I made it to Step 9, which was a battle through the stone courtyard surrounding Kanten Castle’s outermost wall, followed by Step 10, which required you to scale that wall while fighting off dozens of expert-climber “Spider Ninjas.”
Step 11 required me to fight my way down a lone stone walkway through the castle grounds. Step 12 was another wall-scaling level, identical to Step 10, but with the color scheme changed. When I reached the top of this second wall, I faced Ninniku one final time, dispatching him for good.
“Boom!” Shoto shouted triumphantly as I completed the level. “You took out Ninniku! You’re almost to the castle!”
Shoto was right. Step 13 required me to fight my way through more ninjas and samurai, making my way up a long stone path that led to the castle steps. When I reached those steps, the main villain, Zaemon Gyokuro, finally appeared and started shooting at me with a pair of ball-and-shot pistols. When I managed to hit him enough times, the level ended. And then I finally made it back into Kanten Castle—my former home, now overrun with usurping Pastel Ninja dipshits.
Step 14 required me to battle my way into the castle, by running under ladder walkways suspended on pylons before I had to fight Zaemon once again. Then I continued on to Step 15, where I had to make my way into the castle’s inner chambers, through a series of washitsu, Japanese-style rooms with walls made of translucent paper.
When at last I reached Step 16, I finally got to face off with Zaemon and his minions in the castle throne room. I lunged forward into the final boss battle, with Aech and Shoto both shouting advice in my ear and cheering me on, like my own personal Mickey Goldmill and Paulie Pennino.
Luckily I’d picked up a few more lives in the last ten levels, because it took all of them to defeat Zaemon. Finally, I had reached the end of the game. But it was a strange ending. Even though they were supposed to be dead, Ninniku and Zaemon both reappeared, standing on a stage inside the castle alongside Princess Kurumi herself. Shoto told us the game’s lead designer, Yoshiki Kawasaki, had chosen this ending to imply that the events depicted in the game were just a stage play that had been acted out for the player’s benefit. No one had actually been hurt.
After the game’s characters finished their curtain call, the following text appeared on the screen:
CONGRATULATIONS!
THE PRINCESS HAS COMPLETED
HER ADVENTURE AND REGAINED
THE KANTEN CASTLE
A huge cheer erupted from the boys gathered around me, but I didn’t turn around right away. I still had one life remaining, so the game had started over again at the beginning of the first level, and I kept playing to see if Kurumi’s “imposter” was going to appear. After a minute of nothing more than the familiar color-blind ninjas, I let my one remaining life expire. GAME OVER appeared on the screen and I was prompted to enter my initials for the high-score list. I started to put in my own out of habit, but then I remembered who I was supposed to be and entered “K.R.U.” instead, for Karen Rosalind Underwood.
When the list of high scores appeared, I discovered that my score of 365,800 points put me only in second place on the list of “specialists.” The person in first had racked up a score of 550,750, outscoring me by over 200,000 points. They appeared to be sharper than me, too, because they’d entered the initials “K.R.A.” beside their score—the three-letter signature Kira Underwood had used on videogame high-score lists, instead of her initials. I’d failed to recall this obscure piece of trivia until I saw it in front of me. But my predecessor had not.
That was when I realized I was looking at Ogden Morrow’s score. Which made perfect sense. Og had completed this challenge earlier today. Just a few hours ago. And judging by his score, he was much better at Ninja Princess than I would ever be. Either that, or he’d kept on playing after he beat the final level and the game started over at the beginning again, to rack up those extra points. But why would he do that? Was he trying to match Kira’s real high score? Had I just screwed up somehow?
I snapped a screenshot of the high-score list so that I could examine it later. Then I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and nearly jumped out of my skin.
I turned to see a young Ogden Morrow smiling at me.
Og looked like he was around sixteen years old. About the same age he was when he met Kira for the first time—at a local arcade, when she moved to Middletown in the summer of 1988.
No wonder this setting and the scenario I was acting out both felt so familiar. I’d read about it seven or eight years earlier, in Ogden Morrow’s bestselling autobiography, Og. Unlike Halliday’s blog and diary entries in Anorak’s Almanac, Og’s recollections were infuriatingly vague when it came to details, but in the second or third chapter of the book, he described meeting his future wife for the first time, on the last day of summer vacation before his junior year of high school. He’d described how an “unbelievably gorgeous girl, with short dark hair and beautiful blue eyes,” had wandered into “one of the local arcades,” where he watched from a distance as “she beat one of the toughest games there on a single quarter.”