Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen is better in all the wrong ways

destructoid.com:

The Ninja Jajamaru-Kun series took a hard left turn after Jajamaru no Daibouken. Considering it started as something of a rip-off of Ninja-Kun after Jaleco published the Famicom port of that game. It never really had a strong identity, but Jaleco was going to throw it against the wall as many times as it could until it finally stuck.

It never stuck. Reinvention didn’t work. The biggest offshoot was Ninja Jajamaru-Kun’s attempts at JRPGs, but 1991’s Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen for Famicom is perhaps the one that feels most desperate. That’s not to say it’s bad, but if some sort of game vampire sucked out every last ounce of what little personality the series had, this is what you’d get.

First of all, I guess we’re in space. Despite the series focusing on Edo-era Japan, we’re suddenly in space. Next, they took away Jajamaru’s shuriken. Largely, it’s the Jajamaru characters in a game that doesn’t at all resemble any of the others. It’s not just that the art style has changed, it’s that everything has. Gamapakkun appears but in robot form. It’s better than no Gamapakkun at all. That would have been very upsetting.

Ninja Jajamaru Ginga Daisakusen is actually a hop-and-bop platformer, like all the other hop-and-bop platformers released in the wake of Super Mario Bros. 3. What this game does different is essentially nothing. It has this heavy reliance on using this charge-up dash move to get over gaps, which is one of the dullest focal points I can imagine. However, most levels have at least one instance where you have to charge up your dash to make it across or over obstacles.

Don’t get me wrong, there are side-scrollers out there with some indispensable jumps. For example, I can’t imagine the Mega Man X series without the