For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to zagato blackfist's Inindo: Way Of The Ninja (Super NES) maps.
The year is 1582, and the demonic warlord Oda Nobunaga has destroyed your village. As an Iga ninja seeking to avenge your clan, you must travel across feudal Japan. But the path to killing Nobunaga is not an easy one. It could take years, yet you only have until the year 1601 to complete your quest. And being a ninja is not a lonely existence - here, you will need to earn the trust of a number of different allies, to have them aid you in battle and survive maze-like dungeons.
Inindo: Way Of The Ninja is different from many other Super NES RPGs. It's a bit less fantastical, taking place in feudal Japan, though a fictionalized version of it. It's less linear than more story-heavy RPGs, and has a very large number of recruitable characters, but you have to earn their trust first, usually by talking to them at inns and tea houses. Turn-based battles take place, as you would expect, but in this game your position on the battlefield is important, so you will be moving around a lot. Fighting for or against certain daimyo can affect these feudal lords' possession of provinces, which affect your progress. And there are two different storyline paths, and the one you are on is determined upon exiting the first cave, the Password Dungeon. So there are a few things that make this game unique.
The various floors of any dungeon, however, are not so unique from each other in design, and there tends to be a sameness across the levels of any particular cave or mountain. Without help, you will most definitely get lost in these mazes - good thing zagato blackfist has taken on this game. In fact, he has mapped this once before in 2010, but redid these maps in 2019, consolidating the floors per dungeon and providing lots of information. Sure, there's the usual treasure contents in dungeons and the price lists of town shops, but also, the times there are differences based on which storyline you are on are indicated. Here at VGMaps.com we value improvement, and so it's good to see when someone takes the time to perfect their work. Thanks twice over, zagato!
So to recognize the effort put into mapping out the way of the ninja, zagato blackfist's Inindo: Way Of The Ninja (Super NES) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for March 2019.
