Last Ninja 2: Back with a Vengeance

About Last Ninja 2: Back with a Vengeance

Last Ninja 2: Back with a Vengeance (1988) is System 3's isometric action-adventure in which the ninja Armakuni is pulled into 20th-century New York to face the shogun Kunitoki again.

Last Ninja 2: Back with a Vengeance in Depth

After the events of The Last Ninja, Armakuni holds the Koga scrolls and has begun training a new order of shadow warriors. During a training session he is mysteriously transported to New York City in the 20th century, and, torn from his own time, must defeat the evil shogun Kunitoki once more. Each level shows a different part of the city, divided into several screens and presented in an isometric view, in which the ninja can move in eight directions and jump.

Enemies armed with fists and ninja weapons wander the levels, and the ninja fights them bare-handed or with weapons found along the way, using a range of blows and attacks and the ability to block. Shuriken are thrown in a straight line rather than used in melee, killing or badly wounding any enemy they hit. Keys, a rope, a map and other items are scattered around, and collecting them and using them in the right place is essential to finishing the game, while hamburgers give an extra life when eaten. The Limited Edition of the original release came with a ninja mask and a rubber shuriken.

Making Last Ninja 2: Back with a Vengeance

System 3 developed and published it in 1988 for the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC as the sequel to The Last Ninja, with ports to the Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, Amiga, Atari ST, MS-DOS and NES following. It was an enormous commercial success, and in 2004 Retro Gamer readers voted it the 68th top retro game. Last Ninja 3 followed in 1991. The source code of a version for the Konix console was discovered in 2015, and City Connection re-released the NES version on Nintendo Switch in June 2025, the game's first release in Japan.