A terrific remake of a classic NES-era action game that retains the challenge
So I’m going to be really honest about why I wanted to review this game, and it’s not going to make me look good. I saw a post on Twitter with an image of the female character, and since I’m a sucker for this style of character design I wanted to check it out. The visuals pulled me in, I know what they are going for. And it worked.
And then I played it, and realized it’s actually really fun and enjoyable.
Shadow of the Ninja Reborn is a full remake of an NES era Natsume game. I’ve never played the publisher’s other projects before, but it’s been really cool to see how they’ve stuck with delivering that essence of older games. In the case of Shadow, they’ve committed to it being super hard and really cheap, where we’re going to die a lot and be mad — it’s really great!
It feels like an old arcade game that we somehow just found. It’s built as an arcade game at heart, with linear levels, and the progression of clearing them until we die and restart the level over. In this case we keep our health between each level. We’re also incentivized to, one, learn how to play, and two, learn the levels, so we’re going to be dying a lot.
What’s really cool is if we don’t get hit, and we pick up a certain power up, we get an upgrade to our base attack, so for instance we get a little beam thing, and can launch projectiles. We can also have like a chain attack that we can throw and hit things from far away. And, if we hit projectiles at the right time, they’ll fly back at an enemy. There’s also really cool climbing and parkour in the game. It kind of has everything that classic arcade games focused on.
And that challenge? It’s just really hard, dude. It’s a game where we have to turn our brain on and keep everything in perspective, keeping an eye on shortcuts while we parkour or managing timing of our runs. Can we shave off a few seconds if we go around here and skip all these bad guys, or should we work towards improving our attacks and head directly into them?
It’s telling that the people who were working on it cared about it. It looks and sounds great, and it’s actually kind of interesting to see the effort that they went into relaying the classic into the modern. In watching videos of the original game after playing this I could see details, like in stage 1-2, of how aspects have been preserved.
This wasn’t anyone’s favorite NES game, so I appreciate that the devs didn’t try to deviate too far from being that 2D retro experience.
I just love that aspect.
And I just love that lady. You got me with the lady.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on The SideQuest Live! for September 11, 2024. Images and video courtesy ININ Games.
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