The pitch here only gets more novel in the era of damage spongey bosses and slow, meticulous movement: Kill every enemy as fast as possible, with the quirk that every defeat in an encounter powers up your sword. Use your extreme mobility to dart around the battlefield, killing smaller enemies so you can fell the larger ones in a single strike. Bosses that would take 15 minutes in this game's peers have the potential to take 15 seconds here with the right approach. It's a uniquely sega approach to 3D action games and while it's not a perfect translation of the Ninja-flavored 2D shoot-em-up the OGs were, it's repsectable in it's own right and that's more important. The demon sword feasting on the blood of enemies and eating away at the player's own health if they're too passive is both the perfect modernization and contextualization of a classic arcade timer, incentivizing active play in all the same ways with a sinister edge that fits the new tone like a glove.
The gameplay loop on paper is perfect, but the developers were averse to fleshing out anything outside of it. Shinobi isn't a 2D action game where you retain perfect control of your character, it's in 3D which requires the game to step in to make up the difference in precision possible with the extra dimension with a lock on system. It's shockingly unreliable for a game who's entire strategy revolves about picking out specific targets. If there's a horde of enemies on screen and you want to start with the small target in the back to build up cursed energy and stay on the move, good luck making sure the camera doesn't snap to any of the enemies in-between. Sometimes it doesn't even snap to enemies at all, with the camera staying stationary when you press the lock on with enemies behind you. That's the time you'd most need the game to snap to attention. It's the most imprecise tool possible in a game trying to encourage precise play. That's a long enough scarf for the game to trip over.
The core premise of your clan being possessed and you being forced to pick them off one by one is a good enough hook, but the story overall isn't fleshed out enough to work any meaningful drama from it. The boss squad makes for some entertaining fights and diverse personalities, but the first time the player meets most of them will be in these battles even as Hotsuma recalls cherished histories for them all.
Level design is of questionable importance when given a well fleshed out, varied combat system but for something this simple and to-the-point it was an opportunity to add some much needed variety. They only manage it some of the time though, with battles over bottomless pits or in narrow hallways that leave little room to skirt around enemy fire the best the game can come up with. Repeated level chunks in the same area don't help. Sometimes it feels like you've replayed a level a few times by the time you've gotten through it once.
Varied enemy design tries to pick up the slack here but despite there being some decent variety on the art side there's not a ton separating them all mechanically. You have smaller, floating turret enemies meant to be fodder, more standard types on the ground meant to gang up on the player and corrall them in with defensive play, and larger varieties of each that take a fully charged sword to take down effectively Even in the most varied cases you'd ideally be killing the enemies before they can get their gameplan going anyway so they all start to blend together.
Bosses usually are a highlight though. The lack of a tutorial is baffling at first but you'll quickly realize that the strict damage thresholds of the bosses are the method the game chose for teaching players about the Tate system. You simple won't make any meaningful gains on without understanding it. I'm not sure if the boss in the third level is even beatable without taking it in consideration. It's easy to see how this game got it's reputation, but the bosses flip on their head in a really cathartic way once you "get it". This might be the only action game that I've ever gotten an S rank on a late game boss on my first try. The way this game's systems flip from obtuse and frustrating to simplistic and empowering once the gap in understanding is crossed is the most extreme I've ever seen.
Once you "get it" it's a hard game to hate. It fufills the ninja fantasy well enough with it's focus on speed and precision and there's enough depth here to make for some pretty decent score attack fun here too, but a lack of polish and variety hold it back from it's true potential. It's got me interested in checking out nightshade, since I feel like it could really succeed with a second pass.
The gameplay loop on paper is perfect, but the developers were averse to fleshing out anything outside of it. Shinobi isn't a 2D action game where you retain perfect control of your character, it's in 3D which requires the game to step in to make up the difference in precision possible with the extra dimension with a lock on system. It's shockingly unreliable for a game who's entire strategy revolves about picking out specific targets. If there's a horde of enemies on screen and you want to start with the small target in the back to build up cursed energy and stay on the move, good luck making sure the camera doesn't snap to any of the enemies in-between. Sometimes it doesn't even snap to enemies at all, with the camera staying stationary when you press the lock on with enemies behind you. That's the time you'd most need the game to snap to attention. It's the most imprecise tool possible in a game trying to encourage precise play. That's a long enough scarf for the game to trip over.
The core premise of your clan being possessed and you being forced to pick them off one by one is a good enough hook, but the story overall isn't fleshed out enough to work any meaningful drama from it. The boss squad makes for some entertaining fights and diverse personalities, but the first time the player meets most of them will be in these battles even as Hotsuma recalls cherished histories for them all.
Level design is of questionable importance when given a well fleshed out, varied combat system but for something this simple and to-the-point it was an opportunity to add some much needed variety. They only manage it some of the time though, with battles over bottomless pits or in narrow hallways that leave little room to skirt around enemy fire the best the game can come up with. Repeated level chunks in the same area don't help. Sometimes it feels like you've replayed a level a few times by the time you've gotten through it once.
Varied enemy design tries to pick up the slack here but despite there being some decent variety on the art side there's not a ton separating them all mechanically. You have smaller, floating turret enemies meant to be fodder, more standard types on the ground meant to gang up on the player and corrall them in with defensive play, and larger varieties of each that take a fully charged sword to take down effectively Even in the most varied cases you'd ideally be killing the enemies before they can get their gameplan going anyway so they all start to blend together.
Bosses usually are a highlight though. The lack of a tutorial is baffling at first but you'll quickly realize that the strict damage thresholds of the bosses are the method the game chose for teaching players about the Tate system. You simple won't make any meaningful gains on without understanding it. I'm not sure if the boss in the third level is even beatable without taking it in consideration. It's easy to see how this game got it's reputation, but the bosses flip on their head in a really cathartic way once you "get it". This might be the only action game that I've ever gotten an S rank on a late game boss on my first try. The way this game's systems flip from obtuse and frustrating to simplistic and empowering once the gap in understanding is crossed is the most extreme I've ever seen.
Once you "get it" it's a hard game to hate. It fufills the ninja fantasy well enough with it's focus on speed and precision and there's enough depth here to make for some pretty decent score attack fun here too, but a lack of polish and variety hold it back from it's true potential. It's got me interested in checking out nightshade, since I feel like it could really succeed with a second pass.