Yo! Noid Was a Ninja in a Red Mask First: Buying 仮面の忍者 花丸

A mask that covers the face does two things at once: it hides who you are, and it licenses you to behave in ways you otherwise would not. Venice built an entire carnival on that second half. The Famicom game this article is about puts a red mask on a boy ninja named 花丸 and sends him through a theme park to find missing children — and eight months later, the same game shipped in North America with the mask replaced by a rabbit-eared claymation mascot who sold pizza. Yo! Noid is not a game that resembles 仮面の忍者 花丸. It is that game, wearing a different face. The comparison to Venice is this article's own; no source connects the two, and none is claimed below.

For a buyer, the interesting part is what the Japanese release does not have. Every previous buying guide on this site has turned on a product code — a code that works, a code that returns 404, a code that is one suffix too long. This row has no code at all, and no English title either. There is exactly one way to search for it, and this article measures how well that one way works.

• Yo! Noid (NES, North America, November 1990) is a reskin of 仮面の忍者 花丸 (Famicom, Japan, 16 March 1990), developed by Now Production and published by Capcom
• The conversion changed graphics, sound and presentation: the ninja became The Noid, the hawk weapon became a yo-yo, and the card-based boss battles became pizza-eating contests
• The Kataban catalog holds the Japanese release as M878494 with no product code and no English title — the only field you can search with is the Japanese one
• It is a cartridge, not a Disk System game: the catalog records カセット (ファミリーコンピュータ), 2 megabits, 5,800円 before tax
• Suruga-ya returns 2 listings for 仮面の忍者 花丸 — 1,000円 for the cartridge alone, 3,030円 with a damaged box
• Buyee returns 43 hits for the same query, 41 of which name 花丸 in the title; adding the hardware name makes it worse, not better, which is the opposite of what the handheld guides found

What is Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru?

仮面の忍者 花丸 is a side-scrolling action game released by Capcom for the Famicom on 16 March 1990 and developed by Now Production. The player is 花丸, a boy ninja in a red mask, accompanied by a robot hawk called 鷹丸. The setting is 遊びの島 — “Play Island” — a large leisure park where children have gone missing, and the game is the rescue.

The catalog record is plain enough to quote in full. Row M878494: class GamePackage, platform ファミリーコンピュータ, media カセット (ファミリーコンピュータ), 2M, copyright (c)1990 CAPCOM, published 16 March 1990 by カプコン, 5,800円 (税抜), reading カメンノニンジャハナマル.

Two things there are worth pinning down before you shop. First, this is a cartridge. It is easy to assume a 1990 Capcom title with a mascot-shaped afterlife was a Disk System release, and the catalog is unambiguous that it was not — there is no Disk System record for this game in it at all. Second, the publisher on the box is Capcom and the developer is Now Production, and shop listings will say カプコン. If you search by developer you will find nothing.

The catalog holds one other 仮面の忍者 title, and it is a different property: 仮面の忍者 赤影, 1988, 東映動画. That matters at the shop, because one of the listings you will meet is a two-cartridge lot pairing the two of them.

How did it become Yo! Noid?

The Noid was Domino's Pizza's mascot in the United States — a claymation figure in a red rabbit-eared suit whose job in the advertising was to ruin pizza, so that Domino's could be shown defeating him. Capcom's American arm partnered with Domino's to promote the character, and the vehicle was a game they already had: 仮面の忍者 花丸, released in Japan eight months earlier.

What changed was the surface, thoroughly. The graphics, the sound and the presentation were reworked. 花丸 in his red mask became The Noid in his red suit. The hawk weapon became a yo-yo. The minigames were swapped — the Japanese version has a penguin-whacking game, the American one a “Pizza Crusher” stage. The boss encounters changed form entirely: in 花丸 they are card-based, and in Yo! Noid they are pizza-eating contests. Some stage melodies, the boss-battle music and the clear jingle were replaced.

What did not change was the game underneath. The mechanics carried over. This is why the two versions play as the same game with a different skin, and why a player who knows one will recognise the other immediately despite sharing almost no artwork.

It is also why the mask framing is not merely decorative. The Japanese title is literally “Hanamaru, the Masked Ninja”. The North American release takes a character defined by a mask and swaps the mask for a corporate one — a licensed disguise placed over a game that was already about a boy in a disguise. That is an observation about the two products, not a claim that anyone involved intended the parallel.

Yo! Noid was received unevenly on release; Electronic Gaming Monthly's four reviewers scored it 5, 6, 7 and 4 out of 10. Its long afterlife has been mostly as a curiosity, including a freeware fan sequel, Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void, released on 1 August 2017.

Why doesn't it have a product code?

Because the catalog row simply does not carry one. Row M878494 has no schema:productID field. This is not a formatting problem or a truncation — the field is absent, on a row that otherwise carries the platform, the media type, the ROM size, the price, the publisher, the copyright line and three forms of the title.

It is also not the exception. Counted across the catalog source, 51,827 records are game packages, and only 12,208 of them carry a product code — 39,619 do not. A missing product code is the normal case, at 76.4% of the file.

It is worth resisting the obvious explanation here, because the numbers do not support it. The intuitive story is that cartridge-era releases predate the code formats later hardware standardised, so the Famicom is where the gaps are. Measured, the Famicom is slightly better than average: 1,252 Famicom rows, 889 of them without a code, which is 71% against the file-wide 76.4%. The platforms with the emptiest code fields are recent ones — PlayStation Vita at 99% missing, Nintendo 3DS at 96%, Wii at 97%. And the single largest block of code-less rows, 5,557 of them, has no schema:gamePlatform value either: before you can ask those rows for a product code, you would have to ask them what machine they run on. So the empty field on row M878494 is not an artefact of the game's age, and this article does not explain why it is empty. It reports that it is.

That absence changes what a buying guide can even offer. The previous guides in this vein all had two instruments and could compare them: a product code and a Japanese title, with the interesting question being which one the shop indexes. Here there is one instrument. There is no code to shorten, no -JPN suffix to cut, and — because the catalog carries no English title on this row either — no Latin-letter string to paste into a shop by mistake. The single-instrument case is less forgiving in one specific way: when the only query you have returns something wrong, you have nothing to check it against.

So the question worth measuring is not which query to use. It is how clean the only available query actually is.

How do you search for it at Suruga-ya and Buyee?

These are measured results, not assumptions. Suruga-ya was measured with raw search URLs; Buyee was measured in a real browser against raw search URLs, because Buyee answers a command-line request with HTTP 202 and an empty body.

On Suruga-ya, 仮面の忍者 花丸 returns two listings, both of them the right game and both labelled ファミコンソフト: 仮面の忍者花丸（箱・ジャケット・ケース不備（中））at 3,030円, and 仮面の忍者花丸 (箱説なし) at 1,000円. Note that the shop writes the title without the space the catalog uses, and the query with the space still reaches both — you do not have to guess the spacing.

On Buyee the same query returns 43 hits, 41 of which name 花丸 in the listing title. The two that do not are an eight-cartridge lot sold as a bundle and a rental DVD of a television programme. Cartridge-only listings run from about 1,000 to 1,700円; complete copies with box, manual and registration card sit at 18,000, 25,000, 29,100 and 38,000円. The median across all 43 is 1,580円.

Appending the hardware name does not help here, which is the opposite of what the handheld guides found. 仮面の忍者 花丸 ファミリーコンピュータ returns 41 hits rather than 43 — two fewer, and none gained. The bare title is already specific enough, because 花丸 as a game title has no competition on either shop. Use the title alone.

(箱説なし) is the condition label to read on both shops. It means the box and the manual are not included — the cartridge alone. It is the cheaper Suruga-ya listing, and it is most of what the Buyee result set is made of.

Seven of the 43 Buyee listings are lots rather than single cartridges: a two-game set pairing 花丸 with 仮面の忍者 赤影, a four-game set, and several described as まとめて・大量. Read the listing title before bidding — the search cannot separate these for you.

One warning specific to this game: do not search for it in English. Yo! Noid is the North American cartridge, a different physical product, and typing it into a Japanese shop will either return nothing or return the American release to you. The Japanese title is the only string that reaches the Japanese cartridge, and on this row the catalog does not offer you an English one to be tempted by.

Kamen no Ninja Hanamaru · 仮面の忍者 花丸 · Famicom · 1990 · Capcom · no product code

Where to buy: Suruga-ya.jp (by Japanese title) · Buyee