Shadow of the Ninja - Reborn

Very satisfying to learn stages and progress little by little everytime after each game over. Tho I'm but a humble onigiri eater. Worth it.

This game is amazing to play especially when you look at the original version of the game.The original version shows how limiting the game development was back then and now if you look at the Reborn version, you can see some new Improvements in designs for characters like Golden Samurai and Garuda. It's like the devs didn't always want some bosses to be easy for players to defeat and they decided to improve boss battles for Garuda and Golden samurai in the reborn version.The designs are great especially the protagonists and the stages.I even love the feature where you can choose to buy items with the points you earned in the game. Not saying the original version looks bad.It looks good still. Both versions of shadow of the ninja look good IMO.

The Good: Top tier graphics and music. Satisfying when you get through things cleanly without a hitch. The Bad: The controls are absolute garbage. Swapping items is god awful. Jumps are terribly delayed and the wall climbing + edge grabbing + platforming climbing is some of the worst I've ever had to experience. Most of the "ninja tools" feel terrible to use, and your powered up slash projectiles have very poor hitboxes despite how they might look. Major lack of healing items in stages has you fiending for something after difficult treks through craptastic enemy placement and rough platforming bits. The Ugly: Game suddenly freezing+crashing after the end of a torturous section in Stage 5 involving lots of shitty climbing and cube turrets. Also the incredibly bland UI + Font choice in menus of course.

One of the first games that I have ever played in my life was Blue Shadow (or Shadow of the Ninja for those outside of Europe) and I have some fondest memories of playing that game. When I take nostalgia goggles off (and I have to do that as this game diverges from the original quite a bit), this game is still fun as all living hell. And tough as nails. It will punish you if you just decide to plow forward (ala Castlevania), so you really have to keep your focus. A solid 7 out of 10 for me.

The more I play it, the less I like it. This is my least favourite Tengo Project game by far, and that's a shame, because I love action-platformers. If you played Super Ghouls & Ghosts on SNES and gave up, this game is more like that than a game like Mega Man X/Zero or one of the major ninja game franchises. I also love pixel art, and this has better and more high-effort pixel art than 99% of indie games. Tengo remade the original NES version completely. I wish I could give it a positive review because of that, and I probably shouldn't, but I will anyway. So this game is extremely memorization-heavy, which isn't my thing. It has (1) a low margin for error, (2) lots of recovery on every action you take, and (3) level design that requires you to know in advance where the enemies and items are positioned, where and when it's safe to jump, etc. The game trolls you constantly by doing things like punishing you for going for an item box by placing an enemy a bit further away that shoots the exact location of the item. That's cool that it's a hardcore game, and I'm going to try and get good enough at this game to like it, but the basic gameplay just to pick it up and play it is not fun. I've gotten very frustrated at Wild Guns and Pocky & Rocky as well, but they are a lot more fun on a basic level than this is.

fantastic, I enjoyed playing it