The Black Manta is one bad mother fucker. When he's not warning kids about the dangers of drugs or saving them from evil drug pushers, he's slitting some bastards throat with his short sword or slicing thier gut open with a shuriken. He's definately the baddest ninja on the NES. And Wrath of the Black Manta is a damn cool NES game, in part because it's a good game, but mostly because of the cheese factor. It, basically, is one huge gigantic ripoff. It manages to rip off everything imaginable. It obviously rips everything straight from Ninja Gaiden, trying to cash in on the popularity of ninja games in the late 80's. It rips from Karate Kid, bad anti-drug commercials, anything and everything. The cut scenes are so blaringly bad and uninspiring that it's fucking hilarious! I was playing this game with a few friends one day and we laughed our asses off for hours, and even now when I see one of them they're liable to mention WOTBM. The Black Manta, on his quest to rescue a bunch of kids, can grab ahold of enemies and interrogate them, and some of the conversations are just so funny they should be banned. Not intentionally funny, but much in the same way that the title screen from Bad Dudes is hilarious. The character art is so bad, you will shit your pants. There are rumors that all of the character art was stolen from a "how to draw" book written by a Marvel comics guy and Taito was sued extensively. I don't know if there's any truth to that, but I wouldn't doubt it, whoever drew this crap certainly NEEDED a how-to-draw book.

The game screams with 80's logic. The gigantic underground legion of bad guys, D.R.A.T. (dont ask me what it stands for) has kidnapped a couple thousand kids from New York and are brainwashing them to turn them into drug addicts. Give me a break, like they needed to do that. I'm sure there were enough kids in NY willing to be drug addicts for them, if they just looked, instead of making thier own junkies. Who do they think they are, the U.S. Government? It seems like there was some big collaboration between Nancy Reagan and Taito. When the Black Manta rescues a kid, sometimes he'll give them some tips about staying off drugs. "Yeah, thanks Black Manta, I've just been kidnapped, beaten and thrown in a cage, what I really need right now is a few life lessons".

Black Manta can earn more and more ninja arts as he goes along, you know, the basic ninja stuff, such as the Art of the Missile and the Art of Ground Fire. There's a lot of secret rooms to find, and a lot of the time when you rescue a kid they'll tell you how to access them. "Oh yeah by the way, while I was being mamed and tortured I noticed a room with an invisible door, you should check it out Black Manta, I'll bet throwing 2 ninja stars at the wall will open it up, don't ask me how I know that I just know". The Black Manta does a lot of cool stuff in this game such as flying on a towel in level 2, it would kick so much ass if you could use a towel to fly like that in real life!

Call me crazy but I think Wrath of the Black Manta is a damn cool game. It has a special place in my NES collection. I have so many memories of borrowing it as a kid then getting up to the last boss, when everyone else thought the game was hella tough. Then years and years later I have memories of playing it again and laughing my ass off. Plus this game is what got me into the online NES community in the first place, after I resorted to looking on the internet for how to beat the last boss and from there found all of these other sites. Wrath of the Black Manta is but a metaphor of our own lives, really. When riding your towel through the warehouses of life, you just got to face up to the men in red, and overcome them, and get useless information off of them, so you can learn the Art of the Missile, and.... Aww just forget it and look at the pretty pictures.

The Black Manta holds the enemies at knife point, I'm tellin ya', he's a badass mutha.

That bastard! He's rattin' em out!

Damn black Manta! Don't pry into peoples personal lives when you're interrogating them.

The first boss. No comment needed.

"Even though the city is really counting on you and you need all of your ninja arts, I'm going to play a little game where I only give you two arts at a time after you kick a bunch of peoples' ass. HA HA!"

No one's figured it out yet but towels can easily take the place of hang gliders.