Gaming Target - Game Boy: The Revenge of Shinobi

Written by Tim McGrew on January 24, 2003

Review: It's definitely not your Grandpa's Shinobi!

Revenge of Shinobi has quite a few games preceding it. The series is now spanning three different platforms and arcade games as well as five separate installments including a second game bearing the same name as this particular Gameboy Advance title. It's not an easy heritage to live up to seeing as how nearly every game in the series has been filled with gameplay techniques that are unique and original to every game in the series.

Despite the series' amazing track record, Revenge of Shinobi comes up short in a lot of different ways. The game has a great deal of gameplay variety and the levels are drawn with a lot of detail and care, but the game itself is very slow, very easy, and very boring right from the start. Unfortunately, none of that changes for the entire length of the game.

As Shinobi, it's your job to break the curse of the world by collecting five swords protected by five Shogun warriors. Halting your progression, besides the five Shogun warriors, are hundreds of other ninja and samurai warriors trying to kill you before you can complete your task. It's a simple enough premise, but playing through it without falling asleep may be the most daunting task of all.

Shinobi has a great deal of moves to choose from, both from the onset and later on acquired in the game. The movements of Shinobi are also incredibly fluid and very quick, but the problem with this array of moves, which includes the standard jumping and slashing as well as crouching, jumping, throwing ninja stars, and executing magic attacks, is that not all of them are used in the game. There may be one particular instance where the move comes in handy, but after that, using them is rarely ever required.

What's worse is that with so many moves, you'd figure the enemies attacks would improve as you progress and gain experience. Alas, the enemies remain the same with the same slice and dice animations as in the first level. You'll actually train your eyes to look for segments of the levels that appear to be different from others and prepare yourself for an attacker to leap from that area and thus, kill him before he even realizes it. I know ninjas are especially astute to their surroundings, but this is fairly ridiculous.

Despite its boring gameplay and lame repertoire of enemy AI, the graphics in Revenge of Shinobi are impressive and actually look very similar to older games in the series. Throwing ninjas stars is a great deal of fun and there are a bunch of different animations for Shinobi and his vast array of moves. However, the poor gameplay moves the great graphics to the back seat since nothing presented in the game, aside from Shinobi's animations, take advantage of the awesome 2D side scrolling look of the game.

The music in Revenge of Shinobi is limited to maybe no more then six tracks, but every track really takes advantage of the GBA's audio hardware. There are no voice samples in Revenge of Shinobi, but there are a great deal of sound effects with each attack and sword impact. You'll cycle through a lot of the sound effects, but this is a straight forward action game with plenty of fighting and it's no surprise that the sound effects do get repetitive after awhile.