Nin­ja copy fails Black Manta

Peo­ple were appar­ent­ly wild about nin­jas in the ’80s. Real­ly wild. I’m guess­ing this because it seems to be a mil­lion and one games about nin­jas that were made in the 1980s. These were all made with var­i­ous degrees of suc­cess in get­ting the point across about the nin­ja expe­ri­ence. Out of the coterie there were two that stood out: Nin­ja Gaiden, a time­less clas­sic in the way of the nin­ja arts; and, Wrath of the Black Man­ta. Note that we did not use any sort of kind trib­ute for the lat­ter. There is myr­i­ad rea­sons for this distinction.

Wrath of the Black Man­ta is your stan­dard adven­ture game cen­tered on find­ing miss­ing chil­dren in New York City, the appar­ent bas­tion of all evil and where the most heinous crimes take place in the video game world. A drug fiend named El Toro is hell­bent on turn­ing these chil­dren into addicts and it’s up to you and your nin­ja skills to make Toro get down or lay down with the War on Drugs.™

The premise is run of the mill, the con­trols con­fus­ing and clunky and the action extreme­ly repet­i­tive. The back­grounds do change from lev­el to lev­el and there is a lot of ground to cov­er. But, all you’re going to do is walk around search­ing ware­hous­es for chil­dren and gang­ing up on infor­mants from the car­tel to get infor­ma­tion. What should be an absolute clean sweep is a clus­ter because get­ting that infor­ma­tion with­out being killed from ridicu­lous hits is a nightmare.

The fact that most of the action is ripped off from the infi­nite­ly bet­ter and more inter­est­ing Nin­ja Gaiden doesn’t help here because you’re going to die a lot from ter­ri­ble jump­ing and those afore­men­tioned hits from ene­mies. The sound­track also does Man­ta no favors as it’s just bare­ly ser­vice­able. Even the art is ripped off from some­where else: Word on those mean streets of NYC is that some of the art was tak­en straight from the book “How to Draw Comics the Mar­vel Way” when the Japan­ese ver­sion was port­ed to the U.S. I’m guess­ing they thought no one would notice, but it goes over with the sub­tle­ty of a ton of bricks. Speak­ing of a lack of sub­tle­ty, the obvi­ous “stay away from drugs, kids, if you want to live” mes­sage and the hit-you-over-the-head irony of char­ac­ters named Tiny (a in no way sur­pris­ing­ly large boss char­ac­ter who tries to stomp you to death in the first lev­el) means you’re in for a long ride with this whether you want to or not.

The key to this bat­tle is, if you want to play a nin­ja adven­ture just play the released at the same time Nin­ja Gaiden. Gaiden is far supe­ri­or in every way and has more appeal in terms of sto­ry. Wrath of the Black Man­ta is the poor man’s Nin­ja Gaiden and is in no way stealthy enough in its sub­tle­ty to earn any sort of title of nin­ja anything.