Ninjas! Everyone's familiar with these dark-clothed assassins, and they've appeared in many, many games. Often taking advantage of their sneaky ways and combat prowess, ninjas tend to show up in many action/adventure titles that usually involve stealth in some way. Notable ninja games include, of course, the Ninja Gaiden games, as well as the Shinobi games and the Tenchu series. They've also appeared in RPGs (especially Japanese ones) and the atmosphere of their games run from deadly serious tales of honor to the somewhat lighter "blow up everything" types. So, indeed, how does one come up with anything new for the genre?
My first idea was to create something like Ultimate Spider-Man or GTA, in which you have a large sprawling city landscape to conceal yourself in, and fulfill various missions which come your way. You'd have a focused main objective which will be fulfilled in a series of important "story" missions, involving the recovery of your ninja clan's most prized treasure from the impressively tall skyscraper HQ of an imperialistic Japanese businessman who unjustly took over your temple and all of its possessions. Other missions would include finding money and allies to help pull off the heist, allowing you to make the decision to follow noble goals (like helping someone escape from a corrupt cop) or less noble ones (assassinate a rival mob boss). You'd get about the city with an array of ninja skills and equipment, similar to Spider-Man webslinging his way from one district to another. But then I figured this or something like it would be getting made soon enough, so I moved onto idea #2.
Idea #2 is a game that's a little more multi-player compatible. It is, in a sense, similar to Counter-Strike or Halo or any of those frag-fest multi-player types. The difference being is that every player is a ninja of a specific clan, and these clans are continually at war with each other for wealth, power or simply to acquire each other's secret powers. Every ninja clan has its own mystical scroll which teaches the senior members of that clan a very specific ninja skill. Players have to decide which clan they want to be a part of based on how efficiently they can use that clan's power when fighting rival ninjas. Another factor is how these powers become enhanced as the player grows stronger, though in the sense of fair-play all other ninjas playing become equally adept in their chosen mystical art.
Some of these ninjas will have stealthy powers, befitting the traditional ninja image: These included limited invisibility while moving (akin to the Predator's light-bending cloaking), the ability to hide in shadows limiting their movement but making them almost impossible to see (advanced players can even use one major shadowed area to warp into another one) and the ability to climb walls and ceilings with ninja ropes to conceal themselves in places players won't expect to find them.
Other ninjas will be more martially-inclined, forgoing the stealth for more firepower. One such clan will be able to use spirit blasts: fireballs that increase in power as the player becomes stronger. Another may be able to wield two weapons at once with equal efficiency for double the chance to hit, or could mystically power up their weapon just before striking for extra damage.
The weaponry would be dated to around 19th century but with several ninja-specific enhancements, allowing for mystically sharp blades and shuriken-shooting crossbows. Ninjas can also throw shurikens and kunai (ninja knives) relatively fast. They are also adept at setting traps involving needles and possibly even explosive materials, which would act as a sort of proximity mines for interlopers in your clan's building or can be set up on the fly for someone to trip.
The one-player version of the game would be somewhat like The Warriors, in that one clan is trying to take over the territories of all the other clans while remaining under the radar to the authorities governing the land. Taking over a clan's territory by eliminating all the ninjas in that area will eventually allow you to take on their base, defeating their leader and recovering their secret power for you to use. At the same time, other clans will be warring against each other using an advanced AI to calculate how well one side is prevailing over the other. If the player keeps his attention focused, he may even be able to discover which clans are currently at war and could take out the weakened clan before their enemy does. Each of these clan battles takes part in an arena based in that region of the country (of Japan, of course, though it may be a fictionalized version), and a player may need to take out opponents in bamboo forests, trap-filled temples or rustic, apparently calm villages full of hiding places. Eventually, you might get one of the Emperor's samurai wandering through the arena, whom are extremely powerful AI opponents and may wipe out any ninjas in the area if they don't skedaddle (creating a sort of time limit). The game may end up with you, as the only remaining ninja clan, taking on the Emperor himself for dominance of the country.
Though such an online system invites campers and the like, it may give players a touch more challenge than usual depending on their opponents. If they wish to just run and gun it and rack up frags like no-one's business, they can do. They can also play to their stealthy strengths and take out the loud obnoxious players as they stumble around without looking around fully. There will be individual servers for both the all-out offensive/martial players and the stealthy players, as well as several servers to accomodate both simultaneously. The inter-clan warfare could end up becoming very interesting considering people make clan-based collectives of non-clan games such as CS anyway, especially if we give players the ability to design their own clan insignia and use it on their ninja uniforms.
Plus, I just think it'd be cool to play as a bunch of ninjas fighting other ninjas. Seems like foolproof awesomeness to me.
