Tea Leaves

Dripping with style and almost aggressive cuteness, Ninja Town for the Nintendo DS puts the “aw!” in “kawaii”.

Ninja Town

The game takes place in a town of adorable, fluffy little death machines called “Wee Ninjas”. As Ol’ Master Ninja, you’re in charge of organizing the defense of Ninja Town against a seemingly unendless group of enemies hailing from nearby Mount Feroshi. Fortunately for you, the enemies come in waves, which gives you a chance to prepare.

Ninja Town is essentially a simplified (and hyper-cute!) version of the Desktop Tower Defense games. Enemies march through each level, following a set path, and you have to build structures which will slow, damage, and hopefully eventually kill them. Using the currency of the realm, which happens to be cookeis, you can build new structures or upgrade existing ones. Destroying enemies gives you more cookies (if only real life worked like this).

There’s a constant balance between building new structures and upgrading existing ones. Weaker enemies tends to come in larger groups, so you’d like as many houses as possible to give you many Wee Ninjas to take them out quickly. But stronger enemies can’t be taken out by a horde of weak ninjas, so there’s pressure to upgrade the houses instead of building new ones. There are other tradeoffs as well. For example, Wee Ninjas can’t hit flying enemies; for those, you need your crack team of Wasabi Pea Shooters, but they are vulnerable to physical attacks from ground-based enemies.

The ninjas are cute. The houses are cute. The balloon in which you survey the battle from is cute. The enemies are cute. Even your ninja’s poop is cute. This is a game which is infused in a level of cuteness that will probably not be seen again until Hello Kitty becomes President. It is, in a word, unrelentingly cute, and manages to do that while still providing interesting strategic choices. I liked Ninja Town, and unless you have an unresolved masculinity crisis, I think you will too. It sells for about $30 at Amazon.com.