Reviews

A superior arcade-adventure, even if it's a little slow. The player takes control of a samurai rabbit (tsk, those Japanese comics, eh?) and has to explore a scrolling environment fighting-off troublesome ninjas and footpads, showing respect to other samurai encountered on the road and being kind to peasants (even giving them a little money if you have it to increase karma). This all works quite well, although some of the jumps over chasms are tricky to pull off and the lack of a save option seems a bit off.

This was a pretty neat effort in the very crowded samurai rabbit genre.

4/5

This has to be the inspiration for the Ninja Rabbits games, it's pretty obvious. Graphically it is impressive, very very good detail in the graphics, but I had a hard time fighting in this. He wouldn't swing his sword when I wanted him to and when he did I was miles away from my opponent. Having only one life just adds to the problem. I feel there's something I'm missing in the fighting element and I would need the instructions to fully understand my wrongdoing but of course they are in Spanish which is wonderful. By sheer luck I got past the first screen only to immediately die with one hit on screen two due to my low health. But it certainly looks to be a great game, the gameplay just doesn't feel quite right for me to enjoy it properly.

1988 Firebird Software (UK)
by Ross Harris & Dave Semmens

Well, this was a big disappointment to me.
This game is based on the awesome 80's Japanese manga called Usagi Yojimbo written by Stan Sakai. The manga has a cult following for many years and was crossed over with the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles several times.
In a way the game does it justice, bringing some recognizable elements from the manga to the digital world, some known characters are present and even the honor found in the Samurais of the old Edo are emphasized, with the Karma feature.

But other than that the game feels very empty. Accompanied by the meditative sound of silence, apart a beep here and there, what our character mostly does is... walk.
Peasants and other Samurais will appear, but not before you had a loong walk. Then you have the fighting sequences, which happen quite fast and require just one to three blows. Then comes the walking again. And I feel disencouraged to continue on.
Maybe this isn't the right game for me, nonetheless I expected something more exciting.