Shinobi Arcade Review

       Last but not least in my recent set of reviews of games on Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection comes another arcade game that isn't actually on Genesis: Shinobi. I played a bunch of Shinobi 3 a few years back and had a blast, so I was interested to see what this was like.

       First off, it has worse graphics than Shinobi 3, which I wasn't quite expecting since some of these arcade games, like Fantasy Zone and Alien Syndrome, have quite good graphics. It looks pretty decent though. The sprites are huge and pretty detailed. A lot of the sprites have pretty great animation, but the player character looks a little stiff. He walks like he's trying to get to the bathroom asap, and his jumps aren't really that ninja-like.

       This is contrasted by the way the game's action feels; it really makes you feel like you are a ninja fighting other ninja and enemies. You go through the 2d levels from left to right although there is some up and done and right to left involved to. You must find a certain number of hostages (who, hilariously, are all the same red-headed little boy in pink pajamas) before you can leave. You move with the d-pad, X is jump. You attack with square. If you are far from an enemy, you throw a shuriken (which are unlimted, unlike Shinobi 3). If you are closer to an enemy, you will kick them or slash them with a sword instead. You can power-up your shuriken to a mini cannon type thing that is more powerful by rescuing certain little boys. You can jump between foreground and background or between levels on a stage by pressing up and jump or down and jump. Triangle activates your ninjitsu attack, which is kind of like a bomb in a shmup. Everything freezes and you unleash a cool attack, such as making a ton of copies of yourself bounce around everywhere or summoning some elemental power. This takes out all of the enemies on the screen, and really has the feel of a shmup bomb as you can use it offensively to take out a big group of enemies or defensively to save yourself from a hit at the last second. This can be used once per stage per life.

     The levels are typically crawling with 3 kinds of enemies. There are regular dudes with guns, who shoot continuously at you. When you see them, you need to duck immediately to get under their bullets, which fly across the screen pretty quickly (although pretty slowly compared to real life). One hit kills you in this game, so you need to be careful. You can often get the jump on these guys while they are reloading, which is really cool. Then there are ninjas. These guys appear out of nowhere and try to get you with their swords. They are pretty aggressive, and unlike the regular guys with guns, they too can jump into and out of the background, so they are hard to get away from. They also take two hits to kill. Dodging their aggressive jump attacks and charges is challenging but well choreographed, and is a big part of why the game is fun. It really feels like you are in a dance of death with other ninja when a few of them suddenly materialize in front of you and charge. The third type are the guards who are always near the hostages. These guys throw swords at you that you must either duck under or jump over. The swords boomerang back to the guards, so you must watch for them on the way back too. That is unless you kill the guard, in which case the sword will keep going instead of boomeranging. This leads to interesting combat situations in which you must remember if the sword is going to boomerang or not and what level it will be flying at in order to avoid it. These guys also have shields so you can't pick them off from a distance; you must approach them and give them the opportunity to attack you. These guys stay dead when you kill them, even if you die and start the level over.

       Between groups of levels there is a first-person bonus stage where you throw shuriken at ninjas who are approaching you. If you kill them all, you gain a life. It looks really impressive; the first-person view of hands throwing ninja stars is cool, and when a ninja kills you see a giant, awesome looking sprite of it, but the levels aren't that playable and I was never able to get a bonus life.

       The final level in each group of levels is a boss fight. These fights seem pretty difficult until you realize that your ninjitsu attack will drain most of a boss's hit points, although you'll still have to get a few hits in the hard way. Even so, the bosses are fun and varied. They each require different tactics to beat, and some require some figuring out with some pretty cool “aha!” moments. The last boss is a really fun challenge. 

       The game's music is pretty cool. It has a bit of traditional Asian flair to it that sets the mood pretty well.

Curiously, you can't continue when on the final set of levels. The game is set to free play on SUGC, but if you lose all your lives in the last world, it's game over. This means if you just want to see the end, you need to save scum your way through the last few levels. I used 15 “quarters” to get that far. The last few levels actually aren't that much harder than the rest of the game (read – they are all really hard). The last boss is super hard though, and trying to figure him out with very limited lives and no continues would be quite a process without the magic of save states. Beating the game on one “quarter” is doable, but I'm not going to do it. Like all these arcade games I played, that would be a matter of months to do, and it doesn't merit that kind of replay.

       Shinobi is a fun take on the action platformer. Like I said, it really does make you feel like a ninja, whether you are taking out an army of normal dudes with guns, nimbly fighting it out with a handful of your fellow ninja, or summoning ninja magic to duel a boss. Some of the animation could use some work, but the sprite-work in general is really cool. It's a fun little nostalgic game. Mediocre, Tier 1.