Unfortunately, I don't have much to say about Ninja Gaiden Shadow. It's pretty much exactly what you'd expect from "original Game Boy Ninja Gaiden", although it also takes cues from Shadow of the Ninja. You gotta slash, jump and ceiling climb via grappling hook your way through five levels of mediocrity. The level design here is pretty boring overall, but it is all servicable and smart enough to make you go "oh, ah-ha!" to figure out a solution or two. The game is at its best when emulating Ninja Gaiden's fast flow state "keep running forward and trying to dodge" vibes and less so when it tries to do slower platforming, which is just kind of There. Enemies variety is interesting enough. I was enjoying myself enough until the final level. The actual level isn't too hard, but the hitboxes of the laser turrets felt MUCH chunkier than the lasers themselves and led to way too many cheap hits for my tastes. The controls felt snappy and responsive enough, but I had some issues with the grappling hook being read as a forward jump or not jumping out of crouch, however I suspect this was due to me fat fingering the inputs since when I focused on it those problems evaporated.

One thing about this game: It is SHORT, easily under an hour, and while that it is acceptable on the Game Boy it has NO replay value like...say...Kirby's Dream Land does. That felt rather unfortunate and a bit of a shame. Given it is Ninja Gaiden, an unlockable "Hard Mode" would have been fun even if it was very generic and just spammed some more enemies on screen or amped enemy damage by 1.

If there's a plus to this game it is that, much like The Amazing Spider-Man GB, the soundtrack randomly goes hard. The final battle theme is pretty lit in particular. And for a Game Boy game the graphics are pretty solid too. I was honestly angling for a 5/10 on this until the lasers at the end just kept pecking me and making me get to the final boss with low HP, plus the game is ultimately pretty unimaginative, but I'm glad enough I played it just to see what the game was like!