 In the heat of the console war between Nintendo and Sega, there was always that one kid at school who didn't have either a Super Nintendo or a Sega Genesis, but instead had a Turbo Graphics 16. Believe it or not, one of those weird kids was Macaulay Culkin of all people. Unfortunately it never caught on as well as its two 16-bit rivals, but there are still some quality games for it that have held up well over time like Ninja Spirit, which has gotta be a top five or maybe even a top three game for the system. It was originally made by Irem for the arcade in 1988 before getting ports to all the usual home computers of the day like Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64, but the only home console port it got was for the Turbo Graphics 16. We start our story with this dude having a nice evening by himself with his sword, before a bunch of green orbs come and murder him and just like that were off. You play as a ninja named Moonlight fighting to avenge the death of your father and within one minute of gameplay you can already see what this game's all about and it's fun as hell. You are overpowered to the gills jumping 30 feet into the air with shadow clones, annihilating everything that moves with your choice of four different weapons, a sword, a shuriken, a sickle and chain, and a bomb, and you get all these weapons to start the game with unlimited ammo. You also get a health meter with three lives and unlimited continues to get through seven levels with no battery saver password system. There's plenty of power-ups too like the usual clear screen attack, weapon upgrades, invincibility, and the aforementioned shadow clones that follow you around and I know what some of you are thinking, well actually it should be obvious to anyone with any kind of gaming knowledge that this clearly steals from Ninja Gaiden 2. And no it doesn't. Ninja Spirit came first, Ninja Gaiden 2 came out a couple years later. Ninja Spirit does an excellent job implementing this power-up to the point that if you play this game enough you can really take advantage of it by leaping around each huge level just wiping out everything and by taking out full screen bosses like this no problem. When it comes to the weapons themselves the game does a nice job making each one useful whether it's defending yourself with your sword from attacks above or doing heavy damage with bombs or creating a huge wall of shurikens which almost makes it look like you're playing a shoot-em-up. This game may seem easy at first and it kind of is. For a while it seems like you're unstoppable but the later levels do ramp up the difficulty a bit with enemies that can block your attacks or this giant guy here dressed like the Brooklyn brawler. There's enemies equipped with grappling hooks, little gremlin things coming up beneath you to stab you with spears, even if you hop into the ceiling there's still hellbent on stabbing your groin somehow. There are some enemies here that rudely ignore your health meter and kill you in one hit and the last levels really get tough, especially this part where you're falling and you've got enemies popping up all over. It's like that part in Mario World after you finish the ghost ship and you fall forever only the invincibility stars are replaced with ninjas. If you want more of a challenge though there's an arcade mode available that reduces the game to one hit deaths. That is pretty dang tough but still doable because if you die in this mode and you will die it's pretty easy to get powered up again rather quickly so this isn't a gradius situation where you're totally screwed if you die to the point that you might as well start over. This is a smartly made well-balanced game when it comes to the difficulty. If there's any flaws to point out here it's the slowdown it pops up here and there and I almost always found it was while I was in mid-air which is actually totally fine because the jump in this game is so forgiving. I mean I'm never a fan of slowdown in any context mostly because you can't predict when it will start and when it will stop but I was actually kind of surprised at how much it didn't bother me if it does bother you well then you can just go play the arcade original any way you can I suppose. So yeah Ninja Spirit is my favorite kind of action platformer the kind where your character is just comically overpowered to the point that you breeze through the first couple levels before the game starts to ramp up the difficulty and suddenly you're not as overpowered as you thought. The reason this game works so well is the balance of speed between you and your enemies and how the difficulty is balanced as well where it's frustrating for the right reasons instead of feeling like you're pointlessly smashing your face against a brick wall. The controls are good the music is good and some of the enemy sprites look pretty cool so all in all you really can't go wrong with Ninja Spirit. I know the easy comparison is to Ninja Gaiden but Ninja Spirit is better thought of as the best possible version of the 1985 game The Legend of Kage. And here's a fun bit of trivia in the 15th ever issue of EGM Ninja Spirit along with East Books 1 and 2 were the first games to get a 10 out of 10 in the magazine's history. You could play the original arcade game through the arcade archives collection on Switch or PS4 but you can't go wrong with the TurboGrafx home port either. It's easily one of the best if not the best game on the system. Alright I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.