N+ would have been great, if its soul hadn't been ripped out...
What's interesting about N+ is the distinction that the game draws between games that are dumbed-down and games that are stripped. Neither terms hold particularly positive connotations and tend to bring to mind images of shovelware targeted heavily at stupid parents of four-year-old children, or pornography (at least with regards to the second distinction). Dumbed-down games suck; I won't argue with that. But N+ shows that if you've got a good basic formula under all the bells and whistles, your game will be just fine without all the nifty little accoutrements.
N+ is almost insultingly simple and in a time where we appreciate beautiful, detailed visuals N+ stands out starkly. There's next-to-no color in the entire game and your basic actions are running and jumping. That's it. You can't defeat foes, and the trappings of modern-day platformers are nowhere to be found. It's a simple, stripped, pure title and offers a sense of fun that will remind you why you first loved gaming.
That said, there are some significant issues with this title's design. If you've played the flash version of N+, you'll likely acknowledge that what's fun about it is the trial and error approach to platforming. You always know what to do: hit the switch and get to the door before time runs out. It's simple. But the levels were so well-designed that each episode was brilliant and fresh. And once you threw in the threat of enemies and environmental obstacles, you had a really tricky, mind-bending but intuitive platformer.
Well, the DS version of N+ throws that out the window and takes an entirely different approach to platforming. It may seem a bit subtle, but if you've played the flash version it will become apparent. Rather than have an approach on adrenaline-rushing platforming and foe-evasion, the handheld version of this game feels more like a puzzle title than a platformer. The focus here is less on actual completion of each level and more on how exactly you'd go about that completion.
So I'm left wondering: did the developers even really know what made their game fun to begin with? The flash version was awesome, but then the dev team decides it would be a good idea to disregard all the great things the free version did and create a different game with the same name and sell it for twenty bucks. It's almost like they were looking for something to distinguish their game from the flash version, and as a result fundamentally changed how N+ plays.
That said, there's still a lot to love about N+ especially for anybody who grew up with older systems and simpler games. It can be mind-bendingly difficult, but it's not a difficulty that I particularly prefer. You're left trying to use the game's sometimes-nonsensical physics engine to get your ninja across seemingly-impassable obstacles. But even with problems like this, there are occasions where you'll experience that same, unadulterated fun that the flash version offered. The combination of careful planning and spontaneous, split-second decision making that characterizes N+ makes it a lot to fun and flaws are easier to overlook because of it.
On a roll with taking good stuff and making it suck, the development team behind the DS version of N+ also botched the level editor. This was a pretty significant aspect of the free version and building your own levels really represented what this game was all about: variety. There were so many different freaking ideas that you could literally play this game forever and never get bored (frustrated, yes. But never bored). Well, the interface downright sucks for this level editor and while it's great to be able to share levels online and create your own arenas for ninja-destruction, it's hard to get it to work right. The editor is unintuitive and hard to use.
And seeing how the game only has forty episodes, each with five different levels, it would certainly work in the game's favor to make it easier to create and share user-created content. It's a pretty short game and despite the emphasis on playing through puzzle-like levels, it's not difficult to the caliber that you might expect. I really wish that the dev team had just made an N+ that was the N+ I knew and loved. But when you tinker with a perfectly functional machine you're liable to screw it up, and sadly I get the sense that's what happened here. N+ is still a solid platformer, but it could have been a hell of a lot better.