2026/05: Ninja Five-O (GBA) - Spanettone

[JonLeung]

Ninja Five-O

For this month's "Maps Of The Month" featurette, I wish to draw your attention to Spanettone's Ninja Five-O (GBA) maps.

Known as "Ninja Cop" in Europe, Ninja Five-O is a platformer that might remind you of old-school ninja action games like the Shinobi series.  Besides jumping around, Joe Osugi will have to utilize stealthy approaches and master combat skills to make his way through 20 stages.

Spanettone, a GBA mapping veteran, has laid all those stages out here, with items and hostages labelled in all of the rooms so you can survive all these missions that will take you from the Bank all the way to the Base.

This game received rave reviews at the time, but didn't sell well. It has since become very sought-after, with the GBA cartridge now going for hundreds of dollars on eBay.  Its delayed appreciation made way for its rerelease last year, for the PS4, PS5, Switch, and PC, so that more gamers can appreciate it, despite the original version's rarity.

So to recognize the effort put into mapping this coveted classic, Spanettone's Ninja Five-O (GBA) maps will be known as VGMaps.com's Maps Of The Month for May 2026.

[VGCartography]

Loved this one, I wish I'd kept my cart from back then... 

Lovely maps!

[Cyartog959]

Really nice to see that game receive the Maps of the Month honor, and I'm very sorry it didn't sell well for the GBA version.

It's a very nice game, even though the maps are very... well, short and small, not that I'm complaining, because I'm well fond of long/large maps, and try to gradually adapt as I find and play through another one when able.

Guess the staff didn't utilize some more extra size space in it to make them reasonably long or large, even with their hardware already more than strong enough to create such large stage maps.

Perhaps when more people buy it, thanks to LRG's re-release, and look up on its maps to get by, maybe they'll understand and appreciate it more to warrant a sequel with more longer stages and plenty more challenges to overcome... at least, we can hope.

Well, at least, Spanettone put effort into mapping that underappreciated game, and that mapper has our thanks.