Mini Ninjas : PS3
Ah, Mini Ninjas! This game has been part of my game playing experience for about a year or so, as we got it a long time ago and I’ve been dipping in and out every now and then. Something grabbed me in the last week and I played a few solid sessions and what do you know? It’s done! So what is Mini Ninjas and is it any good?
It’s hard to classify this game. It shares a lot with platforming fare like Ratchet and Clank but not enough to chuck it in the same category. It has some climbing and hanging bits like Prince of Persia but I’d not put it there either. There’s a bit of stealthy creeping about, but this is no Tenchu… Really, the best thing to do is not compare it at all. It’s just Mini Ninjas.
You play a ninja (he’s quite mini) and there’s a plot to stop the evil samurai warlord, and on the way you will meet up with other ninjas (they’re quite mini) and add their skills and unique traits to your own in the quest to stop the evil samurai warlord. He’s done the Doctor Robotnic thing (or is it Eggman?) and turned a load of little bunnies and foxes into evil badguys (some samurai (they’re quite mini too)) and once you kill them they pop back into being foxes or bunnies or bears. It’s a whole thing which sounds (for the right reasons) very Sonic, but hey, this is no Sonic either.
The first thing one notices about Mini Ninjas is not the mini ninjas, but the beautiful graphics. Like Ratchet and Clank, this looks like playing a cartoon (though of a very different style to R&C, in fact, it’s not much like that game at all) and for a while you will just run around relishing the way it looks and how the grass moves as you jog through it. Once you settle in, you get your mission, learn your controls and start to look around. There’s a great big bunch of collectables and the élite hunter-gatherers out there can enjoy spending extra hours trying to find every little plant or statue, but they’d better be pretty sharp-eyed to manage it because even when I replayed a level with the express desire to get 100% of all the things, and scoured every corner I could find, I was still short. Finding the little flowers and mushrooms growing around can be quite hard! Anyway, this isn’t a game about collecting things (it’s no Pokémon), this is about being a ninja, a mini one.
You fight stuff (a bit like Onimusha, or Devil May Cry, though it’s nothing like those games) and they turn into bunnies (I mentioned Sonic, right?) and you get experience points and level up (sort of like Final Fantasy type games, but not). You can mix potions (like you do in Harry Potter) and sneak around and assassinate things (in a Metal Gear Solid kind of way) and climb around (a la Prince of Persia) and run along rooftops and smash pots for coins and it all looks and feels great.
Every now and then there’s a boss, but thankfully, for the most part (wait for it) the game doesn’t turn into a horrible ‘everything is fine and then you get to the boss’ type of thing (like Dead Space did around chapter six, Oh My God!), instead the boss fights are more a case of ‘be in the right place and then press the buttons that flash on the screen’ (sort of in a rhythm game type of way) which actually works really well and puts a nice holiday sort of break in the main gameplay rather than a jarring crack sort of break. The story continues, you join up with another small ninja to aid you and you collect more things, sneak about some more and go on.
Mini Ninjas is a lovely game. The storyline is good and the feel of the game is lovely and if you fall into it, you don’t want to put it down. The environments are lush, the array of skills and weapons is clever and you actually use everything a good few times (unlike some of the weapons in other games) and it’s fun to hunt out all the collectables. It fails in two places; the first is that it’s hard to pigeonhole exactly what this game is; it does many things quite well, but none of them perfectly which means it’ll never stand head and shoulders above a crowd as there is always something it can be compared to where it’ll lose; secondly the end boss is a mess and for the first time in recent history, I had to cheat and look up how to kill him after spending about an hour in the boss fight and not managing to do him any damage. Of course, when I did get an internet-based clue as to what to do, I killed him in about two minutes, but there was no real clue in the game itself as to what to do and while all the other bosses followed the ‘press X when it flashes’ rule, this was more akin to the annoying-ridiculous-boss you find in so many games. After twelve or more hours of fun, to end on such a huge anti-climactic bad moment was a sin and left a bad taste in my virtual mouth.
So Mini Ninjas, absolutely wonderful right up until the end, but a bit of a jack of all trades and master of none. Feel free to chuck a sequel this way though!
Oh, and for those of you at the end of the game and about to chuck a controller at the wall, think lightning; that’s all I’ll say.
