Kasumi Ninja Review (Atari Jaguar, 1994)

Mortal Kombat clones were a dime a dozen in the 16-bit era. Unfortunately most of them were not very good. Developers often focused on the blood and gore instead of gameplay. That’s kind of where we’re at with Kasumi Ninja on the Atari Jaguar. You would think that with all of that supposed extra processing power that the console could churn out a worthwhile Mortal Kombat clone. Kasumi Ninja gives me serious doubts about this. It’s one of the infamously bad games on a console well known for having bad games. Or at least that what I’ve always heard. Maybe it has aged more like wine? Well I popped the cartridge in to find out, and no. It’s curdled milk. Let’s take a peek.

Kasumi Ninja introduces its story to the players via a text scroll when you start up the game. The plot is extremely cheesy and unfortunately takes itself too seriously. You play as one of two ninjas by default that live on the Kasumi islands. This is a place cut off from the outside world by the magic of powerful celestials. It is here that fighters learn powerful skills under the guidance of three elder ninjas. Unfortunately one of them goes crazy, kills the other two, and opens a gate to the netherworld. During this process he becomes possessed by an evil demon, and gains enough power to destroy the world itself. It’s up to your guy to defeat him, but you’ll need the power of other fighters to do so.

This game is a traditional 2D one-on-one fighter. Your simple goal is to reduce your opponent’s life bar to zero. Health is measured at the top of the screen by a sword representing each character, and as you take damage blood gradually appears on it. When the weapon is covered that corresponding player is defeated. The winner is determined in a best of three match style, and after winning twice you get the option of performing a finishing move on the player. This doesn’t have much effect on gameplay and instead is just a flashy way to help them meet their end. It’s basically the fatality mechanic from Mortal Kombat. All characters can punch, kick, jump and block by default. What sets them apart is their special moves that require specific directional inputs paired with directional presses. Kasumi Ninja plays things safe by not trying to re-invent the wheel.

Unfortunately it is in the game’s basics where it fails the most. There’s some noticeable input lag during gameplay. It’s not uncommon for punches and kicks to not register. To perform a jump kick you have to press the button at just the right time otherwise it will fail. It’s really strange that the game requires such precision. Even worse is the hit detection. Kasumi Ninja heavily benefits the player attacking by letting them successfully strike a foe even when they’re several pixels away. Because of these issues the gameplay just feels sloppy and half baked. It’s also a problem that the characters move slowly. Matches take longer than they otherwise should because everyone walks at a snail’s pace. The fighting engine feels really unpolished. This was supposed to be an advanced Mortal Kombat clone, and instead it feels like something a generation behind Midway’s franchise.

Like in many other fighting games the CPU controlled opponents are incredibly cheap. Kasumi Ninja just isn’t fun to play because of this. They perfectly block or duck almost all of your attacks, and counter almost every time. I normally don’t like to turn down the difficulty in fighting games but here I couldn’t avoid it. Unfortunately it’s still extremely unbalanced on easy mode. In fact, I couldn’t tell a difference between it and the higher difficulty settings. I don’t think switching between them actually changes anything. That’s just bad design if you ask me. There were times when an enemy character would corner me and just endlessly throw me. No matter the combination of inputs I used there was no escaping it. Meanwhile I was struggling to get even a single throw to register. Kasumi Ninja is cheap and just not a lot of fun.

The character roster is, in one word, weird. You have the two main characters that are just palette swapped ninjas. Sure, Mortal Kombat did this and it wasn’t that bad, but here there’s too little distinction here. They both have the same sprites and animations. Things only go downhill from here. There’s the king of the goths Alaric who looks kind of like Andre the giant. There’s nothing ‘gothic’ about him in his light colored clothes and curly hair. Angus is a Scottsman and that’s his only distinct feature. He’s a walking stereotype with his kilt, orange hair and beard. One of his special moves even involves shooting a fireball from under his skirt. Yes, you read that correctly. The rest are walking stereotypes with an amazonian woman, urban lady (who is dressed like a dominatrix for some reason), native American chief (who just looks like a normal guy), etc.

Unfortunately there’s not a decent concept among them. The roster is not just boring it’s really bad. The special moves are terrible as well. Each character has just three, and one of them is always a projectile attack. Every one of these is terribly generic, aside from the aforementioned kilt fireball move Angus has. Easily the biggest insult in the game is the fact that you can’t even play as all of the characters straight away in single player mode. Only the two ninjas are options at first. As you defeat each fighter you unlock them, and can switch between characters after winning a match. This makes absolutely no sense. Hey, at least the character select screen is cool. It’s a 3D space wherein you can move freely, and you select a player by pressing the action button in front of their statue.

As if it wasn’t bad enough already Kasumi Ninja is also lacking in content. Aside from the single player mode you also have multiplayer, but I don’t know why you would want to expose a friend to this mess. At least here all of the characters are unlocked from the start. Besides these two modes you just have a couple of options to mess around with. You can change the difficulty, but I’ve already covered how that doesn’t in fact seem to do anything. There are also controls for the amount of gore in the game. Parents can even password protect the violence levels which isn’t a feature I’ve seen in any other title from this era. It’s kind of meaningless now considering how tame Kasumi Ninja is compared to many modern video games. For a full priced release this game is lacking.

I think it’s fair to expect a supposedly 64-bit game to look better than what you’d find on the Super Nitnendo and Sega Genesis. Unfortunately Kasumi Ninja doesn’t impress. On one hand the digitized characters have some decent animations. They also appear somewhat higher resolution than in the original Mortal Kombat. It’s everything else that looks awful. The developers opted to use real photographs for many of the backgrounds. It gives off some really uncanny and weird vibes. The colors are also super drab with muted green and brown tones. No matter how you spin it this game is ugly. The soundtrack is also awful. The music is extremely low tempo and the instrumentation is awful. It doesn’t sound so much like bleeps and blips as it does pops and dings. In terms of aesthetics Kasumi Ninja is a mess. It’s hot garbage from a technical standpoint.