Massively underrated or just Made For Me to a degree no other game has ever been? A little bit of both. Either way, this is going in my 5-star Favorite Games Of All Time Superstar Club.

A much superior game to Shinobi 2002, and also maybe the best action game I've played since Ninja Gaiden, Nightshade is exactly what I like in my action games to a degree that I wonder if I actually designed this game through some rift in time. We need to start considering games like this and Ninja Gaiden Black as art games. I think incredibly stylish and well-choreographed action are as artistically unique uses of the medium as boring-as-fuck shit I'll never in a million years finish like Kentucky Route Zero.

One of the absolute best designed ninja suits ever, worn by a badass woman, incredibly fast and skillful gameplay, style and substance, with an incredible drum'n'bass soundtrack to boot. The game would have to periodically cut to episodes of Columbo if I were to rate it any higher.

This is a 5-star based on vibes alone, as I really don't think this one is for everyone. It's incredibly difficult, requires precision and mastery on a level that most will find frustrating, and the camera, while a massive improvement on Shinobi's, is still not ideal for the later level's bottomless pits. From my personal standpoint, you absolutely should play this with save states, as the general checkpoint system is far too punitive for the kind of accuracy it demands from you. It's VERY old-school in that sensibility.

It also has many difficulty options, including a beginner mode which I found very welcoming of the game after the US release of Shinobi cut the easy mode for god-knows-why. Shinobi is a game I really like, but find WAY too unwelcoming and prickly to truly love. It's like a friend's really ill-behaved cat, where you know that little piece of shit is going to scratch or hiss at you just for daring to exist near it. Impossible to love but too endearing to hate.

A lot of this comes to Hibana feeling better to control than Hotsuma, especially in-air. Shinobi would demand a lot of perfect air-combos, but Hotsuma didn't feel quite as maneuverable and lacked a dedicated kick button, meaning enemies who could block you were a massive pain in the ass. The most immediate improvement Nightshade adds is that Hibana can kick from the air, giving you better gap-closing opportunities, better combo extension, and allows for you to deftly navigate the game's bottomless pits through knowing how to RESET those in-air combos. It feels much more stylish and skillful than Shinobi, while giving it the necessary bit of streamlining to feel more approachable.

I also played the undub of this game, as one of the biggest "What the fuck" changes is removing the Japanese dub entirely. Shinobi was pretty unique in letting you listen to the Japanese voice track instead of the English dub. This isn't a huge problem as for the era, these dubs aren't actually that bad. I like Hibana's voice in the English dub, and my research indicates that her voice actress also was interviewed in documentaries about Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo, which is curious. More curious is Hisui, who is voiced by "E. Cahill", which, and I'm not sure, might be Erin Cahill, better known as Jen Scotts from Power Rangers: Time Force. I have watched many hours of Power Rangers throughout my adult life, and a lot of them was on Time Force, and I REALLY don't know if they are the same. Who is the same though is Hibana's japanese voice actress, Atsuko Tanaka, who has been in EVERYTHING EVER. You might know her best as Motoko Kusanagi in Stand Alone Complex and the dub voice for Lisa in Night Trap. Her voice for Hibana is sooooo good, applying a very deep and professional tone with this cool-guy edge you rarely get to see a female character have. She manages to be a consummate professional like Hotsuma while being incredibly distinct from him in her devil may care attitude in contrast to Hotsuma's grave seriousness.

One of the most striking things about Hibana is her flare for style. Hotsuma's TATE poses were classic ninja-movie stuff: dude puts his sword away calmly while his enemies collapse to pieces. Hibana is more willing to strike a pose: spinning her knives, holding her sword in the air, and the more TATEs you build up the more dramatic. Pulling off the 30 TATE might be when I decided this was a 5-star game, it was so enormously difficult, as Nightshade punishes you HARD for input spamming, forcing you to get a rhythm down to approaching TATEs. It was then I realized that Nightshade was cooking in a way no one really appreciated, in the similar way Sekiro feels rhythmic in its combat encounters, building long-stretches of TATEs in Nightshade is the same way!

The rhythm of this is enhanced by the BEAUTIFUL MATSERPIECE M'WAH PERFECTO soundtrack consisting of the best drum'n'bass ever fucking PRODUCED. Composed by a ton of Sega pros, one of the most notable names on here is Fumie Kumatani: the composer for all the BEST TRACKS in Sonic Adventure 1 and 2. She was also responsible for the best tracks in Shinobi!! She can do no wrong!

Here are some of my favorite tunes, including the composer name as sourced from VGMDB.

Shinobi Tate by Fumie Kumatani
https://youtu.be/Nl930cF0tVU?si=EwDidZuTuXPeROaJ
Overcome Speed by Keiichi Sugiyama
https://youtu.be/MjCJuppjOG8?si=iyzeCCjOLmNjRb5p
Dark Kingdom by Tomonori Sawada
https://youtu.be/8ZN8vzehu4c?si=bLXEisdEXEYjQmQN
Jade Water by Fumie Kumatani
https://youtu.be/hZT1ZB-VQBc?si=eqM6PIEcUsxpAklq

As with Shinobi, this OST is a must-listen if you like D'n'B, as they assembled the fucking Avengers of the Amen Break on this one.

I have written more words about Nightshade than have been written in 20 years, so I'll try and wrap it up. I find this an immensely stylish and rewarding game with a surprisingly dramatic and well-directed storyline, with gameplay improving on everything Shinobi did while adding in more. Bosses are more mechanically interesting, levels feel more considered, and movement feels fantastic once you get its intricacies down. It's not gonna be for everyone, but it was for me more than any game really could hope to be.

Mostly the exact kind of teenage bullshit we need to be fostering.

Every now and then I get into a mood. There's this feeling that rises in my chest and makes me feel like an animal in a cage. I look at my backlog for something to play, and then I leaf through the Steam store, and then I pull up some list somewhere for some "hidden gems" on some console, and then I give up. I sit there anxious and twitchy as the ennui sets in. It falls around me like wet towels. There is only one possible cure; I need to play some shitty PS2 game that nobody has ever heard of.

Nightshade ended up being a pretty bad pick for that, because it turned out to be something like the eleventh game in the Shinobi series. It's just one of those sequels that doesn't use the original name anywhere. That hasn't stopped it from largely slipping into obscurity, though, especially in the west; I'd never heard so much as a word about it before I stumbled across it on a masterlist of PS2 exclusives, and all it gave me to go off of was a title. I went into Nightshade essentially as blind as I could have, with no foreknowledge nor expectations aside from the vague hope that it would be good. At the very least, I hoped it would be interesting.

Nightshade is occasionally good, and significantly more interesting than I'd expected.

The game opens strong. Hibana must have gone through about six or seven different costume designs in her head and decided to incorporate all of them at once; she's clad from head-to-toe in gleaming white latex, she's wearing red gloves with blades on the elbows, she's got insect carapace boots, she's got what is incredibly obviously a Kamen Rider headband that descends down and over her face to act as an augmented-reality visor, she's got mandibles on the sides of her mask, fishnet stitching holding the entire outfit together, and the requisite Shinobi scarf that's about as long as the Mason-Dixon line and which flows behind her like water when she runs. When each element is listed individually, you'd expect her to look like an overdesigned monster, but it actually all comes together shockingly well. She looks kind of like one of those "what if a Pokemon was actually a human" fan drawings, in a good way. I imagine that if she'd been a supporting character in Shinobi first — the Akane to a Ninja Gaiden, so to speak — fans would be clamoring for her to be in a lot more games than just this and Project X Zone 2.

While I won't try to pit two bad bitches against one another, it does need to be said that Bayonetta 2 ripped the opening level of Nightshade completely the fuck off. Slicing apart monsters on top of a fighter jet as it weaves between buildings and keeps your feet glued to the hull even as it flies in a path perpendicular to the streets below is something Kamiya should have gotten a smack on the wrist for. Nightshade nails it, though, and it flawlessly pulls off the sequence a full decade earlier; you're kicking away missiles, you're spinning sai blades and slashing through Hellspawn, you do battle with a robot ninja who ends up ascending to humanity after he gets continued exposure to a shard of the evil red blade that eats souls. The tate system returns from Shinobi, too: killing enemies in rapid succession grants you an exponentially increasing damage boost, and if you manage to kill all of the enemies on screen in a short enough timespan, you get a cutscene of Hibana executing them all at once. What they don't tell you is that this works on bosses. Bosses will summon adds, and building a sufficiently long tate off of the mooks will open up the chance for you to charge a long Stealth Attack that will instantly kill the boss and give you a unique cutscene if you do it before the tate combo drops. It rules. It fucking rules so hard. It's probably one of the best rewards for playing stylishly and smoothly I've seen in a long time. Once you find an opening, you can kill any boss in a single strike.

Regrettably, though, the levels between boss fights can't hold up to the same level of quality for very long. A lot of the early stages are predicated on clambering around on rooftops and running through dark city streets, and those are all fun and good. Later levels can't help but put bottomless pits fucking everywhere that will instantly kill you and send you back to your last checkpoint, and a thirty-minute level might have two or three checkpoints at best. Getting across these pits steadily starts relying on bouncing between enemies with very few platforms you can actually stand on, and the armored enemies can only be bounced off of with a kick. You can only kick once while in the air, for some reason, so throw out one kick just a bit too early and it's back to the last checkpoint for you. I eventually just gave up on fighting every enemy and settled on running past them when I could, instead. It's possible to be a little too annoying with what you're asking the player to do, and this steps a few toes over the line.

I do want to bring attention to the writing, though, because it’s wonderfully absurd. This is a game where your corrupt CO warns you over radio comms that "astral sensors are at Level 3", meaning that "there is a large-class Hellspawn nearby", and everything just keeps rolling along as though those are two regular sentences to say to a person. Hibana is on a revenge quest against her former master and the new side-piece he swapped her out for. She ends up rebelling against the orders of the Japanese government and the Nakatomi Conglomerate because she realizes that she's little more than a disposable pawn to them, fit only to reassemble and return the cursed sword Akujiki into their care. Every other sentence out of her mouth is “it’s not my day” or “it’s not your day” or “this really isn’t my day”, because the writers are trying to give her a cool catchphrase. It's the sort of heightened realism often found scribbled in the back of a teenager's math notebook and too-often derided when presented as art by the public due to being "juvenile" or "appealing to the lowest common denominator". I'd counter by saying that the biggest prestige video games on the market have been taking themselves a little too fucking seriously lately and could strongly benefit from reigning it in. This isn't a suggestion that we abandon all pretense and make everything a joke; rather that it's our idiosyncrasies which make us interesting, and to play it safe is to play it boring. You'll never embarrass yourself if you hide those strange little parts of you, but you'll never find anyone who likes you for your true self, either. How much of you are you willing to surrender to spare your precious ego?

Nightshade ultimately ends up stumbling too hard and too often in its second half for me to enthusiastically suggest that everyone play it, but it’s absolutely worth trying out. It’s nonsense, but it’s good nonsense. At the very least, it’s good for your soul to play something that’s just a little bit trash every now and then. It’s like sitting under a waterfall and meditating. Cleanse yourself of impurities by not holding games to a prestige industry writing standard that’s still lagging about twenty years behind shit that your dad would have watched on the SciFi channel at 3 PM on a Sunday.

This easily has one of the best soundtracks on the console.

The absolute worst camera I've ever encountered in any video game I've played in my 25 years of existing on this planet. Normally a bad camera isn't enough of an issue for me to mention let alone dock points down for it, but in a game like this; that's all about precision and knowing where your enemy is to continue to chain kills it kinda fucking matters to have a camera that's at least decent and not have god damn inverted controls at that on top of having a mind of its own when you're fighting enemies so it'll start having a fucking seizure to disorient you resulting in you dropping your combo. It's especially bad in boss fights where they're balanced around this mechanic, in fact, practically the entire game is, and it's all ruined because of the camera. I know there's a lock-on and I know you can center the camera with R3, but it really doesn't matter. Because the lock-on is "gradual" with its movement of the camera and not as immediate as you'd like it to be and pushing R3 isn't a perfect solution either. If you have the camera at an awkward up or down angle then it's going to leave it that angle, it's just going to recenter the camera behind your character. All of this and I haven't even mentioned the amount of cheap shots enemies and bosses alike can get on you because you didn't see their attacks coming.

It all culminates to pretty frustrating yet still able to have fun with it experience. All up until the last levels where they get way, way carried the fuck away with bottomless pits, waterfalls that for some reason stagger you if you get too close to them which can ruin your jump leading to an instant death, and obnoxious as fuck enemies that just aren't fun to deal with. I've forgotten to mention up until this point, but I've never really had any sort of issues with depth perception in a video game, but god damn, did this game feel the need to make that an issue as well. I've never had so much trouble judging my jumps than I did in this game. So combine everything I've described then throw it all into one level and they want you to navigate through the level with the air combat getting fucked by the camera and you just made a recipe for I DON'T WANNA PLAY THIS GAME ANYMORE

Look, this game really started off as being extremely fun, tight and rewarding with its gameplay. Oh yeah, did I mention the soundtrack is an absolute banger? Yeah, you should check it out if you haven't already. It's good shit. But good god damn man, they really had to ruin it with this stupid as fuck bullshit. I'm fucking mad man, this game was legit great up until that last level. I haven't even mentioned the one dog shit boss fight that does nothing but waste your time, but fuck that man, that fight wasn't even hard. Just a time waster and annoying. I really tried to pull through with this game cause I liked what I was playing up until then, but I just couldn't do it anymore. They lost me, what a fucking tragedy.

Look, almost more than any other game I feel like I need to point out that I cheated here. I had infinite dashes, infinite help and infinite super attacks. Without those cheats this game would be fully unplayable for me, much less enjoyable.

So with that in mind, I had fun! It's fun to chain the attacks and have her do her little animation. It's fun to zip around, and she looks cool!

The levels are kinda lame and I didn't like the music, but I had a good time.