Now that the dust has settled, what do we all think of Sneak King?

Before this last playthrough, I would've said Sneak King was the best of the trilogy with Big Bumpin' being the worst, but nearly twenty years removed, I'm afraid to say the BK hierarchy has changed.

It's tragic, because Sneak King's opening sets you up for something special. A still shot of a darkened driveway... The King appears from the shadows, stalking about like a predator, his visage a cruel mockery of the human form intended to disarm and draw in his prey. But this beast is no man, and his attempt mimicry is all wrong, glassy-eyed and without life. And then you boot up the game proper and find that it's just a crusty stealth title that asks you to do the same exact thing over and over and over again.

If Pocket Bike Racer's problem was too little content, then Sneak King's is that there's too much. Twenty missions spread out over four levels, but every mission tasks you with essentially the same objective: deliver delicious Burger King meals to hungry masses. The most variety you'll get in how you go about that is in what order you'll need to hit up the various NPCs sulking around the map or how often you're allowed to make a mistake. Sometimes you'll need to deliver [X] amount of meals without getting caught or by climbing into trash cans (coincidentally where I found my copy of this game, I think someone threw it out by mistake) or popping out of houses, but the amount of repetition here really sucks all the fun out. The King doesn't even need to take pentazemin to stop his hands from shaking when delivering Original Chicken Sandwiches™, this game's got no meat on its bones!

The controls are also horrible, which is something I actually wouldn't accuse the other two games of. Say what you will about Big Bumpin' and Pocket Bike Racer, but movement at least feels serviceable. Sneak King inverts the Y-axis and makes climbing into cover so laborious that your mark will likely move away or collapse from hunger before you're able to get into position. The King shrugging his shoulders and shaking his damn head because I botched the timing on his sandwich delivery while the camera was juttering behind a tree branch, what the fuck do you want from me, man? When we get to the sawmill I'm throwing your ass in a woodchipper [Warning: do not do this. The King cannot be killed by conventional means, he will come back and he will be stronger.]

Despite how bad it is, Sneak King is often the entry in the BK Trilogy that people talk about, because it is the most conceptually interesting of the bunch and the one to lean the hardest into the marketing that gave life to this iteration of The King. Tactical Burger Delivery Action is such a good-dumb idea that at least one man has dedicated his time and income to collecting any copy of the game he can find, and by a magnitude of cents it is the most consistently expensive title in the series on the aftermarket. Curiously, graded copies of the game are actually worth less than open CIBs. I understand the economics of this and why that's the case, but it's very funny to think Sneak King inherently has more value when played.

Ohhhh, wait a minute... Sneak King sounds like sneaking. Shit, I just got it.

Let's start with what the game does right:
- The destruction physics are extraordinary, even compared to many shooters of the succeeding generation.
- The levels are unique, varied, and have cool set pieces.
- The shotgun is very satisfying to use. It's powerful and loud.
- ..... That's all I got.

Onto the negatives, there are a lot of them:
- The controls feel terrible. Your movement speed is slow and there is no run button. The aiming sensitivity is also very low with no option to change it.
- The weapon switching, reload and alternate fire mode animations take way too long. They break the flow of fire fights and add another layer of clunkyness on top of my previous issue.
- Enemies are bullet sponges which is the laziest way of adding difficulty to a game. At least head shots are one hit kills.
- The story is pretty bad, even for modern military shooter standards. Knowing the history of the game, you can really tell that it was hastily put together to connect a bunch of levels that have nothing to do with each other.
- While the graphical fidelity is impressive for the time, I wasn't a fan of the art direction. Everything is dark, brown and grey with a bit too much bloom. All things very common in the seventh gen so I guess Black really was ahead of it's time.
- Checkpoints are sparse considering the length of each level.
- Higher difficulties require completing more boring secondary objectives which are essentially just glorified collectibles. I tend to play shooters on the second highest difficulty my first time through but I switched to normal here just to avoid the secondary objectives.
- Game length is on the shorter side.

Black to me is a really good tech demo, just not a good game. I wish it had been released on PC. That would have solved the control issues for me at least and made it more enjoyable to play.

This has got to have the weirdest story mode in any Mario Party I've ever played.

It's been several days now since I finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. I've been decompressing, letting my experience sit in the hopes that my thoughts might coalesce into something clear and concise. But this is a game that took me 139 hours to complete, easily the most time I've sunk into a single run of a video game, and naturally there's a lot of highs and lows in there. In some ways, Rebirth is everything I was hoping it would be, especially after embracing the more contentious changes Square made to Final Fantasy VII's continuity. In a lot of other ways, it's doing crunches for three hours straight so the number of collectables in Johnny's Seaside Inn goes up by [1].

In my review of Remake, I heaped a lot of praise on Square's audaciousness in regard to how they treated the source material, especially towards the end of the game. The promise that the "unknown journey will continue" removed some of the expectation for where the plot was headed, so much so that something as well-known as Aerith's death could once again be considered a genuine spoiler insofar that it was no longer a certainty. Rebirth certainly takes what Remake set up and goes places with it, though it backloads much of this and rushes through at a pace that makes some of the payoff a bit too vague and convoluted. It's got a lot more Zack though, and as a Zack fan, we're feastin'.

Rebirth does otherwise follow the plot of Final Fantasy VII's first disc with about as much faithfulness as Remake does, which is to say you'll still be visiting the Gold Saucer, experience an extended flashback to Nibelheim, and battle a fucked up looking wall in the Temple of the Ancients. Just like the last game, a lot of these familiar locations and moments are expanded upon and fleshed out using material introduced in the Complication of Final Fantasy VII and various spin-offs.

This was at times detrimental to Remake given its focus on Midgar, ballooning what was a three-to-four-hour chunk of gameplay into a full 40+ hour experience. Though Rebirth is packed to the point of bursting with superfluous content, it suffers fewer pacing issues thanks to the portion of the original game it covers, which already provided the player more moments to breathe between visits to dungeons and towns.

That's not to say all that side content is worthwhile. In fact, a lot of it is pretty tedious, excessive, and at times frustrating, and while it's optional on paper, some amount of it will be required either by force or by need. Lighting watch towers, collecting lifestream and summon intel, completing hunts, taking on special hunts, capturing chocobo, digging up valuable loot with said chocobo, completing air-courses with chocobo, jumping around in two different frog minigames, WHEELIES, getting the high score in shooting galleries, playing Not Rocket League, taking on VR battles, destroying your tendons in god damn Cactuar Crush, taking pictures of Cactuars, taking pictures for the photography club, finishing multiple tiers of 3D Brawler, playing Star Fox, riding the G-bike, performing in two different rhythm games, MORE WHEELIES, taking on brutal VR battles, redoing the pull-ups game from Remake but somehow worse, breaking boxes in Desert Rush, catching a bunch of ffffucking Moogles, playing a more truncated version of Intermission's otherwise excellent Fort Condor tower defense game, finding PlayArts figures in well-hidden rabbit holes, setting up automated attack patterns in Gears and Gambits, playing the piano very poorly, I FUCKING LOVE WHEELIES

This isn't even getting into Chocobo Races or Rebirth's persistent card game, Queen's Blood, which both feel like full games grafted on at the hip. Sure, you could do as I did and fall into the trap of trying to 100% a game and come to hate parts of it as a result, but I also think it's fair to say these games are designed in a way that try to pull the player into its side content. Indeed, the story will have you dip your toes into most minigames, and the promise of valuable gear, folios, and even a super-boss might be temptation enough to suck you into some truly dreadful stretches of gameplay. I stomached about 3/4's of what Rebirth had to offer and started to get burnt out, but by that point am I really not going to finish the rest of it?

Well, no, because the final side quest is currently bugged and cannot be completed. Very nice thing to run into after doing literally everything else.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth feels like a minigame compilation that is occasionally interested in being an action-RPG, but when it is, it's pretty damn good. I was already a fan of Remake's take on the familiar "active time battle" system that served as the series bedrock during much of its turn-based days. New to Rebirth are synergy skills, which both deal significant amounts of damage while conferring positive buffs to participating party members. And y-yeah, you know, like... you gotta beat a lot of side quests and stuff to get folios to buy new synergy skills, but if you're playing the game like a freak-ass maniac, you'll have a lot of fun messing around with different party combinations. Aerith can put on Barret's sunglasses and pose with him. She's so cool, I hope she doesn't get stabbed later.

The materia system is intact and has been expanded with new materia that allow for some pretty inventive builds, my personal favorite being Exploding Yuffie. Character playstyles carry over from the last game, though I found newcomers Cait Sith and Red XIII to be the least interesting of the bunch, and as far as I'm concerned, Cloud, Yuffie and Barret are the best combination and suitable for basically any combat encounter you'll find yourself in outside of sections where your party has been pre-determined.

A lot has been said about Rebirth's presentation and performance, and I think most complaints about it are extremely valid. Performance mode is one of the muddiest looking things I've seen and I play Nintendo 64 games on a CRT routinely. Remake's infamous door texture is carried spiritually into the wind-ranging vistas of Gaia, though the inconsistent texture work is better hidden when roaming around the open world. However, plenty of cutscenes are blocked in such a way that draws attention to low-res textures and objects, and I don't know, I think they could've swapped out Midgar's horrible looking skybox if they were going to focus on it this much.

Look, it's hopeless for me. I'm all in on Final Fantasy VII. I see Cid Highwind raise a hand to a woman and my brain goes as smooth as a marble. Palmer wanted butter for his tea, I stood up and clapped and said "yes, thank you, I will spend one HUNDRED hours of my life playing Leap Frog." I have the deluxe edition with two steelbooks, one for each disc, and worse than all of that... I tried to platinum the game. I'm already dead, man. Dump my ass in the Forgotten Capital.

I could say "Square ought to learn some restraint and reign it in with the final chapter," but even if they don't, I'll be on my hands and knees in front of the dog bowl ready for more wet slop. Mmm, diced Zack Fair for me, please!

After completing it: Yeah, this is an all-time favorite.

Feels like a grab-bag of games I really love: Shadow of the Colossus, JSRF, Sonic Adventure 2, Prince of Persia Sands of Time (no joke), and Outer Wilds. Surprisingly, its highs are as high and sometimes moreso than those games. However, it does falls a little short of Sonic Adventure 2, but you can't ding a painting because it isn't the Mona Lisa.

Momentum is just such a fun thing to experience in video games, and skating around such beautifully varied environments is basically just asking me to give your game a near 5 stars. I was consistently just so overjoyed with the new ways they found to create challenges for the mechanics, as skating, grinding, climbing and jumping are all you do in this game. There is NEVER any stupid ass gimmick to detract from what is such a solid foundation. There is one section that involves grappling and grinding to get to a ship in the sky and my god, it is so fun. There are so many moments throughout this game that I am going to think back on and go; "Damn, that was really fucking fun!" Which, to me, is the litmus test for a good game.

The sheer fantastic delight on display here reminds me of playing Spyro the Dragon as a kid, interestingly enough. The sheer amount of color and whimsy is such a visual treat, and make no mistake, this game is an artistic triumph. The fact this thing was sent out to die on the Epic Games Store is an Art Crime because no one fucking played it because of that. I have nothing but respect for how difficult this game looks like it was to make. No game is easy to make, but this game in particular is so well-made and functions so tight that I'm stunned by how SHORT the credits were, how SMALL this team was for how ambitious this game is.

One thing that struck me was that I 100% completed it my first run through. That isn't me saying that I have the game mastered due to my Gamer Instinct, that is more a testament to really good level design and FOCUSED design that meant I always knew what I was looking for, where to find it, and how to get to it. By keeping the systems so simple, there was never an overwhelming amount of shit to look for, it always came naturally. Also the amount of times I would just explore random stuff that had no benefit proves a truth that Super Mario 64 got and no one else did: gamers will explore for its own sake if exploring is fun. If playing the game and moving around the game world is fun, I don't care if I find something useful.

The boss fights are also really something special. The game is obviously drawing a lot from SoTC, which it makes no secret of, but the way you interact with the bosses here is much different, it gives the game a very one of a kind playstyle. You skate around the bosses, timing jumps and hits almost like a rhythm game, with each variation becoming more challenging and requiring more precise timing. I don't think any of the fights can match Shadow of the Colossus's finest moments, HeartMachine does a really great job giving Solar Ash's bosses an identity all their own.

That identity is why it is such a bummer that it is trying to remind you SO MUCH of Shadow of the Colossus. It feels like a very insecure game in that regard, that it doesn't think it can stand on its own so it needs to evoke SoTC in almost every regard. The ALMOST here being that SoTC was a very quiet game, that had very little voice acting, and let its gorgeous visuals do a lot of the talking.

Solar Ash almost has this, but for some GODFORSAKEN reason they have elected to have Rei not SHUT UP EVER. I find the voice acting completely out-of-place too: a made-up language would be fine, but having a very graceful and divine looking being like Rei speak like she is ringing me up at the record store is just a total mismatch. Turn the voices off if you want to be able to get into the alien-nature of this world, as the writer's are trying to sabotage it with every fucking quip. There is so much writing in this game, and the writers were not in their bag for much of it. The lore is not well-explained, over-written and too dense to be interesting, the whole "protagonist is actually doing something bad" angle is so foreshadowed that it actually felt like a joke at a certain point. The game was inspired by SoTC, of course the protagonist is doing something bad. I would be lying if I said that some of this didn't actually work though. I started to grow fond of Rei and CYD, the twist was actually fairly well done and the final fight has some good groundwork laid for it narratively that I'm not opposed to its rather hokey nature. I have no idea who the writers are, and they ARE hacks, but they're at least creative hacks.

I would love for HeartMachine to make another game like this, as this gameplay loop is something I am absolutely crazy about, I just want them to be more confident in their game, and not feel this aching need to remind me of a completely different title. Solar Ash is a beautifully made game and it IS one-of-a-kind. If only people actually knew it came out!!

I was so bad at this and getting owned so swiftly that it was actually starting to affect my mood. I can't win at Yu-Gi-Oh. Can't even get a single win. No matter how hard I try or study or practice my opponent has drawn every card necessary to summon 3 powerful Fuck You monsters to the field in a single turn. I don't understand. The training mode doesn't even come close to preparing me for this kind of Getting Owned.

I work a shitty job, am in enormous debt, I can't afford new tires or a new battery for my car, nothing works out in my favor, and I can't win at Yu-Gi-Oh. I remember when the Cleveland Browns didn't win a single game all year. I wonder how the QB, Deshone Kizer, felt during that stretch. You practice, you study, you do everything possible and yet a single win constantly eludes you. That was on a pretty grand stage, in front of millions. My torment is just in my bedroom while I watch Colorado Rockies baseball, hoping their perpetual losing and inability to play baseball with even the slightest bit of competency will give me perspective on how small my inability to win a Children's Card Game is. But it doesn't. I look at the Colorado Rockies and all I see is a mirror, it's like looking at the devil himself, mocking me for my near-constant bumbling and giving me a microcosm of my various financial woes in the form of a Blue-Eyes Ultimate Dragon being summoned to the field on the second turn just to own me.

If I were younger and still had dreams and aspirations I would probably suffer through the near constant losing just to get a glimpse at what winning a game of Yu-Gi-Oh might look like, but this shit is actually bumming me out. At least when I watch the Shitty Ass Fucking Worthless Colorado Rockies, we are divided by a screen and I am not Nolan Jones letting an easy fly-ball pop out of my glove. Actually BEING that hapless loser is too much for me to bear.

Still highly recommended as it is NOT League of Legends, though.

Normally if I enjoy a game I'd either try to have fun with my writing and do something corny like roleplaying as a character or go insanely heavy on the showmanship, but for the sake of this I'm actually going to be really vanilla and bore everyone to death.

Before I heel out, I'd like to let it be known that I was rooting for this game. When it was originally revealed in one of the Directs, I clapped, I hooted, and I hollered, for she deserves the universe and everything in it. She's an icon, she's a legend, and she is the moment. I heard it get compared to Wario World, which made me bounce off walls like Spring Wario from the classic Game Boy games. I could imagine it now, Peach womanhandling every bad guy in sight and going on an exciting journey through every genre of artistic theater known by Mushroomy Kingdom history. Unfortunately, comparing Good-Feel to even one of Treasure's lesser developments is essentially like putting silly putty next to an unpolished diamond.

"Engagement" and "difficulty" are two separate things, and it really needs to be stressed that the latter means little in the grand stage of what makes a game do what a game does, which is engage the player and take their mind off life, with the "fun yeah woo" energy replacing all their other thought processes. Spyro the Dragon and Ninja Gaiden are on opposite ends of the spectrum and still manage to be a few of my favorites to ever do it. Just a few days ago, I played Bugs Bunny Lost in Time on stream in a Discord call with one of my friends as she did some programming, and that is a game "made for children" with very little punishment dealt out for mistakes. For how jank and lower budget it was, it was fun with decent puzzles, cool ship combat, car chase segments, and even pretty good boss fights! It's something I enjoyed when I was eight, and still do now as an adult.

Peach Showtime for all of it's poor performing extravagance doesn't even use a lot of the joycon's controls, and many segments are very linear and on-rails with one of the Detective Peach puzzles quite literally having the solution put up on the wall for you. Using a simple control scheme is never a bad thing in itself, I enjoy an Atari game now and then, but the fine art of utilizing that simple control scheme demands creativity that extends beyond auto-scrolling sections that make 100%'ing the game annoying. It would also ask for enemies to master the very tricky art of "moving the fuck around a little" to justify having the world's most lenient parry window. It's frustrating, because for every half-decent powergaming moment that involves throwing hitboxes around enemies that are less threatening than beginner mode Musou soldiers it's spliced between very uninteresting unskippable dialogue, uneventful non-combat plays, auto-scrolling/auto-running sections, and "puzzle" segments that are more trivial than microwave cooking. It makes me drowsy! I've played stuff like Toy Story Activity Center off the Collection Chamber and Number Munchers last year, and that stuff was pretty fun despite the target audience! Hell, I still come back to Wacky Worlds Creativity Studio on Sega Genesis just to screw around with the music maker! It stimulates my imagination, unlike Peach Showtime!

Give kids some respect, or even better give Peach some respect. A little bit of both I feel would go a long way.

....Also, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this subject, but why does the game run so goddamn bad? The loading screen and results screen run worse than a bunch of Atari Jaguar games I've played, was it a bad style choice? It would check out I guess, I may as well be playing a movie game.

A dull direct-to-VHS Disney movie game.

One of my most beloved games from when I was a kid, that on every replay I find something new that I don't like about it. It was animated by a virulent transphobe with nasty fucking nails and Tommy Tallarico regularly lies about having composed the music for it when he absolutely did not. Nice stuff!!

I want to preface it right now, on the Genesis this is a 2 STAR GAME. The PC/Sega CD versions I think are 3 stars for many technical reasons and for having the very fun Big Bruty level.

The Genesis version though kind of SUCKS. It's not because EWJ is already an incredibly uneven game, but because the whip has the most particular hitbox you could imagine, requiring precision that really feels unnecessarily strict. The helicopter head never ever feels like it works right, and makes the Use Your Head portion of the final level nearly fucking impossible. The Genesis version plays so bad that I can see why it being readily available on Switch, along with its insipid creator has lead to people turning HARD on Jim.

The Sega CD version still doesn't play perfect, because at its heart Earthworm Jim is still kind of a mess, but I still think it's light years better than Earthworm Jim 2, which is a game that experiments with every level being the bad level. Tube Race and Snot a Problem are the only levels here that I think are just so shit that it brings the experience down. I think For Pete's Sake is pretty fun actually :)

Levels that are pure platforming challenges are usually pretty fun, with a huge asterisk, as sometimes Jim just doesn't control great or his sprite feels a little bit bigger than it needs to be, but I still think New Junk City, Level 5, and Buttville provide good enough platforming challenges. I am a biased observer though, as I really don't care about most 2D games and would rather playing Earthworm Jim than any boring ass Mega Man game, so take my words with a grain of salt.

The music is great though! It was absolutely not composed by Tallarico, despite his insistence it was. I doubt the Special Edition music was even done by him, even the guitars, as he pretty infamously plays to a backing track with VGL. Can he even play guitar? No one knows! Notice how EWJ2 is credited to him and half of it is music he didn't even compose? Weird, huh. I did listen to the music here a TON growing up, and still think it's brilliant stuff.

What this game is rightfully famous for is the animation, character design, all of it being REALLY great looking. The various Jim idle animations, the way Evil the Cat's gun knocks him back during his boss fight, and, even though it stinks to play, the animations in Snot a Problem are so beautifully done. It's a shame the most annoying piece of shit was behind these!

This game is so hard to go back to today for reasons that honestly don't have much to do with the actual game: it's an eccentric 90s platformer, not much to write home about. The fact that it's attached to the hip to the legacies of the most irritating fucking losers is really brutal. Still worth a shot on the Sega CD or PC, as the Genesis version is too clunky to even recommend casually.

The good levels are better than EWJ1, but the bad levels are so bad that I think someone should actually be punished for them. Whoever came up with Puppy Love and determined it needed 3 rounds? I want that guy killed, clean shot. Level Ate consantly bombarding you with enemies and salt shakers? The Iron Maiden. The sick fucking monster who brought in the Flyin' King? The Baptist Hell. Suffer endlessly.

I want to rate this higher than Earthworm Jim 1 because there is stuff I love here: the animation is even better and more expressive, the game actually makes me laugh pretty consistently, it's pretty funny! The good levels like Udderly Abducted, Tangerines, Lorenzo's Soil, and Jim Is A Blind Cave Salamander are actually FUN and have INTERESTING GIMMICKS. But the rotten is like a limb blackened by frostbite, functionless and chipping off before your very eyes, and the only thing we need to do is get it to a hospital so amputation can happen.

A game that would gain more stars if content was actively REMOVED. Puppy Love is T.E.R.R.I.B.L.E. I cannot stand by For Pete's Sake being slandered while this nightmare is given a slap on the wrist. The fucking marshmallow you have to bounce the puppies off of has the most inconsistent hitbox in a game loaded with them by a company who is bad at them. It is a level so bad that I actively encourage cheating. If something fucking stinks: cheat. Don't feel bad about it, if it sucks, skip it. Under no circumstance should you beat Puppy Love how they actually intended, because they intended you to be a gaming God who can nail frame precise movements like you are fucking Simple Flips. You are not. I am not. Skip the shitty level.

Love this music though! It's known that Tommy Tallarico did not compose any actual music in his fucking life, and he especially didn't come up with any of the really great original music here. I highly doubt he even had the inspired choice to put Moonlight Sonata in the Salamnder level. It's a very fun soundtrack that once again has its name attached to a ding dong. Can't win with this franchise!

What I suggest is attributing every bad decision to Doug, notorious shithead. Puppy Love? His idea. Flyin' King? He programmed all of it! Level Ate? He wanted MORE Salt shakers! The game goes down so much easier once you do this.

12 years on from the strange, incomplete original, DD2 is more of the same, uneasily sitting between the uncompromising Souls series & more conventional narrative ARPGs. At times evoking a desolate offline MMO, DD2 is at its best when out in the wilds, the sun setting at your back & two or more beasts landing on the path ahead, all Arising out of dynamic systems.

The main questline unfortunately does not play to these strengths, with much of Act I confined to the capital & some really dull writing. Fortunately, writing does not maketh a game, and side-quests that take you out into the unreasonably huge map are much more interesting, and really need to be sought out in the crowds and corners of the world. Keeping track of these with the bizarre quest tracker is uneven and obtuse: you’re either reading the landscape and tracing clues or just beating your head against a wall figuring out what the game requires of you.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is singular, not quite fully realised, a beautifully rendered physics-heavy oddity. The art direction is profoundly generic, but so deceptively understated it at times resembles a Ray Harryhausen film, full of weight, movement and character. DD2 makes you feel like you have friends, albeit stupid friends, who'd throw themselves off a cliff for a view of yonder.

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.