The Ninja clan
"Silent, quick, never where you expect." is how the clan screen sums up the Ninjas, and the animations take it literally: both Shadow step and the Thousand Shadows ultimate end with the Ninja standing behind the defender.
Drawn in the same ink as the board
Every Ninja is a single figure of near-black ink from head to foot. The only light marks are a white headband, whose two tails trail behind the head as the figure moves, and two small dots for eyes. There is no belt colour, no armour and no weapon in hand, so the silhouette does all the work. On the notebook-paper board that makes Ninjas easy to pick out from the high Board view, and on the minimap in the corner their discs are the darkest of the eight clans.
The twelve fighters on an 8×8 board are named after what a pen leaves behind or the tools that make it: Kage, Nib, Smudge, Quill, Blot, Splotch, Scrawl, Kuro, Loop, Serif, Swash and Dash. Kage and Kuro are Japanese for shadow and black. The names show up in the fight HUD, in the narration line and in the highlight replay. On the 10×10 International board each side fields twenty fighters, so the extra eight reuse names from the list with a suffix added: II, Jr., the Second or Two. A second Kage, for example, can turn up as Kage Jr.
Three finishers, three distances
Shadow step comes first on the clan screen. The Ninja crouches, then blinks forward through five fading afterimages to a spot just behind the defender and freezes in a slash pose while speed lines streak past. For roughly three quarters of a second nothing seems to happen. Then the cut lands with a SHHK!, and the narration spells out the delay: "Kage steps through the shadows. Mochi drops a beat later."
Shuriken storm keeps its distance. The Ninja steps back and throws three small stars in quick succession; each one sparks on contact and makes the defender flinch. The fourth throw is a single large star sent spinning in slow motion, and that is the one that finishes it (THWIP!).
Dragon kick is the acrobatic option: a crouch and a puff of dust, then a slow-motion leaping spin kick, one full rotation with a ghost trail behind it, straight into the defender (WHAM!). Of the three it is the only one that throws the knocked-out figure noticeably further across the board, which is the only sense in which any finisher "hits harder" in this game.
Thousand Shadows
A Ninja earns the ultimate the way every clan does: by reaching the far row and being crowned a master. Thousand Shadows begins with the attacker simply disappearing. Six translucent ink copies then pop in one after another, spaced in a ring around the defender. The game drops into slow motion as the ring closes, and the real Ninja reappears behind the defender in the slash pose while the clones fade out in under half a second. The comic word gets an extra letter for the occasion: SHHHK! instead of SHHK!
When a Ninja is the one captured
Knockouts belong to the clan that loses the fight, so this is what you see when your own Ninjas are being taken. The figure is squashed flat in less than a fifth of a second, SPLAT! appears, six ink splats spray around the spot and extra stains are left on the paper. Every other clan ends as paper in some form, crumpled, torn or folded; the Ninja ends as spilled ink.
Ninjas on the badminton court
In badminton the clan keeps its tricks. Shadow Step (3 uses per power window) arms a blink: on the next chase the Ninja jumps straight to where the shuttle is heading. Smoke Bomb (4 uses) throws an ink cloud onto the opponent's side every time you press it, and the smoke thickens as you stack them, so a full window of clouds makes their half of the court hard to read.
The badminton Thousand Shadows comes with its tell printed in the menu: "Ten shots fly. Only the real one casts a shadow." When it fires, the real shot and nine decoys leave the racket together and a ×10 pops up at the point of contact. The decoys fly to spots spread around the court, so on the receiving end the answer is on the floor, not in the air: follow the shadow.
Played by the computer, Ninjas lean on drop shots more than any other clan and like to aim for the sidelines. They also share the quickest acceleration in the game with the Storm Ninjas, and that part applies to you as well when you pick them.
Should you pick Ninjas?
Pick Ninjas if you enjoy fights that land on a delay and want your side to be the dark one on a light board. If your opponent takes the Storm Ninjas you get two clans that dash behind their target; the purple gi and the lightning streak tell them apart.