 Sashak! Super Ninja Boy is an interesting combination of a few different genres. It's a traditional role-playing game in terms of exploring a world map, visiting towns, talking to villagers, how the story is told, and all that, but the random encounters you come across on the world map put you in a real-time side-scrolling beat-em-up battle mode. This is a really cool idea and it works pretty well, the usual punch-kick stuff is there, along with items like shurikens and special attacks, but as cool as that sounds it is a bit flawed. The action can be pretty slow and choppy. Maybe I've been spoiled by Street Fighter 2 Turbo, I don't know. It doesn't help that this game has the typical early 90's RPG encounter rate, as in this game was made to be artificially long because you fall into a random encounter every six steps, so that gets really old. You do at least get a choice immediately of fighting or running, but the game doesn't always let you run. Also the hit detection isn't always the greatest, you have to be right next to your enemy to register a hit. The game maintains the beat-em-up battles for random encounters, but switches to a turn-based battle system for boss fights, so that's pretty cool. Really, if you're going to play Super Ninja Boy, I strongly, strongly recommend it be with another player. Many of the best Super Nintendo multiplayer games do have perfectly good single-player campaigns like Contra 3, Donkey Kong Country, and Turtles in Time, but like I said, Super Ninja Boy is kind of tedious on single-player, the fighting is just too slow. For the second player, it's a little more interesting, and a little more competitive too. The game does have a password system instead of a battery save, but in this case it works well because you can choose one or two players before resuming the game. The story is very simple, and honestly it's barely even worth mentioning. Jack and Ryu have to collect seven magic orb things away from a street gang that wants to take over the world. The half-assed translation does the story no favors, but who cares, the gameplay is really what matters here. Super Ninja Boy looks and sounds like an NES game rather than Super Nintendo. That's not a bad thing, of course, it's just, you know, kind of lousy the game did take advantage of the inherent technological advantages of the Super NES, but that's fine. Anyway, I still think this gameplay concept can work really well today. Imagine an old-school Super Nintendo JRPG with Street Fighter one-on-one battles, as well as Final Fight style side-scrolling brawls with turn-based combat for boss fights, where you use dual-tech combos like a combination of Chrono Trigger, Sabin from Final Fantasy 6, and Killer Instinct. I think that game needs to be made by somebody somewhere, because I would play the hell out of that. But as it's implemented in Super Ninja Boy, it's just okay. It's definitely something different for a role-playing game, and it's a good time with the second player. If you're going to check it out, I recommend playing this game multiplayer first and foremost.