I decided to give this game a shot. In a lot of ways, it's kind of like NES Batman, except that the default weapon is a sword instead of a fist. My
Stage 1 WIP can be found here. The rom I'm using was Labeled Ninja Spirit (J).gb, although I'm not really sure if it actually is Japanese, because most everything is in english.
A little bit about the game. The game has seven stages, each with a boss to defeat at the end. There are four weapons: Sword, Shuriken, Bomb, and Sickle-and-Chain. Each weapon can be powered up by having the weapon selected while grabing the power-up. If the weapon it already powered up, one of the other weapons will be powered up instead.
Power-ups only drop from certain enemies (in stage one, they are the flashing enemies hanging from the walls). Moreover, where they appear and which power-up they drop seems to be hard-coded (think Mario Bros. question mark bricks, in enemy form). Another power-up is a shadow ninja, which follows your path exactly and does the same moves you do. There is another powerup which destroys all enemies on the screen for about three seconds.
The first part of the stage is pretty straight forward. I make sure to power-up both my Sword and my Shurikens, and to get the shadow ninja. At the end of the stage, there are enemies jumping out of well-like structures. You don't even have to kill any, just wait for a certain amount to appear. However, the game only allows 3 to be on the screen at a time. By killing at least one before a fourth wants to appear, you can make it progress a lot faster (about 300 frames faster than not killing any at all). As for the boss battle, I realize the method I'm using is rather boring, but I guarantee that it is the fastest possible. The only part of the statue that is vulnerable is the head region. I'm actually not even doing any damage, only my shadow is. Every frame the the statue is white, it is taking damage. Were I to jump, or move at all, my shadow would move down to where I am, and would stop dealing damage.
Important to note, is that this is the only boss battle like this (no other bosses are stationary). I'd like to get some feedback as to whether this game is interesting enough to continue TASing. Since it's only seven stages long, I can't imagine the final movie running much over 15 minutes.