Ninja Spirit

Irem put Ninja Spirit into arcades in 1988, and two years later it reached the PC Engine, the console sold in North America as the TurboGrafx-16. That conversion remains the most cited version, because it stays closer to the coin-op original than home ports of the period usually managed.

The game is a side-scrolling action platformer in which a ninja advances through the landscape carrying several weapons at once — a sword for close range, throwing stars for distance, bombs, and a chain sickle. Switching between them on the move is part of the play, because different enemy types respond to different tools.

The standout mechanic is the shadows. The player can gain doubles that mirror every movement above and below the character and attack in sync. Triple fire shifts the balance so decisively that keeping the shadows alive becomes the central tactic — losing them to a hit stings more than losing a life.

Difficulty runs high, as arcade design required; the game was built to extract coins, and the home version largely preserves that severity. Visually it leans on dark Japanese stylisation with oversized bosses closing out stages.

The PC Engine was an unusual machine — an eight-bit core paired with a sixteen-bit graphics chip — and it pushed large numbers of sprites without slowdown, which matters enormously for this kind of action.

On OldGame.cz you can launch Ninja Spirit straight in the browser, and it supports more than one player.