Retro Review Ep. 28 - SHADOW OF THE BEAST
22 / 5 Stars
A game that was adapted to an ungodly number of systems in the late 80s and early 90s. My experience with the title was with its most (in)famous version, on the Sega Genesis. It is well documented that the game's US Sega release was not optimized for the hardware, resulting in the entire game playing at around 10% - 20% faster than the developers intended.
The game itself is linear and quite short, with only 4 stages and a bit of overworld linking some of the stages, however the game does not feature a checkpoint system, extra lives, or continues. When you die, you start again from the beginning. Combine this fact with the unnaturally fast enemies, wildly inconsistent hitboxes, and gauntlets of enemies which come at you from multiple directions at once, and you get an incredibly short game that most people simply will not have the patience to beat; this is probably for the best, as the final boss fight and the ending of the game itself are quite uninspired; a real letdown when you consider the amount of pain and frustration people will experience to reach it.
After two hours of struggling, I was forced to use an in-game invulnerability cheat to progress, only to be soft locked by a boss who died and left his collision behind, blocking my ability to advance (honest jank, or piracy protection? I'll never know).
Music is quite good, enemy and level design are varied enough, and the world concept is the sort of thing I would love to see in a film or TV series, but the fact is that the game was poorly optimized, short, and difficult enough that most people who bought or rented it never got to see the aforementioned uninspiring ending.
Other Videos By The Phenomenal Sir
Other Statistics
Shadow of the Beast Statistics For The Phenomenal Sir
At present, The Phenomenal Sir has 25 views spread across 1 video for Shadow of the Beast, with approximately 2 hours of Shadow of the Beast video on his channel. This is less than 0.11% of the total video content that The Phenomenal Sir has uploaded to YouTube.