“Keep shooting him until his hair turns red!” Shoto told me.
I did as he instructed, and after seven or eight hits, Ninniku’s hair turned from blond to red—apparently to indicate his rising anger. Then the gameplay froze and Step 1 ended. The game tallied up my points, along with my total number of shots and hits and my overall hit ratio. The map of the kingdom popped up again, revealing that by clearing the first level, I’d moved slightly closer to the castle at the top. Then the next level began.
Step 2 required me to fight more ninjas while wading through rice paddies. When I battled my way to its end, Ninniku appeared once again, and once again I attacked him until his hair turned red, signaling his defeat.
Shoto continued to coach me, but Aech remained quiet, except to shout warnings or congratulate me on a nice move.
Shoto referred to Step 3 as the “avalanche level,” because it required you to battle ninjas while also dodging giant boulders that were continuously appearing from the top of the screen. It required a completely different strategy from the first two levels, and I lost my first life figuring that out. Then I lost another life during Step 4, where Princess Kurumi spent the entire level fighting off packs of ravenous wolves. It was a truly great game, and it was also kicking my ass. Now I only had one life left, and my confidence started to waver.
I found myself wishing there was a way Shoto could play through the trickier levels for me, but that was impossible. Tricks like hacked OASIS haptic rigs and illegal software, which had allowed Sorrento to take control of any of the avatars under his command, were obsolete now. None of them worked with ONI headset technology. I was on my own.
Thankfully, I hit my stride again during the next level, Step 5, which was set in a dense forest of bulbous 8-bit trees, concealing wave after wave of what Shoto referred to as “Keebler Ninjas.” I managed to earn back one of the lives I’d lost.
Step 6 was set on a roaring river, which the player had to cross by leaping from log to log like in Frogger, while battling more ninjas along the way. When I reached the other side, Ninniku appeared once again, hurling his boomerang at me from the riverbank until I landed enough hits to defeat him.
As I played, I noticed something odd about the music playing on the arcade’s jukebox. The same three songs kept playing, over and over. “Obsession” by Animotion, then “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield, followed by “My Best Friend’s Girl” by the Cars. It was easy to see the connection. All of these songs could’ve been about Halliday’s obsession with Kira—his best friend’s girl. And, I realized, I could be reliving the moment his obsession began.
I pulled my mind back to the game. I was now in the seventh stage, which took place in the streets of the village outside the castle walls. Shoto referred to the oddly dressed enemies I encountered here as “Pastel Ninjas,” because many of them appeared to be wearing turquoise tunics and pink pantaloons. I had to battle several “Clown Samurai” who wore red-striped Hammer pants that made them look like walking circus tents with swords. Once I defeated all of them, I cleared that level too. Seven down. Nine to go. Almost halfway there…
Shoto referred to Step 8 as the “stampede stage,” because you spent the entire level trying not to get trampled by an endless string of horses stampeding across the screen, while fighting off more Pastel Ninjas, who miraculously never seemed to get trampled even once. The lucky bastards.
At some point, a small crowd of onlookers began to form around me—the NPCs who’d been playing on the other machines, I assumed. And the longer I played, the bigger the crowd sounded. I didn’t turn around to do a head count, but I caught brief, warped glimpses of them in the lenses of my mirror shades, during the pause in gameplay at the end of each level, when my score and hit count was tallied and I was given a brief view of my progress toward the castle on the map. I tried to put them out of my mind, too, so that I could remain focused on the task at hand.
Ninja Princess was a strangely nonviolent action game. There was no blood or gore in it at all. Or killing. When Princess Kurumi got hit, she would just fall down and cry. The Puma Ninja clan members and bosses didn’t collapse and die when they were dispatched. They just vanished in a puff of smoke. When I asked Shoto about it, he told me it was a conscious choice by the game’s creators, to promote pacifism and nonviolence.
“Wow,” Aech said. “A nonviolent game about killing people with knives. Genius.”
“Shh!” Shoto whispered. “Let the man concentrate!”