Ninja Usagimaru: The Gem of Blessings (Nintendo 3DS) Review

At its heart, Ninja Usagimaru: The Gem of Blessings is a puzzle game where the goal is to rescue villagers, but one of the things that immediately sets it apart is the lack of a direct attack, although enemies can be killed by dropping blocks on them. In a way, it's reminiscent of The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle on NES, only better and with the caveat that the ninja is rescuing villagers, and there is no bunny collecting carrots.

That's really not a fair comparison, because The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle isn't exactly an underrated NES gem, but, for what it was, it's not as bad as some have suggested; it was rather basic, but that can be said of almost every NES game. Ninja Usagimaru is anything but basic, with a plethora of movement options available from the start, and a decent number of abilities and tools to make levels more complex as progress is made.

Players aren't limited to progressing through the stages in numeric order; shortly after the tutorial, nearly the entire game is unlocked, and very little is presented to give any idea of what is supposed to be done, or how it is supposed to be done. A lot of the stages are taxing, and many are even clever, while some are little more than disguised tutorials on how to use a particular tool. That's fine, since it leaves players to figure things out, instead of forcing the information down their throats with a long and tedious tutorial.

Ninja Usagimaru, similar to other indie titles like Super Meat Boy and Minecraft, has character. Although it certainly doesn't stand out in a crowd of games like Okami that have the same look and feel, compared to other games that lack any real heart, this feels like an actual experience, and not a generic puzzle game. The graphics, while certainly not top-notch, have a lot of appeal in their style, but the music is uninspired; it sounds like someone just told a composer to "Compose something that sounds Japanese." None of the compositions are complex, and they are all pretty short—thirty-second loops and so on.

Despite having puzzles that have solutions ranging from "looks impossible" to "readily apparent," Ninja Usagimaru is very forgiving; one of the face buttons is even mapped to restarting the level. Like old NES games, all movement happens on a clearly defined grid, so there is no way to stand between two blocks. This tends to make a mistake more devastating in its consequences, but it also makes it easier to avoid making mistakes. Still, mistakes happen, and the retry button makes that reality bearable. Since none of the solutions are ridiculously long, players lose only a few minutes due to restarting, and that's annoying, but tolerable.