Issue Six Reviews

Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise is a crossover of sorts. Sega’s Yakuza Team, responsible for the beautiful, amazing Yakuza series, takes their game engine and applies it to cult classic anime Fist of the North Star. Taking Uncle Kaz’s place is Kenshiro, a martial-arts expert living in a Mad Max wasteland. After a couple of hours of fighting and a brief refresh of Ken’s backstory, he finds himself in Eden, a post-apocalyptic city that still has all the creature comforts of Kamurocho; complete with hostess clubs and a cocktail bar.

Yakuza’s battle system returns here, but with a few major tweaks. Grabs and throws are limited, and there’s no more picking up items to bash people’s heads in; after all, Ken has the ability to make folks’ heads explode with one touch, so he doesn’t really need the help of any traffic cones or bikes lying around. Not that there are many bikes in the apocalypse.

After a few hours of drip feeding features to you, the game finally opens up too, revealing itself to be a massive playground. Yakuza games have always been rich and full of stuff to do, but Fist of the North Star feels truly massive. For one, you get to ride about in a bashed up old jeep scouring the wasteland whenever you want. It even has a tape deck in it with collectible songs, although why you’d want to listen to anything apart from the Super Monkey Ball theme is beyond me.

As always, there’s a grand selection of stupid mini games to choose from, and not all of them are ripped from the Yakuza series. You can use your martial arts and rhythm-action skills to help ailing patients at the doctors office. You can mix cocktails for post-apocalyptic customers. You can use steel girders to play baseball with goons on motorbikes. You can even play the original Fist of the North Star game in your hideout, although I don’t have any footage of that because I haven’t found it in the wasteland yet.

One of the things we take pride in, here at Bit Socket, is that we’re always going to be honest with you, our 250 viewers. But when it comes to this game, this filthy, dishonest game Mark of the Ninja, I’m sorry, but I cannot contain my disgust with how it lies to the player, lies to the paying customer.

I mean, the main character isn’t even called Mark.

Mark of the Ninja, very misleading title aside, has recently been released in razor sharp HD on all the usual suspects, including my slightly concave Nintendo Switch. Even though the game has been out for six years, this is actually my first time playing it, although I came to it with high expectations, because everyone and their auld fuckin’ Gran has been talking it up big style. Honestly, I’ll be adding my voice to the choir on this one, as Mark of the Ninja is a cracking stealth game with a surprising amount of depth, but there are a few wee issues that stop it from heading to Video Game Valhalla.

Let’s gorge ourselves on that good shit first before we stare aghast at what we refuse to eat; first up, I’m a pretty big fan of how the game looks, it’s like a super-violent Toonami game, like Samurai Jack just decided to slice up some absolute cretins inside a European castle. It’s also got a wee hint of the Flash games of yore, and as someone who grew up through the glory days of Newgrounds and the like, it’s got a comfortable feel; even for someone new to the game, it already looks like an old favourite.

Mark of the Ninja’s approach to stealth is pretty much exactly what you’d want; logical, flexible and fun. If you keep out of a guards eye-line, either by staying above them, or creeping through vents or hiding behind huge, convenient plant pots, you’ll be fine and rewarded extra points. But that also goes both ways; as soon as a guard is out of your direct line of vision, say blocked by a ledge, they also disappear off your screen, only showing their last location and little visual clues about any sounds they might be making.

For those of you that want to play the game without killing guards, which is possible, this will add even more to the challenge and help keep you focused; for me, it caused other issues which I’ll talk about in a minute.

As you play, you’ll find that you can hide enemy bodies in bins, under the ground via vents and even suspend them from ledges to freak out other guards, giving you an unmissable distraction right when you need to get past a large group. The main character, still not called Mark, also has access to a wealth of Ninja tools, from smoke bombs to caltrops, so your approach to each level, or even room, can change on the fly. When you decide to engage in combat, which is suitably gory and fun, the best way to approach every encounter is via blind spots, either behind, above or below, as…um… right, I’m going to call him Mark for the rest of the review…as Mark is a fragile butterfly and doesn’t do well in aggressive encounters. He’s like me in that way, except I don’t bring a sword to work.

It’s Mark’s gentleness of spirit and body that causes me issues; you see, I’m really, really bad at this game. I keep fucking up the controls, I hit the throwing dart button instead of the sword button when I get stressed and let me tell you, those throwing darts do nothing but antagonise the guards. It makes them shoot me dead, and that’s a problem for me. Every room, every area in the game is a new puzzle I can fuck up in new and unexpected ways and sometimes I only make progression because my corpse lands just past a checkpoint.