Ninja Hayate HD Remaster

Ninja Hayate HD Remaster is an interactive anime adventure in which you guide Hayate through a trap-filled castle to rescue a princess kidnapped by an evil ninja clan. He faces attacking ninjas, ninja dogs, zombie samurai, monsters and deadly traps. The game’s visuals have been remastered from the original laser disc release of Taito’s first laser disc game, which first appeared in arcades in 1984.

Story and gameplay

Set in feudal Japan, the story follows Hayate as he sets out alone to infiltrate the clan’s castle and rescue the princess. As in other laser disc games, you watch animated video and respond at key points with joystick or button inputs to advance, or fail and see one of the possible failures. Randomised routes vary the sequence of action across playthroughs.

Game settings

The CONFIG menu lets you set the number of lives per play, difficulty, stage order and on-screen guidance. Stage-order options include ARCADE, with partial random selection; RANDOM-ALL, which randomises every stage except the final three; LD-PATTERN, which presents all 19 stages in fixed order; and AC-PATTERN01~14, each with 10–11 stages in a different preset order.

You can choose whether guidance displays all indicators, only terrain indicators, only buttons and directions, or none. Other settings change the opening movie’s audio, displayed language and screen size. You can also enable extra lives at certain scores, reduce the difficulty after repeated failures at a stage, and continue after losing all lives. Using RESET in the ranking settings deletes saved high-score data.