Tag Archives: ninja

[REVIEW] Mark of the Ninja

Mark of the NinjaIt’s hard to believe that it’s been 15 years already, but way back in 1998 I discovered a video game that totally rocked my world. I’ve played a lot of games in my time, but this was one that pushed every one of my buttons so assuredly and repeatedly that even though I “beat” the game in just nine hours of play, I continued to play the game over and over and over again for the better part of 10 years. I loved it that much, and I still love it, despite the advances in video game technology in the intervening time.

What was this miraculous game? It was Tenchu: Stealth Assassins, a third-person stealth-action game featuring ninja where the focus was put squarely on sneaking through the maps to achieve mission goals, rather than just hacking and slashing through a horde of enemies. Tenchu even beat the critically acclaimed Metal Gear Solid to the market, which is why I get more than a little peeved when people claim that it was Metal Gear Solid and not Tenchu that inaugurated the stealth-action genre. Tenchu is more fun and has greater replay value, too, so there.

Anyway, Tenchu had numerous sequels and spin-offs, most of which are actually pretty horrible. We haven’t heard anything from the franchise in five years now and I expect that we never will. The era of Tenchu is truly over.

The thing that I loved about the game was that it made playing a ninja feel like being a ninja. There have been other video games that feature ninja as protagonists and these games have been, by and large, purely action affairs with nary a bit of stealth to be found anywhere. In Tenchu it was not only recommended that you spend minutes at a time scrutinizing enemy movements to determine the best possible moment to strike, but required. Getting into a straight-on confrontation with the bad guys was an invitation to quick and ugly death. Sneak up on someone, though, and assassination was as simple as a button press. Lovely.

Considering that the majority of Tenchu follow-ups couldn’t even get this formula right, it seemed like it would be impossible for any other developer to make a game that captured some bit of that feeling in a meaningful way. That’s why I found Mark of the Ninja to be such a pleasant and unexpected surprise.

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[REVIEW] Lion’s Fire

It has been over two years since I reviewed the first installment in the Year of the Ninja Master series of novels, Dragon Rising. I strongly suggest you go back and familiarize yourself with my thoughts on the matter. You’ll note that my reviews were significantly shorter then than they are now, so you’re only in for a minute or so of reading. So go, read, enjoy.

Now that you’re back, we can continue.

The Year of the Ninja Master was a four-book series released in the aftermath of not-so-successful and not-very-beloved Ninja Master series of men’s adventure novels. These new books were repackaged with very nice-looking covers, if I say so myself, and were positioned as a way to get readers to pick up something about the exact same characters while divorcing them (mostly) from their exploitation roots. I originally picked up these books at the grocery store, a place where stuff like the Ninja Master novels would never be sold, so that gives you some idea of the step up in respectability Warner Books managed to accomplish with this new series.

If you’ve never read one of the old Ninja Master books, you may be unaware that they are almost uniformly awful. Sure, they have some appeal if you’re really into trashy men’s adventure fiction, but if you’re looking for quality entertainment, those books were very much not the way to go. Too much to ask for a series with such modest goals? Probably, but as I grow older I find that I don’t have the patience for trash that I used to, something that’s become more and more apparent to me as I read the latest installments of the long-running Mack Bolan series.

Despite their attempt to gain some additional cachet, the Year of the Ninja Master books are also pretty bad. I was fairly easy on Dragon Rising when I reviewed it back in 2010, but when I reread it in preparation for diving into Lion’s Fire, the second in the four-book cycle, I discovered that it really did have a myriad of flaws. Nonsensical plotting was one of the issues, POV-hopping was another, and truly bizarre bad-guy characters — including one woman who rapes hero Jeff Archer and then says she’ll name the abortion after him — lower the score of Dragon Rising well into the below average range. I credit the ghostwriter behind the name “Wade Barker” for trying something different than what came before, but Dragon Rising is pretty rough material, craft-wise, and can try a reader’s patience, especially the second time around.

I’m disappointed to reveal that Lion’s Fire is not much better, and in some respects is worse. The story is expanded, as one would expect in a series like this one, but there are so many strange decisions made during the course of the tale that I can’t say I enjoyed the experience very much.

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[REVIEW] Ninja

NinjaOver in the sidebar you will see there’s a tag called ninja. Click through to almost any entry under that tag and you will see some variation of the same story I’m about to tell you now. Forgive me if you’ve heard it before.

I came of age in the 1980s, and during the 1980s there was one thing all boys could agree on: ninja were cool. We had the inimitable Shô Kosugi in Revenge of the Ninja (and many others) and we even had Franco Nero playing the ever-popular Caucasian ninja in Enter the Ninja, though this role was first popularized by Chuck Norris in the cheesetastic film, The Octagon. Man, I love that movie. There was also Ninja III: The Domination, but we’re probably better off the less we talk about that one.

Whatever the case, when it came to action movies there were Stallone and Schwarzenegger, of course, but right under that was the common denominator of ninja, ninja, ninja. We couldn’t get enough of ninja and the black-clad assassins were found everywhere from magazines to comics to TV shows to books. We were truly in the Ninja Era, as I like to call it.

Eventually this fad passed, as all fads do, and ninja faded into relative obscurity, cropping up mostly in video games. I played the PlayStation game, Tenchu so many times that I actually memorized all the maps. Maybe everyone else has let go, but I keep the Ninja Era alive in my heart.

You can imagine my pleasure when I first heard about the movie called, simply, Ninja. I usually encountered mention of the film paired with embittered diatribes about how horrible Ninja Assassin was (I don’t agree), and most folks said Ninja was the kind of film ninja enthusiasts really wanted. Obviously I had to check it out.

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[REVIEW] Dragon Rising

I can be stubborn when it comes to reading books that don’t come easy. I don’t like to quit reading something, even if it’s difficult or just plain bad, and if I set it aside one time chances are good I’ll feel bad about it until I try reading it again.

Take Dragon Rising, a novel by pseudonymous author Wade Barker. I’ve owned the book since 1985, and despite repeated attempts to finish it I’ve always put it down before reaching the end. But I never got rid of the book and I never stopped trying. Finally, 25 years after I bought it, I’ve completed the book.

It’s not that Dragon Rising is a particularly thick book. And it’s not a difficult read. In fact, now that I’ve done with it, I’m not sure what kept me from finishing it all these other times. The book is action written for people who were, at the time of its publication, fully in the grip of the ninja craze. Its biggest drawback is that it’s a follow-up to a relatively obscure series that didn’t have the best reputation even then.

Dragon Rising is the first of four books collectively titled The Year of the Ninja Master. The Ninja Master in question was the star of a series of eight action novels that first started publication in 1981 at the very beginning of the Ninja Era. These books were, to put it delicately, not very good. But don’t take my word for it: check out a few installments of Bullets, Broads, Blackmail and Bombs over at Bookgasm and see what I’m talking about.

So The Year of the Ninja Master plays off this previously established character which, I think, is the weakest part of Dragon Rising. We’re supposed to know these characters already, like the Ninja Master himself, Brett Wallace, and his faithful sidekick Jeff Archer, love interest Rhea Tagashi and ninja operative Hama. The book doesn’t waste any time acquainting us with them and casually refers to adventures they had together in the other novels. Someone picking up Dragon Rising cold (like I did way back when) isn’t going to have any idea what’s going on, and that’s a serious problem.

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