The Revenge of Shinobi

"The Revenge of Shinobi: A very shameful way to take revenge."

Cool! Nevet thought I would find what I thought a rare find around the 2nd hand portion of my beloved gaming shop. I wonder such a gem would end here. Well, the cartridge do look cool and I think Shiboni Game has a well established name for the ninja platformer. I got the game and I thought I got a cool game for 5 bucks heck I think Mario's cooler now. Anyway, let's just all calm down and be fair with everything.

Gameplay
Platformers or Slash em' up type of genres should be wooing people with their wicked gameplay. It's perhaps what we could say as the 'Heart and Soul' of any platformer games. In 'The Revenge of Shinobi' the gameplay do really looks down on it's name, something not good if they'be released strings of hot games then ending with one like this in such a system(in GBA to be exact). The gamepaly is rather boring and annoying. You'll be having 10 Life Points represented in a bar which will diminish ones hit or you went too close to an enemy. Then again most enemies have a single or if you're lucky would have two or three patterns. Unfortunately even the boss do have a very predictable pattern. To make things short. The game is virtually something like those hack em' um platformers seen on the NES or SNES systems. Boss and enemies a like are tiny to not a threat at all and each level is comprised of series of houses that has just one plan design and a long road full of enemies. The fun in the game will definitely be gone after playing it for a straight 5 minutes. The controls are rather awful as you'll need to see the manual or something to learn how to use certain scrolls. Reacting to something is rather annoying as it's really really slow and you'll get two or so points off your life. The game isn't much of a challenge and would only offer you annoying levels that has series of jumps to be performed other than that there's not much of a threat around the area.

Story
The story starts right off the game. There's this 5 Warlords who onces defeated an evil villain. This warlords then settled and brought peace back again but before they knew it they've succumb to the evil force of the villain and ended up turning themselves like one. Now they're up to destroy the land they've ones defended and there you stand to keep them from succeeding. A really nice story for a very simple game or at least that's what I thought. Story unfolds to slow and is not that involving. I've went through the rest of the game with out even reading what they had to say. I guess the story is not that intriguing and would even be enough for such a game. Then again the starting intermission is rather cool. I guess the coolest in the game!

Graphics/Sounds
If the gameplay's the 'heart and soul' of a game then the 'Audio/Video' makes it as the external appearance of it. A great game would never fall short with this area but with an advanced portable version of GameBoy it may have looked a lot better than this. The graphics aren't that great at all in fact I think the time the game was made certain games(I shouldn't be naming them) had shown a lot of better graphics and was released perhaps not that far from the time it was released. Not much animation in this part either though you'll see different attacks or Makimono/Ninja scroll moves in a cool way onces in a while. The game doesn't have much animation either and the lack of it really affected the annoying scale of the game. The areas and palces all looks a like and you'll find yourself running in circles if you're not that ready.

The music is rather old and is the usual chinese tune played in some chinese movies. Simple chimes, gongs and stuffs plays around too bad the game doesn't really need them much. The game lacks a lot of varios grunts from both the enemies/bosses and the ninja itself. Even the special scroll moves deserves a lot better than a shattering sound.

Replayability
Other than the really annoying stuffs above. Replayability scores the highest of all. Since there are a total of 3 honors you could recieve figuring out how is a totally annoying process. The game simply features such replayability to go over a beaten level and try to earn certain honors which in my opinion doesn't really have that certain effect on either the story or the game itself. Going over the same annoying level over and over is too much. I guess this part depends on you!

Final Recommendation
I suggest this is to those who simply want to have a Shinobi games collection this is something you should have if you don't wanna miss for your collection though I suggest when displaying them hide it under it's DVD counterpart to simply avoid certain questions. To the others I say you test it out yourself and if you find it as bad as some reviews or my review does said then just spread the word to your friends. In my final recommendation the game deserves a better one though I say not to buy it even if you think it's a bargain. There are other stuffs you could avail off and get better things out of your 5 bucks(which in my case).

Overall = 1/10

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 06/16/03, Updated 06/16/03