Title: Ninja Five-O
System: Steam (PC)
Price: $24.99
Release Date: 02/25/2025
Story
In this GBA classic, you take control of Joe, an expert ninja who sets out to defeat the evil Fire Master and his minions, who are causing wild terror attacks all over town! An interesting Hudson-made platformer that never came to Japan, yet was a cult classic due to being absurdly, insanely expensive and very underprinted. There are story scenes between stages, but they don’t really amount to anything special.
Presentation
It’s been a bit since I covered a Carbon Engine game, and while I planned to review an earlier, yet still recent one first, I decided to pick this up on a whim with it being a shorter game and not having any of the emotional baggage slowing me down from the other CE game. Thankfully, this carries some of the improvements to the Carbon Engine which the game in my Queue introduced, namely finally fixing the bug that made the game not retain your filter/screen size options upon closing the game. So yay, you can fiddle with screen settings and have it left that way!
Speaking of those display options, you have a few basic wallpapers, and a very simple LCD filter. I really liked the look of the LCD filter, and ended up finding it very fitting when playing the game on Steam Deck, so I didn’t really have any problems with the visual options. Maybe a faux GBA border like the faux GB/GBC borders LRG put in prior Carbon ports would have been cool, but I’m not really bothered by the lack of them.
When it comes to the other presentational options/bonuses, there ends up being a little more than I expected there to be. As a toggle option, you have a Remastered OST, which I thought just played the original soundtrack without the GBA crunch, but instead seems to be a slightly remixed version of that original score, aiming to have a similar vibe. I really dig it, though my GBA kid roots make me prefer the original sounding tunes anyday.
Unfortunately, this is where I hit the lone big bug of the port, since several levels of the game would occasionally have the soundtrack failing to loop properly when playing with the original soundtrack. Entering a room or closing/reopening the game with a save state seems to fix this, but this was still a silly thing to encounter more than once in my playthrough, and it really should have been fixed by now. Thankfully the rest of my experience was bug-free.
Also available is a gallery, just like prior Carbon ports, and while it ain’t the best, it does offer a lot more than most Carbon reissues. For starters, you have nice box and manual scans, along with very well done scans of the game’s key art, including an advertisement. As a tribute to the game, this port opens with a short little animation done by Studio Meala, and all the concept art for that opening movie was thrown into the gallery as well. Finally, you have a sound test, as to be expected from these Carbon ports by now.
Gameplay
Ninja Five-O is an action platformer, where you must go through several stages, rescue hostages, obtain keys and defeat the boss at the end of each area, all the way until you encounter the Shadow Master and take him out to end his reign of terror. There are three difficulty options to pick from, although only Normal and Hard modes will let you see the full game. Still, all three options let you choose from three starting areas, each with four stages, as the Easy difficulty just blocks you off from the rest of the levels upon clearing those starting areas.
Besides the save/load state and reset options from the submenu, there’s really nothing extra this port has to enhance the original game besides those and a rewind option, which works fine enough. Hold ZL or the equivalent button and you’ll rewind back a few seconds, which is more than enough to dodge a tricky enemy or badly timed jump, but not to fully back out of a room or make any other big time-saving measures if you took the wrong path. Still, it works and gets the job done, and with proper save states here in a Carbon release, those do a much better job at fixing bigger mistakes you might make, especially in the later levels with branching pathways that can lead you in circles.
Nevertheless, Ninja Five-O appears to be a typical controlling action platformer, with a jump and projectile attack you can upgrade by collecting dropped lightning bolts, but you also have two more techniques to pull out on a whim. Alongside your projectiles, you have a melee weapon, which can be done in the air with a spinning slash, or up close and personal if the opportunity arises. On GBA, this was mapped to R, but here with the carbon port you can’t move it from the B button, and there’s no in-game remapping feature, a baffling exclusion from these Carbon Engine releases.
You also have a grappling hook that you can pull off by pressing the jump button twice, and while that’s still an easy technique to do, I also found it peculiar they didn’t try mapping that technique to its own macro button. Thankfully, Steam Input was able to let me fix the quirk with the melee weapon on my Steam Deck for a more authentic control layout, but for those with the console versions you’re outta luck; even on Switch, you use B to jump and A to slash. Still, it isn’t the worst button for that technique to be mapped to, but something felt way more satisfying about using a spinning slash on a shoulder button.
Once you’re comfortable with the game and within a stage, you have your main objective of rescuing all the hostages within each level, while also hunting down colored keys used to open up their matching doors, usually leading to said hostages while the Red one is your exit path. You can’t beat a stage without trying to get all the hostages back, but you are able to accidentally kill some of them, and you’re still able to beat a stage despite that. Nevertheless, you gotta encounter and hopefully save as many as you can, and as long as you don’t stupidly shoot them in the face or get carried away with a sword slash, freeing them is incredibly easy to do.
While I didn’t mind the earlier stages and found the hostage seeking to be rather fun, the second half of the game really ramps up the amount you have to save, and those stages end up feeling less like platforming challenges and more like an annoying maze to deal with. Still, Ninja Five-O was a decently fun romp overall and I at least was compelled to take on two full difficulties in the process of this review, so that has to amount for something at least. There’s even a time trial mode where you try to tackle any stage of your choosing to get the best time possible and beat the par times, and I found this to be quite a lot of fun with the boss fights, though not so much with the stages themselves. Outside of a couple, you couldn’t pay me to go through some of the tedious hostage rescuing again and again. Still, this game has extra replay value besides just beating the game on Hard if you’re so inclined to go for it.
Conclusion
To my pleasant surprise, Ninja Five-O marks the first Carbon Engine release where major annoyances/bugs I encountered could be counted on a single finger or two, and ends up being a very damn fine way to experience this pricey GBA gem. The bonuses are nice, if basic, and the core game itself has a decent amount of replay value thanks to the time attack mode and different difficulty levels offering incentives for you to take on your best times.
Really the only issue with the port itself comes from the price. While this reissue is nowhere near as expensive as getting a real physical copy, and this port pretty much includes everything you could possibly think of including (this game got no JP release, so all regional variants are here and accounted for), it still stands out as a single retro game costing nearly $25. While it manages to be a very fun, if slightly repetitive action platformer, considering the sheer amount of outstanding GBA games that have been reissued for far less of an asking price, including some entire collections with more games costing a few bucks less than this single title, I can’t say Ninja Five-O is the best value, and for newcomers I do advise you wait on a sale for this one. It’s a fun little romp from Hudson, but nothing groundbreaking and if it wasn’t for the aftermarket price of the real cartridge, I could easily see this one staying as a forgotten gem. Compared to the many, many other Konami gems that have never been reissued, Ninja Five-O is pretty average, if fun.
Still, if you enjoyed this game back in the day, or always had a curiosity to try it, I do feel you’ll end up having some fun here, and if you enjoy time attack action games then this could easily keep you busy with self-challenge for a good few hours. Just don’t expect this to be the GBA’s surprise Ninja Gaiden II or Shinobi III tier masterpiece, and compared to other Konami action games, this one is pretty simple in comparison. Still happy this game is available on modern platforms, though!
I give Ninja Five-O a 6 out of 10.