It’s hard to not feel a little miffed that it took the success of 2020’s Streets of Rage 4 to show Sega that, yes, there’s still plenty to be done with some of their greatest old-school game series. As proven by Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, that’s especially true for Shinobi, a series of side-scrolling action games about ninjas taking on entire international armies of men and demons and where the reward system is so tied to slaying them all with panache.
With Art of Vengeance, another classic series has been reborn with gloriously fluid hand-drawn animation, a sort of ukiyo-e/Image Comics hybrid aesthetic that looks striking even compared to the hand-drawn Streets of Rage 4 yet still very much recognizable as the Shinobi of years past. As you delve beautifully realized biomes, the mechanics will also feel immediately familiar to fans of the series from the second they start the game.
Anyone who messed around with Revenge of Shinobi or Shinobi III back in the day will be able to pick up the controller and start mowing down enemy ninjas in seconds. The way master ninja Joe Musashi swings his sword, uses shurikens, and casts screen-clearing magic is perfectly copy-pasted from those games. At the outset, the only mild adjustments necessary mostly stem from figuring out the combo system, which shares quite a bit of kinship with the juggle mechanics from Streets of Rage 4. Later, additional abilities add some verticality to the mix but nothing so terribly far removed from the wild flips and dangerous platforming of the original games.
The plot isn’t necessarily the thing driving players onward here, but its comic-bookish sensibilities certainly get the job done, with its own twists and turns and edgy clichés that would’ve been right at home in a Genesis game from the ’90s. Thankfully, the developers are clearly well-aware of its ridiculousness, evinced by Joe Musashi responding to even the more dire of circumstances for his family, clan, and the planet with a series of stoic grunts.
But the magic is in what the game offers to the ambitious. While it’s possible to just blow through each stage as a linear challenge, every level is its own self-contained search-action game full of secrets and obstacle courses and death-defying aerial challenges. Art of Vengeance is good at giving players everything they need to progress in the game, but straying even a minute outside the beaten path leads to just about anything players will want, from more health and shurikens to some of the most impressive and damaging ninja-magic attacks in the game.
That’s especially rewarding considering that the game’s combo system feeds directly off of what equipment Joe Musashi has equipped at any given moment. The amulets and scrolls found in the game’s secret areas offer all sorts of devastating new abilities and additional perks the better the player does in combat. Art of Vengeance encourages exploration and risk-taking in an organic way that only the best games of this sort tend to execute organically.
Even with the additional depth that it brings to the Shinobi experience, this is a game that doesn’t let you forget that it’s about ninjas being chased around by fighter jets, surfing the high seas and jumping over mines, and being hunted by demonic skulls in the desert. There are references galore to the prior games of this series: the dog from Shadow Dancer, the life-stealing sword from the 2002 reboot, a certain returning boss from Shinobi III, and so on. Each one serves as a reminder that this is a series that should have never been allowed to go dormant. But that’s pretty easy to forgive considering how we’ve been rewarded for our long wait.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by fortyseven communications.
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