This Shadow of the Ninja Reborn review is made based on playtesting on a Xbox Series X. The game is available for €/$19,99 on August 29th, 2024. The game is also released for PS4, Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Legendary publisher and developer Natsume is one of those rare smaller video game companies that managed to avoid being swallowed up by larger counterparts in the early 2000s. Yes, it merged with the Japanese Pachinko company Atari Inc. (not to be confused with the American company) but kept itself and its IPs intact throughout two turbulent decades in our beloved industry. While many might think it laid low and dormant during this time, Natsume actually published and developed a small but cohesive selection of retro-inspired games.
Its internal development studio Tengo Project has been steadily dishing out remakes of highly praised NES and SNES-era games. Titles like Pocky & Rocky Reshrined, Wild Guns Reloaded, and Ninja Saviors have been received with high praise and have seen various retail and limited physical releases, eagerly consumed by the retro collectors community. Now, another hidden gem NES release, Shadow of the Ninja, has been refitted to cater to the nostalgia-driven crowd.
The Remake
The original NES game Shadow of the Ninja was one of the first in a streak of great games Natsume created in the 1990s, during the NES’s twilight years. Like the late Sunsoft games on the platform, Natsume’s titles combined its solid, bespoke game engine, pumping music, and unique gameplay mechanics in to very playable and addictive productions. The same team that developed Power Blade 1 and 2 as an outsourced project for Taito built Shadow of the Ninja on the template set by those games. While the game’s name might not turn many heads today, back in 1990, Shadow of the Ninja was well received, earning near-perfect scores and being acknowledged for being on of the best coop games on the platform.
If you’re familiar with Wild Guns Reloaded and Pocky & Rocky Reshrined, you’ll immediately recognize the graphical style and production values in Shadow of the Ninja Reborn. The level of detail and the applied color palette are arguably among the best in the current wave of retro-inspired games. It doesn’t have much to do with the original game anymore, though. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The game takes us to the (now very) near future of 2029, where we enter an alternate reality where the evil emperor Garuda has taken over the United States and rules it with an iron hand. The Iga Clan has set out to topple this self-proclaimed empire, sending its two greatest ninjas to assassinate Garuda in his heavily guarded city citadel. This premise throws our heroes into a linear 2D platformer loaded with baddies, death traps, and platforming challenges.
Gameplay mechanics and level design
Players can choose between two heroes, Hayate or Kaede, who both play identically. Your ninja a mighty kusarigama equipped, a blade on a long chain. This weapon allows you to attack enemies and objects at eight different angles. For more direct melee attacks, you can use your trusty katana, which, when leveled up, generates a shockwave that gives the weapon some range as well. While your kusarigama is always available, you can swap out your katana for one of the many power-ups you pick up along the way. These pickups are displayed above your HP meter, but you can only use them in the order you collected them, with only your latest find available at any given time.
Bosses
After navigating through the stages, you’ll encounter mid-level and end-level bosses. The levels themselves require a lot of pattern recognition and patience; trying to “Rambo” your way through will almost certainly end in failure. It’s all about pacing yourself, taking on challenges as a ninja would, one at the time. You will die, though. As for the bosses, they’re a handful as well. Especially later on, the patterns don’t become immediately clear. But as is a trademark of Natsume games, perseverance usually pays off.
Power-Ups
Being overloaded with power-ups doesn’t actually help you get a grip on the game early on. The inability to pick which power-up to use and having to use them sequentially is stressful. Untill I found out that you can actually select the other items by combining the RB-button and left and right arrow on the D-pad. The included digital manual doesn’t mention this control function at all.. Still, switching power ups mid-battle is rather clumsy and stressful.
At a certain point, you do develop the skills to manage your inventory and get useful items in the right order, as they do come in handy with bosses and certain passages within levels. But it’s still counterintuitive and annoying, to say the least.
Clunky weapons
Another big gripe is the consistent but clunky weapon utilization. Using the chain has a huge window of vulnerability that makes your ninja an easy target from other angles. While this might be a downside of using such a long-range weapon, it still seems to add a few milliseconds of vulnerability after your hook shot animation finishes. Trying to mix your two weapons in high-paced combat situations is asking for trouble. Switching weapons adds a significant delay between finishing the first move and executing the second weapon’s animation. It sounds technical, but anyone playing the game would immediately recognize that it just isn’t very responsive in combat. Adopting a more calculated playstyle is the solution, but it’s much less satisfying. Jumps are a bit sluggish as well. Watching footage of the original game, the NES version looks much snappier, with more mid-air direction control and higher jumps.
Hockey stick difficulty curve
Then there’s the difficulty. Ok, I consider myself a casual gamer at best with the ability to push on. A great gamer I’m not. Thinking about your next moves and being cautious, instead of mindlessly rushing into things, definitely takes me a long way. Sure, trial and error is a key component of the game’s fun factor. But just past the halfway point, the game dishes out some nasty level designs that really made me sweat. Instead of making two steps forward, one step back, I resorted to trying to power through dense areas. I just took hits and hoped to have just enough HP left to reach the next stage segment and checkpoint.
That’s clearly not the way the game is intended to play. The level design in Reborn takes a lot of liberties to spice things up. When Shadow of the Ninja Reborn really starts to diverge from the original level design, though, it gets a bit too crazy for my taste. It makes the learning curve resemble a hockey stick rather a consistent imaginary 30 degree angled line. I’m not sure the fans of the original are looking for a kind of challenge. Past the halfway point, the game just throws everything it has at you. In a very un-Natsume way.
Multiplayer
Shadow of the Ninja Reborn features the option to play couch co-op. You and a friend each control one of the ninjas of course. It actually adds a lot of tactical options for tackling the stages, especially during boss fights. Playing the game on a Friday night with a pizza and a beer seems like a really good time to me.
Review written by Danny Neleman, proofread by AI. A review key has been provided by the publisher. Check out our other Xbox coverage on our Xbox landing page.
While Shadow of the Ninja Reborn starts out as an homage to its hidden gem source material, with core mechanics intact, it later introduces elements that aren't always for the better. Difficulty spikes and sluggish controls detract from the experience in an otherwise enjoyable game. However, the gameplay fundamentals are solid and the game looks and sounds amazing. Adding a layer of dystopian cybernetic pixelated sci-fi that the original could never (technically) deliver adds immensely to the game's production quality.
The good
- Looks amazing
- Fitting and booming retro beats by Iku Mizutani
- First 4 stages are fun to dissect and learn
- Fun couch co-op multiplayer
The bad
- The remaining stages are less fun to dissect and learn
- somewhat unresponsive controls
- Power up management is clumsy
