9 /10 1 Votes
Producer(s) Hiroyuki Toda Programmer(s) Teruaki Shirasawa Initial release date 26 May 1996 Publisher SNK | 4.5/5 Emuparadise Designer(s) Kazuhiro Shibata Artist(s) Kazushige Hakamata Developer ADK Genre Fighting game | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Composer(s) Hiroaki Kujirai
Yuka Watanabe
Hiroaki Shimizu Mode(s) Up to 2 players simultaneously Platforms Neo Geo, Arcade game, Neo Geo X, PlayStation 2, Neo Geo CD Similar SNK games, Fighting games | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ninja Master's: Haō Ninpō Chō (ニンジャマスターズ ～覇王忍法帖～ roughly translated as "Ninja Master's Scrolls of the Supreme Ninja Arts") is a ninja-themed competitive fighting game produced by ADK and originally released in 1996 for the Neo Geo arcade and home platform. Ninja Master's was the sixth and final fighting game produced by ADK, following the four games in the World Heroes series and Aggressors of Dark Kombat. It was later featured in the 2008 compilation ADK Tamashii for the PlayStation 2. Ninja Master's was also re-released on the Neo-Geo X handheld system in 2012, and for the Virtual Console in 2013.
Contents
Gameplay
Ninja Master's follows the conventions of many previous 2D fighting games released for the Neo-Geo. The player must defeat their opponent in combat in a series of best-two-out-of-three matches. Characters can change between using the character's weapon or fight hand-to-hand during the middle of combat. Like the Art of Fighting series, Ninja Master's features a super meter.
Fighters
Like various ADK games, SNK Playmore also revived characters from Ninja Master's in later releases. The main character of Ninja Master's, Sasuke, appears as an SNK character card in SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters DS.
Reception
Covering the Neo Geo AES version, the four reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly offered some praise for the game's special moves and the ability to fight with or without a weapon, but generally panned Ninja Master's for its failure to distinguish itself from the many previous Neo Geo fighting games and for its outdated graphics, particularly the small character sprites and lack of scaling. Shawn Smith and Sushi X remarked that the game's mediocrity is shocking given SNK's history and the $150 price tag. In a retrospective review of the Neo Geo AES version, Allgame's Kyle Knight called it "a fairly good fighter that could've been a lot more."
