Though Griptonite Games may not be the original developers of Sega's beloved Shinobi franchise, it seems like there are at least a handful of people on the team that care about producing a faithful update to the side-scrolling ninja action found in games like Shinobi, The Revenge of Shinobi, and Shinobi III. The company's new Shinobi game for the Nintendo 3DS looks like it might be a pretty cool throwback to those days.
Shinobi--yeah, it's known as simply "Shinobi"--is a polygonal game with 2D gameplay that puts you in the role of Joe Musashi's father, Jiro Musashi. You'll run to the right (and sometimes the left!) and slice up enemies with a sword as you go. You can also opt to toss out some throwing knives, though instead of having you pick up additional knives as you move through the levels, the game instead slowly refills your stock after you use them. It appears to have the effect of making sure that you have the knives ready when you absolutely need them, but you'll never have so many that you can just blast through every single enemy you face from a safe distance. As in previous games, if you double-jump and press the knife button, you'll toss out your entire stock of them at different angles, allowing you to deal with multiple enemies at once. You can also parry by tapping the right trigger at just the right time. The parry feels nice and works even if you're in the air, giving you the ability to deal with most incoming attacks fairly easily, provided you're good at timing your attempts.
Traversal is once again a factor, as well. In addition to those double jumps, you can also triangle jump off of walls and cling to specific handholds on walls to reach higher platforms. Ropes and other ceiling-type surfaces can be grappled to and hung from, and you can leap up and down through specific platforms to get higher or lower, as the case may be. As you might expect from a Shinobi game handled in this style, there are four different types of ninja magic to choose from, and you'll only be able to use magic once in a level (though perhaps there are additional magic refills to be found in crates around the levels).
The game appears to take high scores fairly seriously, with big, red negative numbers that pop out every time you get hit and a lower-screen score display that has enough zeroes on it to imply that scores might get up into the millions. The game will have a built-in achievement system that gives you 60 different things to accomplish, with each giving you an unlockable thing if you complete the task. Additional outfits are one of the available unlocks.
Visually, the game looked a little funky, and the 3D effects didn't really add much to the game. Your ninja, as well as the enemy ninjas, didn't look all that great, and the anime-style cutscenes that split up the action didn't really add much to the game, either. On the other hand, the game will apparently resurrect the first-person shuriken tossing minigame found in the original Shinobi and there will be a level that takes place on the wings of a jet, which was described as an After Burner reference, but not shown.
Either way, Shinobi looked fairly promising, and as long as the game continues to require a bit of skill to play effectively, it could be pretty neat. Sega's releasing it in September.
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