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Stage 1: Impressions

Stage 2: Analysis

Stage 3: Evaluation

So you want to be a ninja, but don't have the Japanese culture or nearby ninja training camps to exercise your stealth and assassination skills. That's okay, because Ninja Reflex is here for you. Prepare yourself to be the ultimate killing machine and set out on dangerous missions!

Or not. You must first choose a name, grasshopper, but gone is traditional and boring character input. Instead, players take a preset number of adjectives and nouns to create their ninja name. Unlike text-based character input, sensei will name off your noun as your own, whether it be River-san, Sakura-san, Shadow-san, Snake-san, Storm-san, Wolf-san, Blade-san, or my favorite, Rainbow-san. Fear the almighty Honest Rainbow, ninja extraordinaire!

Ninja Reflex focuses on sharp movements in six different areas. The first is Shuriken throwing, which allows players to hold B to lock on to a moving dummy target (a la Hogan's Alley) and whip the Wii Remote to launch the star. The second is Katana, where players stand still and suffer an awful 1:1 control scheme to defend against evil spirits. The third is Nunchaku, moving the Wii Remote in a figure 8 to whip the weapon in rhythm as barrels and crates fly towards you.

Then there's the Kung Fu movie homages: the fourth training is Hashi, grabbing a fly with chopsticks; the fifth is Koi, grabbing fish from the water while steadily holding the pointer over the fish for it to ascend upwards; and finally there's Hotaru, which involves pressing the A button as soon as a firefly appears on the screen with millisecond marks to determine your speed.

After completing tasks from each of these categories, sensei allows you to redo each tasks in a challenge of grading to see if you can pass to the next belt. White belt to red belt, red belt to yellow belt, and so on for six more belts. That's about it.

Initially, the game is fun. Highly repetitive to the point of needing to repeat the same quests over and over after every belt, but nonetheless entertaining. Can this entertainment value last? Skepticism says no, but players will find some enjoyment.

The music is very soothing and calm, and the pleasant title screen artwork adds nicely to the ambiance. A feeling of ancient Japanese spirit flows through the music, although the same can't be said of the 3D modelling - the visual style works, but seems technically of the GameCube era. The gameplay itself offers no music, which is a shame considering the excellent sounds elsewhere.

The controls work well enough, minus the Katana game mentioned earlier, but already Ninja Reflex fails to achieve what WarioWare: Smooth Moves accomplished within two months of launch. Smooth Moves could afford a lousy mission or two because the game had over 200 of them, but in Ninja Reflex, one lousy mini-game makes one sixth of the entire game a bad experience.

What's multiplayer like, and how awesome can real meditation training make everyday life? Find out in Stage 2 as we uncover both of these ancient arts!