This week's Arcade Archives release is... Mystic Warriors (Konami, 1993)
The Japanese and US revisions are included- while not noted in the manual, there are differences including massively-increased health amounts for bosses in the US release, and subtitles for the speech in the Japanese release- and you can switch between two and four-player cabinets via the game settings. Additionally, the original game had a lot of slowdown with multiple players, but this version includes an option to tone this down significantly, making the game run at the same speed whether you have one or four players.
SKULL Enterprise, an evil mega-corporation, has been builing an evil ninja army and is hell-bent on taking over the world. However, five brave ninjas- Spyros, Kojiro, Keima, Yuri and Brad- rise against the evil ninja corps after one of their own is captured. Across the city, the rivers and even the sky, these ninjas will fight to save their friend and crush the ambitions of SKULL Enterprise. It's sure to be mega-hit!
Well, well, well, this one's taken its time, but 30 years after its initial arcade release, Mystic Warriors is finally home, probably one of the most requested Arcade Archives releases. This is a spiritual successor to the popular Rolling Thunder-style run-and-gun Sunset Riders but with the theme completely changed to modern-day ninja action (although there's a cute nod to Sunset Riders in the first stage as a movie at a drive-in theater). There's a few changes here, though- you can now take three hits before dying, you have a melee attack that does a lot more damage to vehicles and bosses, there are a few power-ups like a screen-clearing bomb and a barrier and the characters have a lot more differences between them including their spread of shurikens, the size of their projectiles and whether they have proper rapid-fire or a more limited form.
I'm preaching to the choir here but Mystic Warriors is excellent, one of Konami's best from the era and it's so good to finally have it available at home. The game mechanics of Sunset Riders have been refined a little with some very nice additions and the presentation is just as vibrant and colourful as its predecessor, maybe even more so. If anything, it almost feels like an American comic book or Hollywood movie interpretation of ninjas, with everything being vibrant and over-the-top, which is helped by the excellent voice clips- the opening "SKULL CAPTURED YOUR FRIEND!!" is a perfect way to start the game, and there's some genuinely dramatic moments here, as ridiculous as it is. It does get quite difficult- the elevator sequence near the end of the game in particular is really tough- but it's an incredibly entertaining entry in the genre. Highly recommended.
Additionally, this does sort out a lot of emulation errors that were present in previous versions of MAME, mostly related to transparencies, in particular any fade-outs are properly rendered here, plus the ending is displayed correctly (which IIRC is still an issue to this day in MAME). The only real problem I've noticed is that the music is a touch off- try messing around with this port's sound settings to get a better balance.
