570: The Revenge of Shinobi (The Super Shinobi)

[JaySevenZero]

Here's where you can contribute your thoughts and opinions for The Revenge of Shinobi (The Super Shinobi) for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

A friendly reminder that where the feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but keeping it brief is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mostly reading out essays. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.

[Mr Ixolite]

Booting this up immediately after Shadow Dancer, I initially felt like a lot of my gripes with that game had been adressed. Level designs were more elaborate, there were more of them, and crucially Joe Musashi could now take more than one hit before crumpling like a piece of paper. You could even recover your hit points! And so I played through the early stages of the game with way fewer newfangled assists than before.

Yet as I progressed through the stages frustration set in again, in new ways. I would often find myself running out of shurikens, especially during boss battles, leaving me almost entirely ineffectual. The more elaborate stages would increasingly rely on a fiddly double jump that I could maybe generously execute 1 out of 4 times. But the real kicker was the enemy placement, which progressed from tricky to infuriating. I would constantly take damage from shots fired offscreen, or be knocked backwards into instant death by an enemy who suddenly materialized at the other side of the pit I was trying to jump. Some of these enemies were so clearly placed just to troll the player that I couldn't help but laugh, but it became a bitter laugh, and by the highway stage where I had to juggle soldiers, moving cars, ninja-nuns and changing planes with the fiddly double jump I was rewinding as much as I ever did in Shadow Dancer.

With trial and error and repeated playthroughs everything in this game can of course almost certainly be learned, I just wasn't having enough fun to ever consider such a time commitment. After bumbling around in the final level labyrinth for a while I decided to put the game now. Still, the gameplay steps taken here were enough to convince me to stick with the series for shinobi 3, as well as the fact that the game certainly had personality. Even in the lightly altered version I played, theres just something fun about fighting what are clearly discount versions of Spider-Man and The Terminator.

3 word review:
Unreliably somersaulting ninja

[ColinAlonso]

Since Mr Ixolite mentioned it, if people want more shurikens, there is a cheat for infinite shurikens.

Go to the options screen and change the amount of shurikens to 00 and leave the cursor there for a while. The 00 will change to an infinite symbol.

Some 90s childhood knowledge there, can't remember the last time I played without that cheat.