Ninja Legends Scoring System

This post is about scoring! The scoreboards are starting to fill up, and we've received a few questions about scoring works. So here we are. The image provides a good summary, and here's restatement of it in text. How is the score calculated?

Score Formula

+ Time Component + Quality Component + Block Component - Damage Received Total Score

Time Component

This one is straightforward. Faster is better. Each second that ticks off will cost me 200 points.

Quality Component

This category has a great deal of depth, and I will only scratch the surface here.

One sentence version

The more damage you deal, the higher your score will be.

Longer version

Each enemy type has an assigned amount of health and to defeat them you have to deal damage >= health. The key here for scoring is that you can deal more damage to an enemy than they have health and that differential while unnecessary for beating the level does count towards your score. How is damage calculated though? It's a combination of hitting the enemy in the right place and delivering a high quality strike. Defining a high quality strike is the part of this that could go on for many pages, but here we will say that it's mostly intuitive. If I swing or stab my weapon with good speed and proper angles and treat it like its real world counterpart, I'll deliver a high quality strike. We have placed a damage dummy in the lobby so you can check the quality of your strikes. Hit the dummy, and it will report back a number up to 120. The other part of the damage equation is hitting the enemy crit point(s). These vary by enemy type and aren't revealed obviously in the gameplay. Here are the crits for the enemies in the dojo.

We will share some more enemy visuals later on highlighting crits, but for now I can say, "when in doubt, attack the head."

Block Component

Each block gets you 150 points. But don’t spend extra time issuing unnecessary blocks because remember that each second costs you 200 points.

Damage Received

This component is unique in that it varies by difficulty mode. Each hit I take subtracts from my score. The penalty increases for each difficulty mode. On "Ninja" difficulty each hit I take decreases my score by 2000 points. So there you have it. To maximize my score I need to be efficient, powerful and defend well. We’ll leave to you to figure out the optimal strategy.