The Revenge of Shinobi (Genesis/Mega Drive)
The Revenge of Shinobi was reissued a few times, so depending on the version you play, you might see varying levels of copyright infringement. On initial release, a flamethrower-wielding enemy looked a lot like Rambo, a boss character that looked like Spider-Man fired webs down at you before transforming into a flying form that looked instead like Batman, and the most flagrant of all, one boss is undeniably based on Godzilla just with his back spines missing. Why these designs were included in the second installment of a successful Sega franchise remains a bit of a mystery, members of the development team acknowledging it later on but also trying to pass elements like the Godzilla boss off as a “brontosaurus” despite looking nothing like that dinosaur. Sega seemingly never got in hot water for these choices, likely because revisions were quickly issued that change the looks of these characters to be more distinct. Godzilla was placed with a rather striking skeletal dinosaur with visible organs instead, the Rambo and Batman characters were altered… and in some versions, the Spider-Man fight was made to actually feature an authentic Spider-Man design thanks to Sega getting the rights to put the character into video games at the time. While this quirky bit of trivia about The Revenge of Shinobi is certainly its most memorable element, there is a lot more to this game than just a few oddly familiar faces.
In the modern day world of The Revenge of Shinobi, the forces of the villainous organization known as Neo Zeed aim to conquer the planet, their group a revival of the Zeed organization that the ninja Musashi had destroyed in the previous Shinobi title. To try and discourage Musashi from interfering again, they kidnap Musashi’s bride and kill his sensei, but naturally this only strengthens his resolve as he swears revenge and sets off to find its members. This side-scrolling action platformer starts you off in some traditional medieval Japan settings such as a bamboo forest before the globetrotting mission of Musashi takes him to places like a nightclub in Tokyo or a Detroit junkyard, the player not only facing other shinobi but soldiers with rifles and even laser-firing machines. The “brontosaurus” boss is a bit of an outlier in the kind of creatures and areas that are normally featured, the game seeming to approach its designs with a near-future sci-fi bent where you can find robots and lasers but you won’t find any flying cars in its urban areas. The setting variety does ensure a good range in the kinds of dangers you can encounter too, enemy types like opposing ninja encountered early on not appearing for a while until you start reaching areas more thematically appropriate.
Most of the enemies you face will only pack one trick you need to worry about though, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. Musashi can afford to take multiple hits thanks to his health bar, but not all hits do an equal amount of damage. A boss can shear off many notches on the life bar with a single attack, but conversely even when your health bar is almost empty, sometimes you can find yourself surviving a few gunshots from a standard foe. A lot of the difficulty in The Revenge of Shinobi comes from needing to advance carefully so that you don’t needlessly walk into danger. There’s a somewhat compelling sense of uncertainty that comes from knowing you can sustain a few hits and press on through a stage but allowing yourself to be hit too many times can make it an issue when you come across one of those heavy hitters at a point where you might not be able to safely outmaneuver them.
Your shinobi’s main means of dealing with his enemies will be what the manual incorrectly refers to as “Shurikins”, a simple press of the attack button letting you hurl a throwing dagger the full length of the screen. It can hit off-screen enemies to a certain degree so you can test to see if there’s someone waiting to ambush you just out of sight, but you also can’t use these sloppily since you have a limited amount. You are free to set how many “Shurikins” Musashi has at the start of a life in the options menu and there’s even a simple cheat code to gain an infinite amount of them, but even if you stray from the default 50 to go with 99 instead, it is a richer experience to have such limits since a good deal of level design tries placing weapon refills in slightly hard to reach places that reward mild exploration. You’ll need to endanger yourself a little to bust open crates to see if some Shurikin refills are inside, some instead containing bombs while others can have healing hearts. The promise of a potential heal can make you still try to outmaneuver some enemies or jump to dangerous perches to investigate these boxes, but the heals are rare and more importantly, you have one technique whose power is meant to be reined in by its high throwing dagger cost.
Musashi can throw daggers normally while jumping, but if you perform a midair somersault jump, you can attack then and unleash a fan of eight daggers that is great for clearing out foes and damaging bosses. Boss battles can sometimes require you to hit their face square-on with a dagger to do damage so having eight fling out in different directions hedges your bets, and some areas in the game are definitely designed a bit as “jump traps” where you leap into the fray and suddenly find a group of enemies all around you. You need to quickly weigh up if your safety is worth the dagger expenditure, and with some of these ambushes unfortunately positioned next to instant death drops, you don’t want to guess wrong and get knocked to your doom. There are different difficulty modes that can lessen the pretty high challenge level of the game some in case you want to still have those interesting moments without feeling tempted by a cheat, but there are a few moments in the main adventure where the difficulty feels a bit less fair. One involves your midair jump, its rigid controls likely to lead to some trouble as you learn its timing. To get this second boost to your height and distance, you’ll need to press jump again at the apex of your first leap, this certainly taking some time to perfect in a game that isn’t afraid to kill you or injure you heavily for missing it at a key moment. Even once you’ve got it down though, the game puts in a few moments where you need to time that jump perfectly or you will miss a vital jump. The Breakwater level at a New York City dock features one such pinpoint jump where you need to be exact or you’ll die and need to repeat the entire level in full, most levels not too long but the ones that do require such perfection wearing down some otherwise decent and varied designs.
Luckily, Musashi has another trick up his sleeve and an interesting consideration to make during your adventure. Musashi knows four types of Ninjutsu, these magic ninja spells able to grant him different abilities. Fushin for example makes your jumps even higher and carry Musashi further, but if there are too many enemies on screen for you to safely deal with, you might want to whip out Kariu instead and summon pillars of fire to wipe them out. Ikazuchi is perhaps the most consistently useful, a shield of electric energy surrounding Musashi and allowing him to sustain additional hits without flinching or losing life. Lastly, Mijin is an interesting gamble, the player sacrificing a backup life to deal some fairly heavy damage to anyone hit by Musashi’s self-destruct technique. Mijin is free to use as long as you’re willing to pay the price and Fushin can be used alongside either Kariu or Ikazuchi, but those two spells can only be utilized once per life or world. There are opportunities to gain additional uses, but those refills are the kind of secret you stumble upon rather than find through any set of clues. If you do find yourself in a tough situation though, having Ikazuchi on hand to let you power through it is an interesting option that continues to contribute to the game’s focus on thoughtful progression despite you and your enemies often engaging each other through simple attacks.
If this was all there was to say about The Revenge of Shinobi, then the game could have been rubber stamped with a Good rating and we can move on, but it’s not quite the full picture. Unfortunately, The Revenge of Shinobi has a bit of a problem with blind jumps and as a result, some dependence on memorization. At a few points, these blind jumps are almost justified. Sometimes you may take a high road to break open some crates for extra goodies, the risk involved in pursuing them being you won’t know if there’s safe ground below you when you’re done. When a blind jump is part of the expected level path though, it’s not always to safe ground. You can usually see far enough ahead that you won’t throw yourself into bottomless pits, but you can end up dropping into situations where enemies stand ready to strike and Musashi isn’t always fast enough to reply to these if you didn’t know they were already there. The Chinatown level has a bit of a problem where you scale and drop down from various ledges on its buildings, sometimes needing to just hope there isn’t an enemy below or above you because even a chance to peek at what’s there doesn’t mean the enemy is staying put. Ikazuchi can almost become a way to hedge your bets during these moments to ensure a cheap ambush doesn’t lead to a quick death, but there are also rare moments where an enemy you haven’t even seen yet can attack from off-screen. Laser turrets in the skyscraper and grenade throwing soldiers can start putting attacks out before you have reason to believe they’re ahead, so if you don’t first learn of their presence through being hurt by them on a previous life, you won’t know how to progress forward safely. That health bar does prevent these from being awful gotchas, but it does drag down the experience a bit. A few bosses that require more time than skill can also dampen the fun a bit like a brain in a machine that poses no threat once you learn the basic attack pattern, but there are still good bosses here and there as well as some effective level designs that balance out those moments something is bland or outright bothersome.
THE VERDICT: For many games, having a rigid double jump, leaps into unknown and often dangerous situations, and off-screen enemies you couldn’t have anticipated could have doomed them to being awful, but they don’t quite kill the better moments of The Revenge of Shinobi thanks in part to their relatively reserved impact. The difficulty is high and trying to mitigate and plan around it gives the action platforming its appeal, the player needing to be careful in how they approach situations but also forced to be reactive at times when the game puts the squeeze on you. Balancing your throwing dagger output, searching for extra resources, and knowing when it’s time to whip out some ninjutsu ensure this game still has some strategic appeal despite those moments where it briefly throws away that emphasis for a blind jump into a potentially deadly scenario.
And so, I give The Revenge of Shinobi for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…
An OKAY rating. As alluded to above, The Revenge of Shinobi could have earned itself a good rating if it didn’t lean into a few bugbears of how difficulty was achieved in games of its time. Making a pixel perfect jump is a rather bland pass/fail sort of test of a skill that isn’t nearly as important as the more fascinating need to weigh how to manage your Shurikins and ninjutsu to slip past some legitimately dangerous enemies. Having an enemy blast you before you even had a chance to learn they exist just hints at the fact the game isn’t afraid to land some cheap deaths to try and wear down your lives and continues for an artificially longer experience. A few weak boss fights wouldn’t leave much of a mark on it, but those moments where the player needs to have learned through a loss what lies ahead add an unnecessary sting to a game that can earn plenty of fair kills on you just through placing enemies well. The life bar does do some important work in making sure you aren’t always going to be frustrated when these situations arise, and there are definitely some boss battles and levels that not only put you to the test properly but make it satisfying once you understand them well enough to press forward with less hesitation. The degree of risk involved in progression does keep you on edge though and thinking about when you should potentially use your back-up options, so there are many moments where The Revenge of Shinobi is just an enjoyably difficult ninja action game. Had the implementation of such a high level of challenge had been smooth then it could even be one that wouldn’t need warnings that it had a few design ideas that lost favor over time.
The Revenge of Shinobi thankfully didn’t need a bunch of inexplicable cases of copyright infringement to be interesting, and considering modern rereleases of the game feature none of them, it is now left only to stand on the quality of what its gameplay offers. For the most part, it does have a lot to give, but it too often dips its toes into weak approaches to adding difficulty to get a full-hearted recommendation. At the same time, modern rereleases can sometimes mitigate the ambushes and blind jumps with the ability to save anytime and retry from that spot, so there are now ways to get around the moments its interesting design slips up a bit. It would be nicer if it was a clean experience where players wouldn’t feel a need for such things, but The Revenge of Shinobi still has an entertaining enough adventure to offer whether you boot it up on original hardware to fight Spider-Man or play a modern rerelease where a bright pink stand-in shoots web at you instead.