Some four years after the console versions, The Ninja Warriors Once Again (aka The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors) Tengo Project's remake of their 1994 Super Famicom/SNES single-plane brawler The Ninja Warriors Again, is finally coming to PC: it'll be out on July 25, with a 10% launch discount and/or a bundle with their more recent self-revival work, Kikikaikai: Kuro Mantle no Nazo/Pocky & Rocky: Reshrined: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2288070/The_Ninja_Saviors_Return_of_the_Warriors/
TNWA is a re-imagining of Taito's super-widescreen arcade action game The Ninja Warriors that not only incorporates a lot of elements from the brawler format as established by Final Fight but also a lot of the combat advancements being made by fighting games of the day; it was one of the earlier and more accomplished examples of brawlers re-importing fighting game tech into their lexicon, and aside from the obvious additions (two new characters, two-player co-op, etc), one might be surprised by just how few "modernisations" were made, or required, for current-day players.
For those not aware of Tengo Project, they're a three-person team of Natsume-Atari1 veterans who, after decades on the licensed/contract mega-work treadmill, managed to form a little carve-out to go back to making games the way they did in the '80s and '90s; this specific trio was responsible for the SNES/SFC games Wild Guns, The Ninja Warriors Again, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition and Gundam Wing: Endless Duel, and each of those individuals also contributed to many other classics of the era that include the two Pocky & Rocky/SFC Kikikaikai games, Shadow of the Ninja, Shatterhand and many other games. So far, all of their projects have been self-remakes of their past SNES/SFC works, and all three of them set the standard for retro franchise revivals, particularly visually: the new pixel art is much more detailed and fluid while being almost imperceptible as "new", to the point where a lot of people have to A/B the old and new games just to even recognise how much work actually went into redrawing them.
(The name "Tengo Project" is a reference to their origins as a unit—when they found themselves with some unexpected downtime between Contract Gig #876 and Contract Gig #877, they were afforded the chance to make an original game on their own terms, provided they made it with half the time, half the team and half the cartridge size of a typical project ["ten-go" = 0.5]: that game was Wild Guns, a classic late-era SNES/SFC action game and the end-product of a team that was firing on all cylinders.)
My interest in Tengo Project isn't due to them reviving these specific old games that I happen to love, or any particular preference for retro games, or games with a classic difficulty curve or whatever: I check for them because, unlike so many similarly-skilled peers who'd been forced into a career of drudgery by an industry that came to viewer smaller accomplished teams as prime grist, they managed to re-assert themselves and make the games they want to make, how they want to make them, with the same degree of artisanry that made those games so beloved to begin with. There are countless other veterans toiling away on service games or doing gruntwork on throwaway IP projects or managing go-nowhere venture-capital garbage that have not been so lucky, but my extremely optimistic hope is that some of them might be able to use whatever success Tengo Project has found as a potential springboard to liberate themselves and return to working on the kinds of games that only they can make, while they're still physically able to make them.
(They've heavily hinted that their next project will be based on Shadow of the Ninja, by the way... keep an eye out around TGS time.)
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the current incarnation of the Japanese studio Natsume Co. Ltd., not to be confused with anything related to any version of the internationally-know Atari, nor the US-based Natsume Inc., to which they are only nominally connected
The most interesting running thread through every Tengo Project release so far is their approach to the cooperative modes. It's common for multiplayer in arcade games to be treated as a fundamentally less serious mode of play. It's where you credit feed and laugh with friends and leave the "real" runs for when you're alone. Tengo seem hellbent on fighting that idea. Each game has so far done something weird and mean to force cooperative play to aim for serious runs:
Wild Guns Reloaded: The total lives pool is shared. Any extend your earning's probably feeding straight into the weakest player just trying to make it back into the game.
Ninja Warriors Once Again: Both players share the same life bar and super gauge. This means you have to coordinate whether to go for EX moves or to Bomb and need to react with panic bombs when you see your compatriot take a hit before the knockdown empties your gauge as a penalty. The shared life bar means you have to ensure neither player is just hurtling forward and getting beat up. Blocking is incredibly strong in this game!
Pocky & Rocky Reshrined/KikiKaikai Kuro Mantle no Nazo (or is it Nazo no Kuro Mantle? I've forgotten which game is which orientation): You're not even allowed to play coop until you've beaten the Story Mode or deciphered a code that Tengo Project tweeted out once (at the main menu input Left, Left, Left, Left. Right, Right, Right, Right. Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right). Thankfully there's no shared resources once you're actually playing it but of course you can't both select Ame no Uzume to just fly over levels. Time to actually learn those stages.
I think it's an interesting approach even if ultimately one that's probably hurt the games so far more than helped. Treating cooperative modes as a challenge in their own right if obviously satisfying to nail but these are the sort of games that people learn about by their one indie game pervert friend bringing around out of nowhere and so every player involved probably isn't at a same skill level.
this is all true, and there are other tertiary issues that can make co-op more irritating: TNWOA requires you to beat the game twice to unlock both of the new characters, Pocky & Rocky Reshrined requires you to clear the single-player story mode twice to unlock its new characters, etc.
Wild Guns Reloaded is the most harsh, as the multiplayer mode has no continues1 and no direct difficulty selection—the single-player easy/normal/hard options are more like route selections (and, I would argue, don't necessarily match their assigned difficulty) and the co-op mode doesn't even let you choose, instead assigning you a route based on how the number of players. Of all the Tengo Project games, I feel like they made a concerted effort to make this one tougher than the original, and it didn't need to be so punitive or confusing on top of everything else.
Pocky & Rocky is a game that I feel was probably already too tough for its primary audience back in the day, so you'd think they might've been a little more accommodating the second time around... but nah, oldheads gotta oldhead, I guess.
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the Switch version has an exclusive "beginner mode" that lets you play with infinite lives, but it's single-player only! (there's also an exclusive boss rush; idk why neither mode got ported back to the other versions