The Legend of the Mystical Ninja

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja is a weird, comical action/adventure game featuring both overhead and sidescrolling segments. While the series lasted a fair while, this is one of the few entries to be released outside Japan.

Sub-Pages#

Prototype Info Prerelease Info Bugs

Location Menu#

When entering your house (location value $0000 in $7E0092), memory address $7E008E is checked for $8000. If true, the menu opens.

Use this Pro Action Replay (PAR) code: 7E008F80

Instructions

• A: Change page (4 total).
• B: Move cursor down list.
• X: Exit your house.
• Y: Warp to location selected.

While the warp works, leaving the location warped to gets you stuck on another map. It seems some initialization code is missing?

Unused Items#

Shop#

Three unused items loaded into memory inside shops. Scrolls and weapon-upgrading "Lucky Cats" are only dropped by enemies or found in pots, but apparently at some point you were supposed to be able to buy them. The full single scroll graphic only appears in the Japanese version; the International versions oddly moved it (leaving only a blank space where it once was), then deleted the top half.

Inventory#

Japanese	English

A bag with a question mark on it, located with the other inventory items. No idea what this could've been intended for, but it was modified in the International versions for some reason.

Unused Graphics#

The doors in the maze mini-game have an unused opening animation. There it is!

Regional Differences#

Title Screen#

The Super Famicom version is Ganbare Goemon: Yukihime Kyuushutsu Emaki and the SNES version is The Legend of the Mystical Ninja. The European version updates the year from 1992 to 1993 (1994 in Germany), but adds "All Rights Reserved" in the middle of the copyright text.

Japan	US	Europe	Germany

Items#

Japanese (Shop)	English (Shop)

Japanese (Inventory)	English (Inventory)

Despite the myriad of untouched Japanese food seen in restaurants, Konami saw it fit to "Westernize" only the two that could be stored in your inventory. The typical Japanese rice ball became a slice of pizza in the west.

Japanese (Shop)	English (Shop)

Japanese (Inventory)	English (Inventory)

Another type of rice ball was changed to a whole pizza.

Japanese	English

The little field sprite used if the food is stolen by the weird robots in area 4 and 6 was also modified accordingly.

Japanese	English

The 1ups found in the Secret Maze minigame had its Japanese characters changed to a question mark.

Japanese	English

The inventory icon was modified likewise.

Removed Scenes#

Ebisumaru's Side Show#

To do: Find if a ROM dump exists of the version of the U.S. and European ROMs that was sent to publications for product review.

The Japanese version of Ganbare Goemon (Legend of the Mystical Ninja) contained extra "Theatre" attractions in Warlock Zones III (Amusement Park) and VI (Tengu Mountain) which were removed from the U.S. and European versions of Legend of the Mystical Ninja. It is unknown if the removal of the scene was a result of a decision by Konami of America, or Nintendo of America's censorship policy of the early 1990s.

The first scene (ID: 0E) depicts a show where a bunch of Ebisumaru (aka "Dr. Yang") clones do a bizarre dance, then slightly drop their pants and fart in unison, causing Goemon (aka "Kid Yin") to faint.

This scene is unused in the English version, but fully translated and functional nonetheless. It's accessible by using the location menu code mentioned above.

Interestingly, the first theatre scene was actually pictured in the instruction manual as "Sammy Rye's Circus Side Show". The sideshow was also referenced in volume 33 of Nintendo Power as "Sideshow". Also, it was referenced in Prima's Secrets of the Games: Super NES Games Secrets, volume 2 (ISBN 1-55958-193-X). This suggests that a decision was made to remove the Zone III Circus Side Show between the time the game was submitted to Nintendo and game publications for review, and the final release of the game.

Strip Show#

The second removed theatre scene was removed from Warlock Zone VI - Tengu Mountains. The theatre second act is named "Sexy Strip Show!" and depicts a Japanese Geisha girl performing a strip tease. Goemon (Kid Ying) can be seen in the foreground, pumping his right arm in the air and cheering, during the strip tease.

This was removed from all Western versions for obvious reasons. The localization went a step further and changed the dialog for when you meet the girl in her house to "Hi! Nice to meet you!" from the original line where she reminded the player he'll have to go to the theater and pay there if he wanted to see her.

The text for this show was never translated to English, but the soundtrack still remains in the US version's ROM, unused. The debug menu for the locations doesn't include this room. If you try to force the game to load this scene (ID: 0C), the Japanese version will load it just fine, but its ID was overwritten in the US version with a duplicate instance of another scene, which was Ebisumaru's Side Show of all things.

Bath House, Women's Door#

The Japanese version gives the player the option to use the men's door or the women's door when visiting the bath house. The player would use this bath house typically to recover health, but some hijinks with the other bath visitors will occasionally throw a wench (or a bucket) into those plans, whether the player went for the perverted route or not.

While some of these scenes survived the localization despite similar fart humor than the removed scenes, the US localization removed the door choice and had the player automatically enter the men's door. The sprites from the inaccessible situations are still in the US version, unused, and are even loaded to memory at all times.

Maze Mini-Game#

In the Japanese version, there is only one maze to play in the maze mini-game. The U.S. and European versions have two mazes to play, with the second one becoming playable later in the game.

Final Boss glitch#

To do: See if the Japanese 1.1 version fixed this.

The sprites of the karajishi that the final boss General Hannya rides during the first phase are glitched in the Japanese 1.0 version. This makes it seem like the final boss is floating in midair a majority of the time, but glitched sprites of its legs will flicker on-screen when arrows are reflected, and a bunch of random glitch tiles will appear if the boss is attacked directly in place of its meowing animation (as shown in the image to the left). However, this glitch is only visual, so it can still be defeated normally.

The sprites were fixed in the Japanese v1.2 and international versions so they appear correctly.

References#