Shadow of the Ninja Reborn | Switch Playthrough | Deaths Cut out
4This is a reboot of the NES game Shadow of the Ninja Reborn (AKA Blue Shadow in Europe). I was pleasantly surprised that they chose this game as I never hear anyone talking about it in any retro media, and I have always been a fan of the original.
This uses the same template of the first game by having 6 stages split into sub-stages followed by a boss. The levels are very similar too but longer and more varied. I would argue harder too.
The controls were a bit of a let-down for me. The game doesn’t make any effort to let you know the controls via gameplay tutorials. Normally I would welcome this, but the controls are not obvious, intuitive, or typical of other platform games. For example, running up a wall requires you to press and hold jump as you hit the wall, and then press up. I’ve just never seen that in a game before. When dangling from an overhead ledge, I can’t count how many times I fell into a pit below because I naturally press UP and JUMP to climb up the ledge, but in this game,, jump makes you drop, no matter what direction you press. There is a hover move which I didn’t know about that was mandatory to use to cross a pit right the end of a hard, long level near the end of the game. I had to look at a guide to see what to do and it angered me that I had to do that since it could have been explained to me at some point that this move existed. It’s not one that I found by accident either as the controls were intuitive again. You have to basically do a double jump, but hold DOWN while you do it. I’ve never known a game to make you hold DOWN during a double jump. There is a manual on the main screen which I read first but obviously forgot all the moves once I was in the game. I couldn’t find the manual in the pause menu so I thought I didn’t have any way to read it without quitting my progress – later finding out that you can continue from the stage you were on, but since I didn’t know for sure, I wasn’t going to risk it. The worst thing is, that upon reading the manual again, I realised there was a super Ninjutsu smart bomb-type move that I didn’t get to use for the whole game. That would have been useful for the bosses.
The other bad control choice is how you change your special weapon pickups. Instead of just using the secondary L and R buttons to scroll through them, they decided to map both R buttons and L buttons to have the same function. So, you have to stop still, hold the R button (which changes from normal weapon to special weapon if clicked) then scroll through. This almost always ends in you getting hit while you are a sitting duck. It is especially stressful on bosses. The worst thing about this decision is that it wasn’t ever necessary to use the R button to swap between special and normal weapon, since there is the A button on the controller not being used at all! That should have been a dedicated Special weapon button.
The bad controls for the special weapons means that it is often a bad idea to swap the weapons, because it very often leads to damage, especially when you are equipped with the OP spear secondary weapon as standard. This is better than most special weapons due its power and its reach. It is far better than the standard sword attack which I stopped using halfway through the game.
This game is hard. But I feel half the battle is the controls. Whether it’s the mistake of trying out a special move and getting hit, falling off an overhead ledge by jumping, or just trying to use health recovery on a boss and getting hit because of standing still to select it.
The bosses are hit and miss. Some I had trouble finding a decent pattern, some I would have a great pattern worked out but they would drag on for too long.
There is a shop feature at the beginning of each playthrough where you can buy special weapons and recovery items with the coins that you earned from the previous playthrough. This sounds good in practice but once you use them, they are gone through the entire playthrough. You would expect them to respawn when you continued but they don’t so it’s a pointless feature for most.
The graphics are nice pixel art, although they look 16-bit rather than 8-bit. There is a nice CRT scan line feature that makes it look authentic. The music is nicely upgraded while using the original melodies.
This game is a nice attempt at a reboot. While they nailed most of the game, it is ruined by the difficulty brought by the controls. Although there is a hard mode and a time attack mode, I am in no rush to play through this game again. But I am in a rush to go back to the NES original. Expect that playthrough video soon!
Game rating – 7/10
Difficulty – 7/10
Played on Nintendo Switch console
Deaths Cut out
No cheats
Thumbnail Boxart is taken from my own collection
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