33. The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors (Natsume, Switch, 2019)

The Ninja Saviors: Return of the Warriors is a kind of remake / sequel to the 1994 Super Nintendo game The Ninja Warriors, which is itself a hugely improved remake / sequel to Taito's arcade original (also called The Ninja Warriors), which had a great soundtrack and amazingly fluid sprites, but not a ton in terms of gameplay.

The game itself feels like a hybrid between a belt scroller (aka beat 'em up) and a fighting game. Gameplay involves you walking to the right while dealing with waves of various enemies (like in most belt scrollers), but a key difference here is that the action entirely takes place on a 2-dimensional plane, rather than allowing your character to move into the background to avoid enemies. This is an excellent choice, as the difficulty of knowing exactly how far into the background any character is in a standard belt scroller is one of the most frustrating parts of the genre.

The Ninja Saviors also mitigates the unfair feeling of other games in its genre by basically making the player much more powerful than any enemies. Additionally, many of your moves give your character invincibility frames, so you can safely pick up items or execute certain moves without fear of wayward enemy strikes knocking you to the ground.

There are 5 characters (with only 3 unlocked from the start), and each feels completely different and novel. I started with the "balance-type" Kunoichi character and spent most of the game getting comfortable with her moveset. I then switched to Kamaitachi, the "speed-type" character, and the experience was just like changing characters in a fighting game. I floundered around and eventually lost to the first boss (who I fairly easily dispatched my first time through).

But by far my favorite part of this game is the feeling of the controls, and the insane thing to me is the range of combat and movement abilities that they are able to get away with using only 2 buttons and a d-pad. I haven't even been able to try out the 2 new characters developed specifically for this game, but even the depth they are able to get out of the returning characters is astounding. I think if we're just going by game feel, this might even be more of an accomplishment than Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, which is my favorite stylish/hard/slow action game. I think I have to give Rondo of Blood the overall better game award, because it actually has stages that are interesting / challenging to navigate, versus The Ninja Saviors' exclusively flat levels.

5/5, virtuosic implementation of a 2-button control scheme, my favorite game I've played this year so far.