Via HxCx G.101

Few are aware of it, but Ninja Jajamaru-kun was one of Jaleco's most prolific franchises back in the Famicom days. The stubby little bug-eyed ninja, hero of his own 1985 Famicom title, eventually went on to star in several other games, going through significant design overhauls in the process. Similar to Sega's Alex Kidd series, Jaleco plastered him in so many different games that there's barely any consistency among them. Most of them are side-scrolling action platformers, but there are a few RPGs mixed in, too. The quality also wildly varies from game to game - some are pretty good, although one would be hard pressed to call them classics. After a number of 8-bit titles, the series went pretty quiet, outside of some attempted reimagenings for the 32-bit and portable consoles.

The series actually began as an arcade title called Ninja-kun, released in 1984 by a company called UPL (known for Atomic Robokid and a few other low-profile titles.) Jaleco was responsible for porting the title to the Famicom, but they ended up reusing the character in their own home release, redubbing their new game Ninja Jajamaru-kun. UPL continued with their own Ninja-kun lines while Jaleco practically turned him into their mascot, even though they were essentially the same character. Many installments were actually scheduled to be released in America, but were canned for unknown reasons. The only games that did make it were the original arcade games - bearing the title Ninja Kid - and two of the Game Boy titles, retitled Ninja Taro and Maru's Mission. It wasn't until the release of the original Famicom game on the Wii Virtual Console that Jajamaru-kun made his official debut to Westerners.

Hi-Ya