By Drew Dietsch
| Published
Back when I did the Super Mario Bros. video for this channel – which you should watch because it’s a good video and doing so helps prevent me from becoming homeless – I mentioned possibly making a video about the real first video game feature film.
Before I can even do that, I have to say this is not about The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! or Running Boy: Star Soldier no Himitsu. Not because I dislike or discount animation at all, but because those were smaller productions more akin to TV specials than big feature adaptations with a real budget.
For that, we’re heading back to the ‘80s and watching what is still one of the best video game movies ever and proves there was never a video game movie curse to begin with.
We’re talking about the real first video game movie, Mirai Ninja.
Mirai Ninja is a 1988 Namco arcade game that was only released in Japan, so it’s fair if you’ve never heard of it. In the game, you play as a resurrected robot ninja who has to stop an evil empire and the resurrection of their leader. Which reminds me, I need to replay Cyber Shadow. That game rocks.
Anyways, the Mirai Ninja arcade game was developed with the intention of releasing a companion feature film, so this wasn’t about adapting an existing game into a movie. Instead, the game and movie were made to directly compliment each other.
The movie’s Japanese title would be Mirai Ninja: Keigumo Kinin Gaiden, translated as Future Ninja: Stealth Joy Cloud Device Side Story. Bless the Japanese and their wonderful titles.
The movie would get a number of different titles depending where it was released. Across the pond in the UK, it was Robo Ninja. My wonderful neighbors to the north got Warlord. Sorry, Canada, you deserved a better title. And here in the States, which is how I came to know it, it was Cyber Ninja but I’m gonna call it by its Japanese title because I’m a loser weeb.
Now, before actually talking about Mirai Ninja itself, I think I need to correct an omission from a previous video. In my video on Guyver: Dark Hero – which I’d also love for you to watch so my beautiful kitty doesn’t starve to death – I neglected to mention the term tokusatsu, which is used in Japanese live-action productions to denote a heavy use of special effects.
Over time, tokusatsu also became a term that applied to a particular style of special effects production, like what is seen in Japanese TV series such as Kamen Rider or the Super Sentai series. And Mirai Ninja is about as pure tokusatsu as you can get. I could watch those exploding sparks over and over again.
Since the game and movie were being produced together, the Mirai Ninja movie was deliberately trying to be as faithful as it could to the arcade game. So much so that the director and co-writer of the film, Keita Amemiya, also worked on the character designs for the game. All of this leads to a movie that couldn’t be more faithful to its video game source material. The first stage of the video game is pretty much directly adapted for the opening credits sequence, and even the music from the game just gets new orchestration for the movie at times.
So the basic story of Mirai Ninja is going to seem very familiar to anyone with even the smallest of familiarity with…
The movie starts with text saying, “Once upon a time, in a distant future…”, there is an evil empire that kidnaps a princess dressed in white, a roguish mercenary is employed to rescue her, there’s an evil emperor that’s big floating head, need I go on? Obligatory statement of “Star Wars was influenced by samurai cinema, specifically Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress” before someone in the comments wants to “Um, actually” me.
The more “not Star Wars” part of the story is about a soldier who dies in the beginning of the movie and is resurrected as a robot ninja by the Dark Overlord’s clan. This is our hero, Shiranui, who is trying to reach the Dark Overlord’s fortress to reclaim his body before it and the princess are used to resurrect the Dark Overlord.
You don’t get much more simple than that, and that is the best thing about Mirai Ninja from a writing perspective. At 75 minutes, it doesn’t overcomplicate itself. As Joe Bob Briggs would say, “There ain’t a lot of plot to get in the way of the story.” This is about robo ninjas and techno baddies shooting lasers and slicing up each other with swords.
Which is the actual best thing about Mirai Ninja. This is pure uncut Saturday morning cartoon craziness rendered in the real world. And it’s just doing exactly what the video game is. It doesn’t need to jam Jack Black into it to make it as widely-appealing as possible. It can reflect and embrace the simplicity of its video game while still managing to tell a functionally melodramatic story about Shiranui thanks to the audience knowing he’s actually the brother of another featured character. It’s nothing new but it works.
And if you’re hung up on the story and characters of Mirai Ninja, you go ahead and pout while I bask in the Edo-style attack walkers and my man, Shoki, the big evil henchman who ends up as the vessel for the resurrected Dark Overlord. He’s got head tentacles that stab you if you try to sneak up on him! Shoki rules.
Shiranui rules. Mirai Ninja fucking rules.
And the only reason more people didn’t feel that way back when Mirai Ninja released in 1988 is because the movie stayed in Japan due to the arcade game not being exported to other countries. It got a home video and English dubbed release in the ‘90s on VHS and a DVD release in Japan in the 2000s, but it hasn’t gotten a loving restoration or better release on Blu-ray.
And it needs to for so many reasons. When people bemoan about “the video game movie curse” that plagued so many adaptations for decades starting with Super Mario Bros., they need to know about Mirai Ninja. The first live-action video game movie wasn’t cursed at all. In fact, it was produced about as well as it could’ve been back in 1988.
Keita Amemiya would go on to direct similar tokusatsu movies like Zeiram, two Kamen Rider movies, and one other film that I 100% will do a video on if this one does well. Since Mirai Ninja was his first theatrical feature, it needs that preservation for his filmography.
And it’s the first live-action video game movie, not Super Mario Bros. That fact alone should grant Mirai Ninja a ton of admiration, respect, and a proper modem home video release for audiences around the globe.
You can find a copy of Mirai Ninja out here in cyberspace, but hopefully we can all look forward to a day where a loving high-definition new version can be made. The first true video game movie deserves nothing less.
Y’all like these kinds of videos about lesser-known flicks or Japanese genre stuff? I love doing ‘em even if nobody else seems to like them, so let me know in the comments and like the video because that’s gonna tell us, “Make more things like this!” Subscribe to the channel and I’ll give my kitty a scritch just for you. Thanks for watching and hope you’ll be back next time here on Giant Freakin Robot.
