Shinobi for PlayStation 2

It's a scientifically proven fact: Ninjas are cool. Recently, a friend and I have been getting into the Japanese anime series, Naruto about, go figure, ninjas. So since Episode 8 ends on a stinking super-cliffhanger, it completely got us amped to play some Shinobi. After all, why just watch, when you can be interacting? Anyway, when my friends hit up E3 last year, this is one of the games they were raving about right up there along with Metroid Prime. Strangely enough, they both come out at just about the same time, and since I have no GameCube, I get to play Shinobi. I'm not really aware of the whole story or the original game, but I hear this one's pretty much entirely different.

This time you're Hotsuma, the leader of the Oboro ninja clan. Japan's being devastated by earthquakes caused by the "Golden Palace" reemerging in the heart of Tokyo. Strange creatures are appearing all of the city, and you're going to take them all out. Apparently, the guys behind all of this have killed off your entire clan and are using their bodies, i.e. Zombies to ravage the city, and impede your progress. You're fairly ticked that someone's done this to your clan, and hence, you want someone to pay.

The plot is entirely predictable, with the climatic battle leading you to come to the realization that, "Oh wait, you were just using me to kill all those people so you could collect the power from me."

Because nothing's more enjoyable than playing through a mass of annoying levels to find out that you would have prevented this guy's whole evil plan by just not showing up.

Control

Control feels fairly tight, but there are quite a few things I'd want it to have. The control problems combined with the awful design make this game a highly annoying one, as opposed to a must-have for all gamers. Your left analog stick moves you around. The D-Pad will cycle through your different ninjutsu effects. R2 will point you the direction of whichever enemy it feels like pointing you towards, and the right analog will allow you to move the camera around. L1 will center your view to be directly in front of you. O jumps and double-jumps, X will dash, and Square attacks with your katana, Akujiki. L2 uses your ninjutsu scrolls, and triangle uses your throwing knives. Double jump Triangle will fire off 8 knives in all directions.

If you come in contact with certain walls you'll be able to cling to them and run along them. However, despite being able to cling to walls, apparently, being the leader of a ninja clan doesn't mean you have learned the ability to hang onto ledges, a talent you'll find yourself wishing you had quite often throughout the course of the game. Also, you're only able to climb along certain walls, which you'll have to discover through trial and failure. The only problem is that a whole damn lot of these "trial and failure" sections is that they're sections where if you screw up, you're dead. To put this in perspective, levels 1-B, 5-A, 6-A, and 8-A are entire levels where if you miss a jump, you die. 4-B will only damage you with lava, not kill you. Levels 1-B, 5-B, 7-B, and 8-B are boss fights where the boss can knock you into insta-death.

Your sword also powers up with each kill. It doesn't power-up long term, though, it powers up short-term. Like, for a second. So, if you're surrounded by a single tough enemy and several weaker ones, it's prudent to waste the lesser threats, and then you can generally kill the greater enemy with a single slash. You'll then be treated to a scene of you posing, taunting, and them falling to pieces behind you. This is kind of cool at the beginning, but it gets old once your progress further into the game.

The game also is sorely needing a feature to lock onto an enemy, or snap the camera to it. The thing will tell you what direction the enemy's in, and if you're fortunate enough to be facing that direction, you can lock your knives onto it...but it doesn't spin you towards the enemy. You'll find yourself whirling around like crazy after you have your Akujiki powered up and are looking for where the boss is to finish him off, only to find that your sword is no longer glowing once you locate him. Even the ability to spin the viewpoint 90 degrees, like is present in most other 3D platform games would have been greatly appreciated...but it's not there.

Gameplay

The gameplay is nice for the first few levels, then you start running into stuff that you would really, really like the game not to have. As you'll find upon completion of Level 1-B, Akujiki needs to absorb yin from dispatched enemies. What this means to you the player, is that if you make a wrong turn, and can't find your way back immediately, you're toast. Once you get to boss characters, this takes on greater importance, because you don't slake Akujiki's thirst by hitting enemies, it only calms down after you kill enemies. So, you've got to kill off the little things around the boss characters in order to prevent "the cider from being sucked out of you". You'll figure out rather quickly why this is...the level design is so shoddy that they really don't want you looking around all that often...otherwise, without the constant sense of urgency and the threat of having to start all over, you might notice that certain levels are just the same areas over and over...like 8-A. There are like, 4 different rooms on the entire level.

The other thing you'll quickly discover is that while you can't block at all, the enemies can...even if they're dogs holding katanas in their mouths. (Seriously...If I slash down at its head...how does it block? I'm going to split its head open before I contact the sword.) I understand enemies having special abilities that I don't have. Heck, I don't even block most of the time when I have the option. But I don't like it when basic functionality is not afforded to the character I'm playing, and then is given to enemies.

There are several points in the game where you'll feel like the developers are just mad at you. Like you went over to their place and punted their dog or something.

Take this boss fight from Level 4-B for example:

You're fighting this flying moth thing. The area you fight on is surrounded by lava, with various little platforms for you to hop off of.

The center platform is where the little moth things are going to get summoned. You'll need to kill them to power up your sword in order to do decent damage to the boss character. This platform is also where the only items to power up your health will appear.

So, in order to get in a solid hit, you'll have to:

Kill off a 5 or 6 little moth things.
Within 1 second locate boss character.
Within that same second, run forward, hit jump, jump, dash, slash ensuring that you are perfectly in line with the moth thing's head, and that you dash precisely at the apex of your second jump.
Hope that your dash isn't at the same time as when the moth thing decides to attack because it'll knock you out of the air.

This wouldn't be a problem if you weren't on a hovering platform. Or if you didn't need to kill the little things to stop your sword from killing you. Or if you could have the camera immediately line-up with the boss character who is the only thing onscreen still alive. Or if the boss thing didn't have 2 different attacks that fling you off the platform into the lava.

I don't mind games that are difficult...I do mind games that are difficult just because the developers are feeling spiteful, or have designed the game poorly. If I had to figure out a pattern of attack, or I had to dodge a lot of attacks to defeat them, this wouldn't bother me. Instead what I get is that I know the one thing I have to do to defeat the enemy, but it ends up being a long-winded trial and effort task to do that one thing. Basically, once you figure out the pattern to beat a boss (basically, you're looking for a way to kill all the minions, and then hit the boss once.), you'll know within the first 15 seconds whether or not you'll beat it, or should just restart, and the fight ends up with one of two results, humiliating defeat, or exceptionally lopsided victory.

Another indication that the design for the game is weak, is that they can't make a boss fight that is at all difficult unless you've got these stupid little insta-death areas. All the boss fights that happen on solid ground are rediculously easy. The helicopters are cake, Shirogane and Akagane took me two attempts, the guy with the katana dogs in the box is a joke. The guy with the big shuriken/shield took two attempts, and the snake-man took me 3. Blind guy on 6-A only took me 3 tries to beat, and the bosses on 7-A and 7-B I beat on my first attempt, and I only had 1/2 life for the 7-A boss. As long as I'm not trying to fling myself over a pool of acid, or into nothingness to kill an enemy, I've got no problem whupping its butt.

But the boss fights are cake compared to the levels with insta-death. Lose on a boss fight, and it only takes you another 15 seconds to get to where you were before. Lose on a level, and that's 15 minutes of work you have to do all over again. Fall to your death, and you have to start the whole damn thing over again. This gets to be very, very annoying around level 5-A, because the entire level is a death trap. Once you get to level 6-A, you'll have to drop down these tube-like rooms...and at the bottom of each is a pool of acid. You'll find yourself having to hack apart these stones that seal the room off, and the only way to find them is to cautiously drop and run around the room...while things are shooting at you and your sword hungers. Mistakenly exhaust your double-jump or dash, and you're right back to the beginning. You don't even want to know about level 8-A. If you are still playing at this point, when you get to the end of the level, the boss is the insignia on the door...not the guy wielding the I-Beam Mace.

So what does this all mean? It means that the only difficult parts of the game are artificially generated by adding in stupid jumping puzzles. No amount of health can save you from falling to your death, and since the bosses and the enemies on the levels don't damage you enough to concern you at all, the only thing you're worrying about is your sword killing you, or hurtling to earth.

Looking back at the levels that are the most difficult, the only ones I have to play through more than one time are the ones that require jumping to prevent instant death. The ones on plain land are cakewalks. None of the levels ever require you to do anything besides jump and cling onto walls. It's like they made the entire game to be a vehicle for their jumping puzzle fetish.

There's almost nothing that irks a gamer more than death by falling...there's nothing you can do to prevent it once it happens. To make matters worse, I've encountered areas of the game where the game doesn't let me double jump due to a bug. I'll leap off of a roof, and hit O..and nothing...I try and dash...nothing...time to redo another 10 minutes of work. The game stops being entertaining a loooong way from the end, and eventually the only reason you keep playing the game is pride. You don't want to give the developers the satisfaction of you not beating their game.

Graphics

They're not very good at all. While Hotsuma is done very stylishly, and his flowing cape is pretty cool, the CG movies in the game feature stuttery animation, and all the women in the game have freakishly large necks. Also, I was hoping the little knives on his arms would deplete as you threw them, but no such luck.

Also, anyone who's played through Shenmue 2 will recognize half the textures in this game...they're all the busted up buildings in the Kowloon parts of the game. Everything in the game looks about on the level of Shenmue 2 on the DC or Zettai Zetsumei Toshi. (The Japanese earthquake survival game.) You'll run into the same enemies all throughout the game. I think there are about 6 or 7 different ones, and that doesn't scream value to me. I think this game probably could run on the DC without too much trouble at all.

Audio

The background music throughout the game is pretty nice. Japanese-souding but with enough synth to make it feel sort of new wave-ish.

Also, the game gives you the option of using the Japanese or English voices for the game, which is good because I can use the Japanese voices with subtitles to try and learn more Japanese. I recommend more developers doing this...it's not like it really takes up all that much more space. I haven't listened to the English voices yet, so I'll tell you how those are at another time.

One thing I did notice was that the bosses all have scripted dialogue. So they'll be saying something, and then you'll hit them...and they'll say both things at the same time. I mean, I know they're evil, but they shouldn't be able to say two different things at the same time.

Level Design

The levels are generally boring. Drab colors, and busted up buildings abound. I don't think I've seen a level that had any more than 4 or 5 basic colors.

On top of that, you'll be jumping through buildings, turn a corner, and all of a sudden, there's an alleyway in between buildings...that just doesn't make sense. Neither do the floating rock platforms. I had a friend say, "Hey, is that tank just floating in midair?" The response we had was, "No...it's sitting on the rock platform...that's floating in midair." Also, the annoying camera work, and the insta-death zones make the levels more of a painful chore than an enjoyable challenge. You don't really feel like you're making progress...you just feel like there's more of the level to go back through should you, er, I mean, WHEN you die.

Overall

This game's a rental, if that. It can be beaten in under a week, and I really don't see you wanting to go through this once you've done it once before. You can unlock various extras, but really, nothing that merits trying to go through this game picking up all the little insignia coins. Sure you can play through the game as different characters, but what's the point of playing through such a poorly designed game multiple times? Initially, I wanted to say this game was for hardcore fans of the series only, but it's not even for them. There's a huge difference in designing a game so that a good player has a challenge going through it, and then designing a game so badly that the player relies on dumb f**king luck and trial & error to get through nearly every level.

Ugh...I really wish this was a bit more conducive to playing. This would be my winner of the Controller Smasher of the Year Award. I don't mind a game being tough...so long as it isn't the design fighting against me in addition to the enemies. I mean, Reading Rabbit Teaches Mathematical Theory would be challenging, but it doesn't mean that slapping a 3D engine on it is going to make it any fun.

I can see you possibly enjoying the game in you can get through all the jumping areas fine. If you're having trouble with the bosses, you're only going to be waiting for a few seconds to get to where you had failed. If you're like me and you screw up during the jumping sections, then the above body of review applies to you directly.