what an item actually is and where it's to be used, which is rarely obvious, so you'll often need a walkthrough. The levels are also not so clearly themed as in the previous games. They look too similar and also work to similar:

=> Collect everything, find the scroll to open the exit, fight the level boss. Repeat 5 times.

 

The controls are... atrocious. This is what almost ruins the game. If you read the to previous articles, there I already noted that the Ninjas controls are very complex. Well, you can imagine what happens with that complex controls, when they're lacking precission, accuracy and reliability - they suck really bad. No clue how they got this past the beta testing stage. Also I don't get why! Everything was ok with them before in part 1 & 2 - If it ain't boken, don't fix it!

 

It is still playable, but you'll often die when getting stuck somewhere or because you don't manage to maneuver your Ninja in the right position.

 

Well, what remains is still an above average game - with an excellent intro. Probably the best that exists for any C64 game. The actual game portion feels a bit rushed. I think with some 2-3 extra months of finetuning it could've delivered what everyone was expecting. I guess the C64 market was already collapsing at the time, so it just didn't happen.

 

As usual I can recommend watching the longplay video, at least the intro is worth a look! If you watch it some more, I think you can see/hear how it's backing up my claims: http://www.c64-longplays.de.vu/

 

Greetings,

Manuel

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?a...;showentry=3326