The Revenge of Shinobi (GBA)

The Revenge of Shinobi is a 1989 action platformer for Sega Genesis and Mega Drive best known for its high difficulty and unusual inclusion of characters who potentially infringed on copyrights, and for people seeing a Game Boy Advance game by that name on the store shelves back in 2002, they’d have every reason to believe the game was a port or remake of that title despite THQ’s logo sitting on the cover instead of Sega’s. Should they purchase it and play it though, they’ll find this game also called The Revenge of Shinobi is a different experience and one with dubious connections to the broader Shinobi series as a whole. While Sega’s name appears in the credits and they published this game in Europe, this GBA title feels very much like an unrelated ninja game that tried to bank on sharing its name with a nostalgic classic.

 

The name of The Revenge of Shinobi is a bit more literal in this case than its predecessor, as the ninja hero this time is actually named Shinobi (which is itself just the original word used to describe ninjas). While it takes a while for some personal vengeance to come up as a proper motivation for Shinobi, his story begins with his sensei teaching him about a historical villain named Ashira-o and how a group of five shoguns came together to defeat him with their elemental swords. Unfortunately, after the fight the shoguns gradually became corrupted by their blades and now cannot be trusted with their powerful weapons. Shinobi is sent out to retrieve each blade, most encounters not digging much deeper into this plot save for the appearance of a fellow pupil of Shinobi’s sensei, although Zhang’s brief appearances in the plot are a poor attempt to milk some angst from a hero whose motivations and reactions are pretty generic.

This action platformer is definitely focused in more on the gameplay, and in some ways The Revenge of Shinobi does play a bit like the game whose name it borrows. The side-scrolling stages place plenty of enemies in your path you need to approach with some degree of caution, it often important to space yourself enough that you can do your vertical katana slash to hurt them without them landing a hit of their own. Most enemies take multiple hits to down though, so briefly you’re trying to manage the distance between you and the enemy so you’re the only one scoring hits. These quick skirmishes don’t demand much time and your spacing consideration is often just not moving in closer than you need to be, but the number of them does add up across the length of a stage and some enemies are better at getting around your basic attack option. A woman with a sickle on a chain can attack from further away than you so you’ll want to keep up the pressure, many enemies try to jump over you to try and land right beside you, and a few like a man wielding a pair of large swords almost do not seem to care about the incoming damage if you hit them mid-attack. Most enemies flinch and fall back a bit when hit, but this man will continue forward and deal significant damage to Shinobi. Unfortunately enemies like this man pose an annoying level of danger since Shinobi doesn’t move all that quickly, and while it’s expected to eat some damage on your journey, other times a boulder or mine cart comes rolling at you so quickly your sluggish ninja can’t avoid them in time and he can be nearly wiped out by the impact.

 

To deal with enemies who are a bit more dangerous up close you can throw shurikens, the player needing to collect more ninja stars as they traverse stages to keep their reserves well stocked. They do about as much damage as the blade but you won’t get a huge amount of them even if you scour levels, so they’re not quite a remedy for enemies like the double sword user who can, notably, travels far enough that you might get hit even if you try to fight him from afar due to the small amount of screen real estate. It’s fine to encourage the player to be cautious by having some legitimate threats in their path, but some of the threats can attack the moment they’re visible and can’t be harmed when off-screen. Fights thus tend to range from so simple you slash a baddy up and move along without a thought to an ambush where you’re frustrated by the sudden damage and then take them down before moving onward and hoping there’s no more dirty tricks.

You do gradually acquire magic spells on your journey, although initially these have about the same reach as your sword so it’s hard to justify their use. Once you later start finding scrolls with spell upgrades on them, you can start utilizing powers that launch projectiles or hit everything on screen, time freezing when the spell activates to ensure they don’t miss after you lined things up. They’re not all that powerful still and getting energy for them can be quite gradual, many levels having side paths or buildings you can enter mostly for the sake of building up magic energy, potentially finding health refills, or occasionally finding the upgrade scrolls. While the game does feature a range of locations as you journey to each shogun, the player finding themselves scaling a mountainside, exploring swamps, and crossing through a graveyard, many of them also have buildings you can pop in that are unusually enough fairly identical in layout and mostly just vary in size and the exact kinds of enemies within. Most are optional but some have keys to progress, so it is nice that you can skip them if you’re not looking for goodies, especially since after a death within a stage you have to repeat the entire level. Most stages much shorter once you know what’s ahead and that you don’t need to enter certain buildings, but that doesn’t make them more enjoyable, just easier to progress through.

 

The Revenge of Shinobi does do an odd thing when it starts off, the player initially only having a single jump despite many early stages tantalizing you with spots that are just barely out of reach. Some of these areas look like you should be able to climb up onto them, but instead you’re meant to get a double jump later and return to these stages mostly just so you can fight some enemies you couldn’t before and find health and magic refills that aren’t exactly long-term rewards. Instead, these are meant to play into the honors you can collect, the player earning special commendation if they collect every item in a stage, defeat every enemy, or finish a level without getting hurt. The honors aren’t necessary so you aren’t forced to repeat any level, but the game’s lack of an internal save battery does make going for full completion less appealing. After all, writing down the various long passwords on a quest that will be rather dull is hard to muster up the energy for. There are minigame like levels where you have infinite shurikens and throw them at running ninjas in a first-person perspective, but the reward for beating them is just a handful of shurikens for regular stages. The minigames themselves are a bit annoying yoo as ninjas jump between layers and can’t be hurt while jumping, meaning if you aren’t positioned right when one appears they can decide to jump twice and end your run.

 

Bosses were likely meant to be a highlight, but even if you don’t save up your magic spells for them, they usually range between something close to a particularly durable enemy to something that you might be able to wrap up surprisingly quickly if you’re aggressive and corner them. The shogun Bashira is fought on a boat, and while most boss arenas have items you can collect to ensure you have some reserve health or magic, I didn’t even get a chance to look around since the fight was over too quickly. Some later bosses do have an impressive look like a large dragon despite the fight being a slog as you easily dodge it and try to land a hit during its very brief moments of vulnerability. Like most things in The Revenge of Shinobi though, these boss battles are often dull and occasionally annoying, their failures not bombastic but there’s rarely tension because you’re more likely to be wiped out by the unexpected rather than something putting up a good fight or testing your battle management skills.

THE VERDICT: The Revenge of Shinobi on Game Boy Advance wants to be about cautiously approaching battles so you’re landing hits and avoiding the enemy’s weapons, but most of the foes you encounter are too easily taken out by playing a touch carefully and the dangers that can’t be overcome this way are dangerous because they’re surprises you don’t have the time to react to. Level exploration loses its appeal when the rewards are often rather weak, so for the most part you press forward plainly, not having to think about much besides swinging your sword and throwing the occasional shuriken to overcome most of what a stage has to offer.

 

And so, I give The Revenge of Shinobi for Game Boy Advance…

A BAD rating. The Revenge of Shinobi gets pretty repetitive early on and doesn’t really do much to spice up the adventure. Some levels may be more vertical, feature something like a crumbling floor, or shift up the kind of environmental danger they feature like spikes or tall grass that slows you down, but it’s not enough to distract from the fact that much of your work is put into overcoming enemies who are cut from two types of cloth. The less troublesome enemies do make the adventure more boring than frustrating thanks to their greater number, but the foes who rely on surprise strikes or ignoring your efforts to hold them at bay like the double sword warrior would be easier to deal with if the screen wasn’t working against you. The Revenge of Shinobi uses pre-rendered images for its character art, meaning they were first modeled in 3D and then drawn in pixels to have a sense of depth, but to show them off the game limited the amount of characters who could be on screen and thus you have those meddlesome moments where a mine cart rushes into view and you’re likely to lose a huge chunk of health to this new unexpected danger. Perhaps worse is the fact the game clearly gives itself more room for safety than you have, as there can be times an archer is above you and his feet are visible, but if you try to slash them, you will do no damage. He can still fire an arrow at you and hurt you, but even if you’re on an even level with a foe who uses projectiles they’ll probably fire them the moment you spot them so you need to hope your reflexes are faster than a fireball. It can feel like these nuisances justify entering buildings to stock up on health refills and the like, but that doesn’t make entering the same similar structures any more enticing. Funnily enough a greater focus on the more dangerous foes might have helped the game, but it would have also had to come with more time to spot what they’re doing and react. A lot of your activities involve pressing forward through unexciting skirmishes that pose little threat though, and while that currently ensures The Revenge of Shinobi is more dull that awful, it also means you won’t walk away with many memories of interesting battles. What few memories that do linger will likely be the boss fights that looked cool but came up short.

 

Malaise from repetitive enemy slashing is likely the kind of emotion one would walk away from The Revenge of Shinobi on GBA feeling rather than resentment, save for of course some irritation at it masquerading as a better game from the past with its stolen title. It’s a boring side-scroller who only gets its sudden sparks of energy from areas where something is out of tune with its usually lifeless action, but at least you might feel something about the sudden unfairness of a fireball launched the moment a miniboss stops speaking. The unusual name situation remains more interesting than most of what The Revenge of Shinobi on GBA offers, because while it is easy to see how some of its enemies and stage layouts could have worked in a better balanced title, Shinobi’s limited skills funnel you into a bland and empty style of play.