I just played Ninja Combat on the ADK Damashi PS2 on PS4 collection. I always remember it LOOKING cool, but not the specifics about the gameplay.
The things I picked up on my playthrough:
- Woah, this has unlockable characters like Sengoku 3. Didn't remember that!
- Woah, this uses like... 1 major button. 2 total. No jump, just a "run" and an attack that changes on distance.
- The fact it's a bit shooter, and a bit BEU is unique.
- There's one stage where you climb a fence like in Super Mario World! That's... unexpected.
- While the art looks solid for the most part, the animations are BAD for many things.
- Scratch that, the art sometimes looks very awkward. Gembu looks like an SD Double Dragon Brother drawn in a realistic style!
- One of the bosses is an early prototype for Nintendo's ARMS! ;)
And then, we get to the gameplay...
- .... Ok, first off, the evasion doesn't evade. No invincible frames.
- ANY motion from an enemy has an attack box. So if you're standing by a guy PREPPING AN ARROW, you take damage. This might be ok...
- BUT THERE IS NO PUSHBACK! So you instead just sit in an enemy, lose all your life, and die.
- The ranges on all range attacks except for Kagerow's SUCK. She can stand outside max retaliation range (sometimes) and attack... but all else just trade blows with the opponents.
- Melee combos just trade hits back and forward with you and the enemy. Since touching an enemy in any way incurs damage, this is incredibly clunky feeling. There's no consistent sweet spot for attacking.
- There really feels like no way to "properly" play this game. It seems to have no intended flow.
- It's ultimately just semi-pretty graphics atop what might be the worse Beat Em Up Engine I've seen since Gravity's attempt at a Double Dragon II remake.
So... yeah. I think every other NINJA game (Ninja Masters, Ninja Commando) is probably better than this, on the NeoGeo system. I don't know if I've ever come away from a NeoGeo game feeling so... soured from my previous memories. It's not bad from that Konami-style school of BEUs, but it's definitely from a time before devs started to master the gameplay cycle of the genre.