Shadow of the Ninja - Reborn Steam Charts & Stats

Finished Shadow of the Ninja Reborn, This is a Remaster of an NES title that was ultra hard back in the day. It’s a short and sweet game but it is VERY challenging when you first play and requires a lot of muscle memory to develop in how the enemies move and the overall timing of the platforming and using a variety of items to get through certain sections of the games. An issue I have is that there should be more of a tutorial teaching all of the different moves and one of them you need to learn at the far end of the game requires you to know but nowhere in the game tells you how to do it and you to look it up in the manual of the original release of the game and a lot of new players are not going to be privy to these moves. The Graphical update is very impressive. The Pixel sprite animations are a hugh grade compared to the original where everything looks very vibrant and the aesthetics really shine through and the Boss Animations received an overhaul in how they’re designed and presented. The Gameplay very much trial and error like a metal slug type game where you go across the stage in a limited time and the level design is challenging to platform while also combating the enemies. The enemy variety and their placement will have you do a lot of split second decision making into how to approach and eliminate them and also kind of trial and error to teach to avoid them.

This is an underrated action platformer that is both very replayable and fun to master. I know some people might say it feels "clunky" to control but after spending more time with the game I don't feel this at all. Some aspects might take a while to get used to, however learning how effectively deal with enemies and platforming is very rewarding. While at first you might play very slow and take a lot of damage, over time you start to navigate stages swiftly and elegantly. The feeling of getting better and more ninja-like is really cool, and this game scratches an itch not many others can. I love this game and I'm really excited to see what this team does next.

The beauty of the gameplay here, much like in the original, is that the design values and rewards above all else intentional and considered actions on the part of the player. If the player is unwilling to meet the specific type of challenge that this game is creating, or are expecting the game to be something that it is not, then they're going to have a rough time. In Shadow of the Ninja, you're not a hacking and slashing maniac bouncing around mashing buttons. You're a ninja, your every move is carefully considered and executed with intention. Your enemies are very well designed and behave in ways that can be exploited or avoided. Once you become observant of what is happening around you and act with intention, jumps that perhaps felt awkward at first now reveal the graceful finesse of their design in carrying out your attacks. Once you begin to really observe your enemies and surroundings, areas where you have failed many times before will become just a walk through your living room. The great strength of Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is in its consistency in applying a very purposeful vision for design in 2D movement and action gameplay that greatly rewards players who engage with it. Any frustration one might feel in failing to its difficulty are just in feeling frustrated at one's own dexterity and coordination, as the game's design is so admirably fair. Any time I ever fell to my death or got knocked off a ledge by an enemy shot, I never had the feeling that the game had dealt a cheap shot, I only knew that I had been punished by being too hasty or unobservant. Truly a masterclass in game design, which combined with the beautiful visuals and incredible music make for an unforgettable challenge.

Currently working through it on Hard mode, skipping Normal because I hate myself. This is a very different game from the one it's ostensibly a remake of, but that's not a complaint; apparently some of the original game's dev team worked on this, and they [i]get[/i] it. This is how you bring back the spirit of old platformers while incorporating more modern sensibilities, but not so much that the game loses its identity. This is [i]not[/i] a Metroidvania with "build variety" or anything of that nature. This is a old-school-adjacent platformer you have to approach the way [i]it wants to be played[/i], which means getting accustomed to how the basic controls, character kits, weapons, etc. all handle. Failure to do so will be met with swift punishment. Panicking and pressing buttons will result in a doubling-down of the aforementioned swift punishment. And you only have one life, so make it count; while you can continue from a checkpoint if you die, you lose everything including items and sword power-ups, so if something was able to kill you, you're probably not gonna do any better with nothing but the wits that got you killed in the first place. This is not a game you play to make numbers go up for hours on end. It's not a game with battle passes, or seasonal content, or all those other buzzwords that make me taste vomit when I read them. You git gud or you get filtered, and with a title like this, the gitting gud part is the meat and bones of the """content""". Then you start to see how hard you can break it. The only thing I can say I don't like is how the inventory swapping works. I get [i]why[/i] the devs implemented it the way it is, but it's quite clunky. That's not going to stop me from enjoying the game, though. In many ways, this game seems less like its namesake and more to have taken inspiration from the higher-quality late-in-life platformers on the NES. Like Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight, Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, or Shatterhand*, but with an inventory system. It's well-designed, and the game doesn't ask anything impossible of you, but be prepared for pain if you slip up. It's as much a puzzle game at times as it is a classic platformer. If we're making first-person-shooter comparisons, it's built with the intentional jackassery that something like The Plutonia Experiment was designed around, where it [i]wants[/i] you to work for your reward but you feel like a god once everything clicks. If that all sounds up your alley, get this now. (Speaking of Shatterhand...pretty please, NatsumeAtari?)