SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance
What's next, Alex Kidd in OATH OF RETRIBUTION?
Coming hot on the heels of the phenomenal return-to-form of Ninja Gaiden, SEGA's own 8-bit era pajama platformer series Shinobi has descended from Heaven to grace us once again. And like Ragebound coming care of the reputable indie developer The Game Kitchen1, Art of Vengeance has arrived via a partnership with Lizardcube, an even more niche but still accomplished indie team.2
In Art of Vengeance you play as Joe Musashi, the leader of the Oboro ninja clan, enjoying a pleasant sunny day with his pregnant wife, faithful dog, and favorite apprentice. Luckily in full ninja garb already, he performs a short platforming tutorial when suddenly dark forces swoop in and attack his clan, petrifying everyone they come across and laying waste to Musashi's home. Now the mute pair of narrowed eyes must go on a quest of revenge to stop ENE Corp and their leader Lord Ruse from whatever it is they're up to.
The game is primarily an action platformer, but rather than the linear punching gallery of the original games, it consists of stages that are mostly open maps, with loops and optional branches and even a handful of paths initially blocked off. Despite appearances, it's not really a metroidvania, although you do get new traversal abilities as you progress, because all of the possible backtracking is entirely optional, and the stages are still mostly linear. It does a good job of shifting gears, though, with some long stretches of platforming, broken up by short horde encounters or mild puzzling, often all in one mission.
The combat is probably the more significant departure from the original series. While some early enemies can still be killed in a single kunai or sword swipe, most of the later ones are far more durable, and your moveset expands as you purchase combo moves and finishers in the shop like in the Devil May Cry games. There are separate light and heavy attacks, combos developed by combining them, rolling attacks, jumping attacks, quick evades after an attack, and then unique follow-ups to that evasion, and so on. The more complex moveset meshes well with the enemy roster, and I found myself using different techniques a lot more than I usually do in these sorts of games. For example, you eventually unlock both a light and heavy kick out of a dodge roll, both of which do significant damage to the armor bar of enemies with hyperarmor, as well as massive posture damage. But which you use depends on your situation - the light version has an unlockable second hit, which deals much more damage in total, but requires a longer window, and knocks light enemies backwards. The heavy version is a diagonal kick that launches enemies upwards instead, and can posture break many common variants by itself.
In addition to regular attack combos, you slowly unlock both ninpos and jutsus, which operate as special magical attacks. The Ninpos are cast using green cells that fill as you land normal hits, and are strong one-off attacks, like a fire breath or bubble shield that parries and counterattacks a hit. You can equip talismans that give you slight perks, like changing the function of your kunai, but most of them augment your ninpo attacks in some way, like giving your fire breath a bigger hitbox or letting you perform the lightning dash multiple times in a row. Jutsus are full-screen spells like the special moves in the original games, and can only be cast once your Rage gauge is filled from taking damage or killing enemies.
The posture break system is the last piece of the combat. It functions similarly to the posture bar in Sekiro, with some attacks [and kunai] dealing more posture damage than pure health damage, and if an enemy's posture bar fills, you can do a combination to instantly teleport to every enemy with broken posture on screen and finish them off. The resulting shower of extra gold, health recovery, and kunai refills is reminiscent of Doom (2016)'s glory kills, but are a little less jarring in a 2D view. It reminds me a bit of the finisher mechanic in the 3D Shinobi games, except there's no timer limitation, there's no real incentive to tee up multi-kills with it [apparently it increases reward amount but not by a noticeable amount] and it's not really mandatory for anything. It does look super cool though.
Speaking of looks, the game's art style and animation are gorgeous, with great use of color, dynamic sprites, and so many layers of parallax that it can be used for pseudo-3D effects. Many of the backgrounds are impressive in their own right, and the game has strong character designs, plenty of detail, and fairly good contrast for damaging elements. It can get a little busy, and some of the UI stuff gets lost in the lights, but it's generally readable. It does have some clashing of objects and environments that might make the game look a bit low-budget in certain stills or clips but is mostly unnoticeable while playing. It's not a huge deal, but it's something that stands out from how well-done everything else is.
The audio design is another strong point, with good hit effects and warnings keeping the battles engaging, excellent voice acting [at least in Japanese] and some really solid music as well. The credits include Yuzo Koshiro, an extremely prolific composer, as contributing "Additional Tracks" and indeed, many of them have clear themes taken from games he worked on in the past, including Shinobi titles of course, but also Streets of Rage and Ys. The primary composer is Tee Lopes, who is best known as the Lead Composer for Sonic Mania. The soundtrack in general is good, but maybe a little inconsistent or overly busy for everyone's taste.
Each stage has collectable medallions, which are used to unlock more combos, upgrades, and costumes in the store, optional arena battles that have their own unlocks, and hidden portals to long platforming challenges. None of it is particularly hard to find or complete, and the mission select shows you exactly the items you have left to find in each stage, but it's still an excuse to revisit at least the first few stages after unlocking all the mobility upgrades. Thankfully you can also just warp directly to any checkpoint from the main map, and the game autosaves constantly so the backtracking is kept to a minimum. Unfortunately, the map is sometimes less than helpful - it generally uses purple shading to indicate optional or 'hidden' paths, but icons for unopened chests and such don't necessarily pop up unless you get pretty close, meaning you can wind up having to comb through huge sections of some of the maps if you try for 100% completion. The ultimate reward for most of it is somewhat unremarkable too - completing all portals gives you an alternate sword with a slight damage boost, I don't even remember what you unlock for finding all the medals, and you really don't need the number of max health and kunai capacity upgrades you find to beat the game.
In fact, the game in general is a bit too easy for my taste, and while they allow you to adjust individual factors like enemy health scaling and environmental damage separately when you start a run, sort of like Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, you can only crank those things DOWN and make it even easier. Especially once you unlock the accessory that gives your normal attacks life leech, not a lot is actually going to outright kill you, and it's not as though the game is short on checkpoints and health restores anyway. If you're thorough, you can collect a set of secret keys that unlock an optional post-game super-boss hidden in a particular level, but even that fight wasn't particularly hard. In fact, the only thing that really busted my balls was the boss rush mode, which combines a complete lack of health restores [aside from that one accessory] with no real way to accrue Rage [since none of the bosses have adds you can farm charge from] to mean that every single hit taken really does add up.
After beating the game, you unlock the option to replay any level in Arcade mode, and this is where my disappointments really started to set in. Arcade mode really only removes the cutscenes with dialogue, and replaces all collectables with… pointless medals that contribute to your score. It does not meaningfully alter anything else about the stages, so they're still just as long as before, the enemy spawns are the same, and you still have to unlock doors in the same roundabout ways. One of the most annoying things about this is how the game stops and drags your camera around to show you doors opening whenever you throw a switch. It's a little tedious in the base game, but at least then there's the excuse that players might get lost or confused without being shown very deliberately the path they've just opened up. It's far less tolerable in the ARCADE mode, where players have by definition already seen all these transitions before, and are in addition playing against a clock. The arcade mode of the first stage even forces you to dash through the entire tutorial segment, which is insane.
Another issue that the arcade mode really highlights is the general imprecision of the movement and especially the combat. Every once in a while you'll do a finisher or launch and your movement afterwards will unavoidably carry you off a ledge, into spikes, or onto an enemy projectile. It's not something that you'll have too much frustration with in the base game, because as I said before, it's generally very forgiving and easy, but it becomes a real problem in the boss rush and arcade modes, because one of the score multipliers at the end of a stage is 'no damage.' That's one thing in a game where a stage is five or so minutes long, but the VERY FIRST level of AoV took me over ten minutes in arcade mode, and many of the later stages are much, much longer. The idea of trying to avoid all damage, for that long, with very little in the way of risk mitigation, puts me off giving the mode a serious try. If the levels in the mode were tightened up, changed around, and more interesting in any discernible way, I probably wouldn't even feel the need to mention that slight sloppiness inherent in the movement, but as it stands, I do.
SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance is an excellent game, but not quite a perfect one. I think with a little more challenge, a little more enemy variety, and a few more meaningful options, it could be a real contender. In its current state, I'd say give the demo a spin, as it provides a decent taster of the core gameplay, and if you're not desperate to play the rest, wait for a sale.
SHINOBI: Art of Vengeance can be purchased on Steam, Xbox, Playstation, or Nintendo Switch.
Developers of Blasphemous
Developers of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap and Streets of Rage 4