Last Ninja 1

• Read all about the first Last Ninja 1 prototype at Games That Weren't
• Undocumented C64 feature: Use SHIFT +/- to speed up or slow down the game.
• Did you know that when you run past an enemy armed with a sword some of them will commit suicide ?
• You'll be annoyed to find out that the ninja magic you get in the wilderness wears off even while you pause the game! The duration of it is three minutes precisely.
• The game does a 'hack check' on the first timer tick after starting of each fight, so if you modify the number of lives left manually, the game will crash at that point. Update: Or, more likely, it's just John Twiddys copy protection kicking in!
• You can put the enemies to sleep as well using the smoke bomb and the bottle.
• A lot of screens are repeated twice (with almost the same layout) in Palace Gardens.
• Using POKE 687,n will end the level if n is non-zero (Thanks Luigi)
• Like to know more about the disk-transfer protection in LN1+2? In both cases the image registers of CIA 2 timers are used. What this means is that if the game is not loaded from tape, the protection kicks in:
  • For LN the game just hangs when Armakuni is hit.
  • For LN2 the Integrator data pointers are all intentionally corrupted when Armakuni picks up any object. After that the game attempts to use garbage data for graphic operations and things go horribly wrong: to an inexperienced cracker this condition might appear like the crack itself might be missing some required data file from tape or some data files might have been improperly transferred to disk.

Last Ninja 2

• In Central Park the guards need to be beat twice so they stay down, except for the first one. In the City Streets you have to beat the guys three times. Four times in the Sewers and so on... Which means you have to beat the guards in the Mansion seven times if you want them to stay dead! The first guard before the Final Battle will revive forever. You can't kill him.
• You can change the number of lives left by modifying the contents of $924 directly.
• When you stand on beaten enemies after their energy has replenished they can't get up until you move. :)
• All the screens take 2 seconds to complete drawing except the first screen of basement level which takes 3 seconds.
• There are only two points of no return in the game: When you jump across the first river in Central Park (which means you have to restart the game if you've forgotten to pick up the staff) and when you jump inside the building in Mountain Hideaway.
• The only open doors that you can't go through are in level 2.
• The only one-way door in the game is the blue door in The Sewers.
• Cheat for Spectrum version:"When fighting: as you throw punches and kicks, keep tapping the pause too (so to play the game in a pseudo slo-motion). When timed correctly (I believe it is the simultaneous action of Pause+Enemy's Energy Loss), the enemy dies with a single hit. It will definitely shorten battles!"
• Using POKE 687,n will end the level if n is non-zero (Thanks Luigi)
• Like to know more about the disk-transfer protection in LN1+2? In both cases the image registers of CIA 2 timers are used. What this means is that if the game is not loaded from tape, the protection kicks in:
  • For LN the game just hangs when Armakuni is hit.
  • For LN2 the Integrator data pointers are all intentionally corrupted when Armakuni picks up any object. After that the game attempts to use garbage data for graphic operations and things go horribly wrong: to an inexperienced cracker this condition might appear like the crack itself might be missing some required data file from tape or some data files might have been improperly transferred to disk.
• Slowdown Poke for enemies in Level 1: Use POKE 41926,S where S is the slowness with which they react to Armakuni’s movements. The default is 4 so for an appreciably easier life you can set S to 9, or if you really want enemies rather slow to react to changes you can push it to e.g. 20.
  The only thing to bear in mind is that the less reactive they get, the easier it will be for Armakuni to perform an evasive action, however enemies will use shurikens a lot more if Armakuni flees all the time: in other words, keep them close while you fool them. :)
  (taken from Luigis Blog)

Last Ninja 3

• You can change the number of lives left by modifying the contents of $1D directly, but you have to set it back to (LevelNumber+5) or less before entering the last building or the game will crash as soon as you start the fight with the guard.
• In some disks of LN3 you had to use the bellows to move the lilypads in the water level.
• In the same disks as above, because of a bug in the game, after getting one 'Game Over' in the fire level, you would lose the bellows, so you had no other choice but to restart the game from the first level.
• Here's a cheat for the Amiga version: Gather over 600 points and in the hall of fame entry type: ILLBEBACK - This should give you infinte lives and with F1 and other buttons you can skip levels.
• CD32 version level codes: SUSS, IMED, VRTI (or URTI), BASD, NVOS, REOO (or RERO)
  For unlimited lives immediately press top left + top right + blue as the game begins to load.
• Level Skip Cheat, found in 2013 by Luigi DiFraia:
  You can skip to the next level by doing the following movements with your joystick:
  left, down, right, fire, down, right, up, fire, up, right, down, fire, right, down, up, right, fire
  The message “CHEATS SELDOM PROSPER” will appear, the Bushido power will boost to its maximum and Armakuni will jump straight to the next level, where he will also have a few weapons in his inventory.