Shinobi no Okite/The three female ninjas Reviews

After more than seven months, nobody has posted a review for this game? Talk about unusual. In any event, I posted a video with a full overview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6ngbt4xtck To summarize, this game is one part history lesson, one part advertisement (on why to visit Japan) and one part mediocre "Qix" clone, and is incredibly Indie/Doujin in just about every way. If you're not familiar with 1981's "Qix", the basic idea is that you move around a perimeter (most often a square or rectangle) and "draw or cut" a portion of it out to reveal an image until you've revealed the majority of it while utilizing power-ups and avoiding enemies / obstacles. There are subtle differences between the various Qix-esque games, but they are mostly the same at their core and most of them are better offerings than this (some examples include "Battle Qix", "Dancing Eyes", "Cacoma Knight", "Gals Panic", the Doujin "Gal Pani X", etc.). With that in mind, the game is a hard "maybe" as Steam does not have a neutral rating and is recommended purely for its price point and its attempt to promote various Japanese locales.

I only found out about this game because I searched on Google for the name "Panther Software" -- developers of obscure games like Space Griffon VF-9 for the original PlayStation and Metal Dungeon for the original XBox -- and I found out that they released this game on Steam. I mean, I believe it's the same Panther Software, but after playing this game, it's hard to tell. Shinobi no Okite is a Qix clone. It's basically an action-puzzle game where you move your character around the screen and draw lines that will, slowly, uncover a picture. Reach the required percentage in each stage and you can advance to the next. Easy enough to understand, but hard to master. As far as I know, this is the only Qix-style game on steam with controller support, both digital and analog. Since it's dirty cheap, I didn't have much to lose. Boy, was I in for a rough journey. The best thing about this game is that it actually teaches a lot about Japan. The story is pretty bad and the translation is very poor, but beneath the terrible presentation there is something to be learned about the history of Japan. You follow a group of female ninjas who travel through the 53 stations of the Tokaido road. Stop at one of the stations, uncover one of the ukiyo-e prints, learn a bit about the station and move on to the next. Not a bad idea for a game, but one that severely lacks effort. While the ukiyo-e prints are beautiful and acceptable in quality, most of the photos of the locations are low resolution and some are cropped and displayed in very small sizes. The font is hard to read sometimes and the translation seems to be machine generated, with very poor results overall. The characters are dull, with no personality and with a tendency of repeating the same things all over again. The music and sound effects are forgettable and inoffensive enough not to get in the way. The main problem with this game is that the gameplay is very unbalanced. The game gets hard pretty fast with up to 10 enemies on screen. They move very quickly all over the place and are immune to the obstacles. Also, they throw bombs that will make things a lot harder than they should be. You have to complete stages with a set number of lives and a very limited time. Even if it was possible to set the enemies to half the speed and double the amount of time in a single stage, it would still be too hard for most people to even keep playing. How do you win, then? Each character has a special attack. One of the characters has a level 3 attack that gives you a 33% chance of instantly clearing the stage. Yeah, the game expects you to cheat your way to the end. Not my idea of fun, to be honest. Also, there are no trading cards to collect or achievements. You can't even make the game run in full screen! Honestly, it's impossible to recommend this game. It needs a lot of work to become acceptable. The idea of uncovering ukiyo-e prints and learning more about the history of Japan is very good, but this game is awful.