The Worst NES Game I Ever Played

Not every game on the original Nintendo Entertainment System was good. Many of the games on the system were diamond hard. While this made some of them nearly impossible, it was more due to a lack of skill than anything else. The worst game I ever encountered for the console back in the days of my youth did have an unreasonable difficulty level to be certain, but that is only part of the reason I despise it.

The story begins as many did back in those days: I had a weekend coming up and popped into the local grocery to pick up a rental from their half-baked but charming selection of NES games. A kid back then didn’t have much to go on for picking out a game other than the cover art and brief description including possibly a few screenshots on the back of the box. I had the great misfortune at the time of thinking that ninjas looked cool. That’s how The Last Ninja crossed my path.

I couldn’t have known what I was getting into at the time. That was the nature of renting a game back then. Most of the time when you picked up something to play for the weekend, you would be lucky if it still had the instruction manual with it. My local Mom and Pop seemed to be more capable of inspiring the fear of retribution in its rental patrons than most, and I saw no difficulty in returning the manual with the game, but not everyone was so kind regardless. I don’t recall reading through the manual for the game I had chosen for that weekend, and that means one of two things. More than likely it just wasn’t there, but the more interesting and perhaps applicable possibility is that reading the manual made no difference to the experience I was to have.

At the time I didn’t know what ‘isometric’ meant in terms of video gaming (or anything else for that matter). I thought the larger character graphics and the ability to move in four directions looked like it would make for a fun experience. Unfortunately, all it did was show many of the issues possible with the isometric view.

Chief among these was the inability to accurately tell where your character was in relation to the environment and enemies. This led to swinging out a punch or kick only to strike nothing whilst being mercilessly pummeled into the ground by enemies (for the simple reason that they were programmed to know where they were in relation to you far better than you). This wasn’t even the worst part. Far and away the worst part of not being able to accurately tell where your character was in relation to the environment meant that when the game dared to demand platforming, executing the jumps with the precision the game required was virtually impossible. Arguably, the game really shouldn’t have tried to implement platforming when the isometric system itself was enough of a challenge to deal with (at least the way that they implemented it). I’m not saying that platforming in an isometric game is impossible. Super Mario RPG is every bit an isometric style game and it does platforming extremely well.

The issue with The Last Ninja was that there was no grid for the character to move on. Every minor movement allowed your ninja to go as much or little in any one of his four directions as you desired (more on this later). A grid would have allowed you to more accurately gauge where you were in relation to your enemies, giving you a better idea which direction you needed to swing to hit. By the same token, platforming would also have been easier, because you would know where you were in relation to the objects you were trying to reach with your jumps.

Finally, all directional movement was diagonal. The four cardinal directions of a NES controller were not ‘up, down, left, right’ in The Last Ninja. Each one of these directions on the D-Pad instead resulted in diagonally moving up to the left and right or down to the left and right. This was extremely disorienting when I first tried to play the game. Getting used to basic movement isn’t in itself a bad thing, but I do think certain expectations need to be met if one is going to alter the natural feel of a control scheme so drastically. When the I needed to turn to hit enemies quickly or try to move away from danger, the strain imposed by the odd movement style often caused me to go the wrong way. I imagine with time I could have gotten used to it, but doing so wouldn’t have been worth it.

I have some small relief for the fact that The Last Ninja wasn’t a game I’d bought outright. When the term of the rental ended, I was only too pleased to return it to the store. The game ruined a weekend during my childhood years, which now seems like an offense worthy of capital punishment. I’m not saying other games I rented for the NES were fantastic, but beyond any shadow of any doubt whatsoever, The Last Ninja was the Worst NES Game I Ever Played.