Ninja Dash Guide: How to Play, Tips, and Tricks for the Cozy Tokyo Runner
Ninja Dash is a cozy 3D endless runner, in the spirit of lane runners like
Subway Surfers and Temple Run. A little ninja cat (or dog) dashes through the streets of Tokyo on a spring
day, under cherry blossoms, paper lanterns and torii gates. It runs on its own and keeps
getting faster: your job is to switch lanes, jump and slide past everything in the way, and
collect as many onigiri as you can before you run out of lives.
There's no one chasing you and nothing to fight. The light theme is a pink spring afternoon,
with Mount Fuji on the horizon, and the dark theme is Tokyo at night, when the shop signs and
lanterns light up.
How to Play Ninja Dash
The street has three lanes. Press Run, or Space, and the ninja starts running.
- Change lanes with the left and right arrows, or A and D.
- Jump with the up arrow, W or Space. A jump pressed just before landing still happens.
- Slide with the down arrow or S. In the air, it drops the ninja down fast and slides on landing.
- On a phone or a tablet, swipe left, right, up or down.
Obstacles
- Traffic cones and barriers: jump over them.
- Paper lanterns (chōchin) and shop curtains (noren) hung across a lane: slide under them. Jumping into them from the street is a crash, but from a roof you can jump over them, or land on top of their frame and run across.
- Cars and taxis block their lane. Change lanes, or jump on their roof and run across it.
- Food trucks are too tall to climb: go around them.
- Some vehicles and streetcars are parked, others drive toward you down their lane, head first, as fast as you run on Hard, faster on Very Hard. They get there sooner than you'd think, and there are more of them the further you run and on Hard.
- Streetcars, like the old Toden trams of Tokyo, are too tall to jump on. Some have a wooden ramp in front: run up it and along the roof, and switch lanes up there to hop over to the streetcar next to it. Sometimes streetcars fill every lane and the ramp is the only way through. Streetcars without a ramp drive toward you too, sometimes two side by side: get into the one lane left, and jump or slide past whatever is in it.
- Trains run on the railway, its tracks for lanes. Parked trains are long roofs to keep running along. Often, while you're still on a roof, long trains come driving toward you one after the other: each in the track next to the last, alongside only its last cars, or coupled behind it. Hop from roof to roof across the tracks before the end, following the onigiri. Beside a ramp, a train drives toward you too: hop over onto its roof and run along it. No cars or trucks there, but trains without a ramp drive toward you: get off their track.
Lives
The ninja has three lives, shown as hearts at the top of the screen. Running
into an obstacle costs one: the obstacle is knocked out of the way, the ninja slows down and
blinks for two seconds, and nothing can hurt it while it blinks. The run ends when the last
heart is gone (in Endless mode, it can go on: see below).
Running into the side of a car while changing lanes doesn't cost a life: the ninja bounces
back to its lane and slows down for a moment. Every row of obstacles always leaves at least
one lane you can get through, by changing lanes, jumping or sliding.
Endless Mode
Turn on Endless under the difficulties for a run that doesn't have to end. When
the last life is lost, the ninja lies there and two buttons come up. Continue,
Space or Enter, and the ninja does a substitution, the classic ninja trick: a puff of smoke,
and where it lay there's only a log of wood. It's back a few meters on, with all three lives,
and the run goes on. Stop, or Escape, ends the run there.
Endless runs have their own stats and leaderboards.
Onigiri and Power-Ups
Rice balls (onigiri) line the lanes, arc over cones and sit on car roofs. Each one is worth 5
points and rings a little bell as the ninja grabs it, a note higher for each one in a row. A
row sometimes ends in a treat, floating in a glowing ring:
- Dango (sweet rice dumplings on a stick): worth 3 onigiri.
- Sushi: worth 5 onigiri.
Now and then a power-up floats in a glowing ring too:
- Vacuum cleaner: for 10 seconds the ninja holds it out in front and sucks in every onigiri and treat nearby, from every lane.
- Katana: for 8 seconds the ninja runs with its katana held out, and cuts to pieces anything it runs into.
Score and Difficulty
Your score is one point per meter, plus the points of the onigiri, plus a few for your moves:
1 for jumping over a cone or a barrier, 2 for jumping onto a car or a taxi, 2 for sliding
under lanterns or a shop curtain, 2 for taking every onigiri of a long row, 1 for cutting
something with the katana, and 4 for cutting a vehicle driving at you. Bumping
into the side of a vehicle takes 2 off. The street speeds up and
the obstacles get closer together the longer you run. Easy starts slower,
with more room between the rows; Hard starts fast and gets dense quickly. Very Hard is faster still, with fuller rows closer together and fewer
power-ups along the way.
Each difficulty has its own stats and leaderboard.
Characters and Colors
Before a run, pick the difficulty above the Run button. Two round buttons on the left open the
settings and the characters. Pick who runs in the characters card, behind the button with its face:
- Ninja Cat: a little cat with pointy ears and big round eyes.
- Ninja Dog: a little dog with floppy ears, its headband tied behind.
Both wear a ninja robe and a headband, and draw a katana only when they pick one up. Under the
character, three tabs change how it looks:
- Fur: real cat and dog coats. The cat can be black, an orange tabby, gray, white,
Siamese (with a dark face, ears and paws), calico (mike-neko in Japan, said to bring luck),
tuxedo (hachiware, split between the eyes) or a brown tabby. The dog can be black, golden, a
beagle, a dalmatian, a German shepherd, a Shiba Inu with its cream cheeks, a husky, or a
caramelo, the caramel stray dog of every street in Brazil.
- Clothing (the robe) and Band (the headband and the red of the gear): the
same sixteen traditional Japanese colors for both, so they can always match, like Kon
(indigo), Sakura (cherry blossom pink), Matcha (green tea), Yamabuki (golden yellow) and Fuji
(wisteria).
The black fur, and Sumi (charcoal) and Aka (red) for the clothing and the headband, are free.
The others are bought with onigiri: every onigiri you collect, with
either character, goes into one purse. Tap one in the menu to try it on, then buy it if you
like it. The rarer coats, like the calico cat or the caramelo dog, cost the most.
Tips and Tricks
- Look ahead, not at the ninja. Plan your lane two rows in advance, especially once the street speeds up.
- Take the high road. Onigiri often line a ramp and the streetcar roof after it, and up there nothing is in the way until the end of the streetcar. Jump just before the end of a roof to land on the next one.
- Use the car roofs. Jumping on a car is often faster than changing lanes, and there are onigiri up there.
- Slide out of a jump. If lanterns come up while you're in the air, press slide to drop down and slide under them.
- Follow the onigiri. Trails show a safe way through a row: on the street, over a cone, or onto a roof.
- Charge with the katana. While it is in hand, run straight through cars and cones instead of dodging, and keep your lane full of onigiri.
- Use the blink. Right after losing a life, nothing can hurt the ninja for two seconds: grab the onigiri in the next row without worrying about the obstacles.
A Walk Through Tokyo
The run goes through five kinds of streets, over and over. The shopping street (shōtengai) has wooden townhouses (machiya) selling ramen, sushi, tea and dango, convenience
stores (konbini) open all night, vending machines on every corner, beckoning cats
(maneki-neko) by the doors, daruma dolls, red post boxes and carp streamers (koinobori). The shrine path runs under a tunnel of red torii gates, like Fushimi Inari in
Kyoto, past stone lanterns, bamboo groves and the fox statues of Inari shrines. The countryside (satoyama) is a country road between rice paddies with
scarecrows, thatched farmhouses (minka), pine trees, garden ponds with arched bridges and
little roadside shrines with jizo statues, and the road crosses a river on a bridge with red
railings. The neon district has tall buildings with glowing signs, like Shibuya and
Shinjuku, and 止まれ ("stop") is painted on the road before
the crosswalks. Past a level crossing (fumikiri) with its striped barriers and red lamps, the railway runs between the backs of apartment blocks under overhead wires, its
commuter trains in the colors of their lines, through a station with a canopy over its
platforms.
Credits
The fox statues, the vehicles, the food, the trees, the rocks, the footbridges and the torii gates are low poly
models by Quaternius,
released under CC0. The ninja cat and the ninja dog are models from CGTrader, rigged to move like Quaternius' ninja. The buildings, the rice paddies
and the street details are made for the game.
Sound Effects Credits
The sound effects used on the game come from multiple parties. The credits and
respective licenses are listed below:
Disclaimer
This game is a property of Lofi and Games. All code and assets are protected and must
not be redistributed or used without prior permission.