This is a Japanese-created vertically scrolling 2D shooter (and there are an incredibly diversity of Japanese-created indie games, given the Xbox 360’s tiny marketshare in Japan). And it does a few things differently than others I’ve seen before, too. But let’s be honest with each other, the best reason to buy “NINJA STG 忍者武右ヱ門のいちばん長い日” is the crazy cuteness of watching formations of ninjas acting as if they were planes in 1942, or some other vertically scrolling shmup.
Let’s face it, the actions of the enemies in Galaga, 1942, or… well, any of them really… don’t make a lot of sense. That’s all the more obvious when it’s ninjas doing the manoeuvres. But that doesn’t hurt the charm factor, it actually ramps it up. And the game is a more than competent shooter too, starting off easily enough but becoming bullet hell-ish pretty quickly. And it has a few features you don’t always see, like a gauge on the right hand side of the screen that slowly drops until your special weapon runs out for example. Worth a dollar (or whatever the approximate equivalent in yen is).
Here’s what the publisher (AKAGIKEN) has to say about the game:
“NINJA 2D shooting game”