A playthough of Sega's 1989 ninjathemed actionplatformer for the Sega Genesis, The Revenge of Shinobi.

Played through on the normal difficulty level. I got the good ending in this playthrough, but at 37:36 I included the bad ending.

The Revenge of Shinobi (or "The Super Shinobi" in Japan) was the sequel to Sega's 1987 arcade game "Shinobi," and as a title designed specifically for the Sega Genesis, it featured a fair number of changes to make it better suited to the home console format.

Shinobi itself was an excellent game, but on the NES and Master System, it did come across as a bit insubstantial. The Revenge of Shinobi, however, added quite a bit to the original formula. Stages are now much larger and somewhat less linear, and the mechanics are better fleshed out. Joe has his standard shurikens at his disposal but he can also now fling them in a spread shot from a double jump, and he has his choice of several magic spells with a wide assortment of effects, ranging from life gauge refills to the destruction of everything onscreen in an instant.

The Revenge of Shinobi is no slouch in its difficulty, but instead of demanding twitchreflexes to the extent than Shinobi did, Revenge requires a bit more strategy and planning. Plotting the optimal path though a stage and knowing when to defend and when to attack are much more important in this one especially when it comes to the extraordinarily difficult boss sequences. Once you learn the patterns, the strategies become clear, but the game makes you fight toothandnail to make progress. It's not quite as hard as Ninja Gaiden, but by the time you manage to clear that merciless final stage, you'll feel like Rocky as he finally reaches the top of the mountain.

But speaking of Rocky, The Revenge of Shinobi is loaded with a ton of fun (albeit unlicensed) cameos of stars from comics and 80s action movies Rambo shows up as a standard enemy, and The Terminator, Godzilla, Batman, and Spiderman all show up to lay down some pain in the boss encounters, and Sonny Chiba's mug adorns these title screen demo. Way back, this was some exciting stuff to find in a game, and it's still extremely cool to come across it all now.

And finally, it would be unfair to not address the presentation when talking about Revenge of Shinobi. This was one of the first releases for the Sega Genesis at the end of 1989, and it blew away most of its direct competition on the system that year. The 2D graphics are stunning for a home game of the time the sprites were huge and colorful, the level of detail in the backgrounds was secondtonone, and animation was far more fluid than we had ever seen in the 8bit era. In avoiding the gimmicky tricks of games like Super Thunder Blade and Space Harrier, The Revenge of Shinobi has aged far more gracefully than many of its contemporaries, and not being a port of an arcade game (like Golden Axe or Ghouls'n Ghosts) allowed it to avoid feeling like a scaledback, cutdown version of a game meant for more powerful hardware. In this way, The Revenge of Shinobi reminds me a lot of ActRaiser on the SNES. The sound design does much the same for the game, in large part thanks to Yuzo Koshiro's amazing work on the soundtrack... and coincidentally enough, he also was responsible for ActRaiser's music ;) The music is a unique mix of traditional Japanese instruments and composition tropes infused with a heavy American rock aesthetic, and the result is one of the best soundtracks to ever blare from the Genesis's FM synth chip. Shakushachis and kotos mixed with heavy guitar, synth brass, and 80sstyle power drums might sound iffy on paper, but Koshiro's work speaks for itself here. And when it kicks into its occasional fits of dance hall music, holy hell. That's something to behold. Stage 42's theme is in a league of its own.

The Revenge of Shinobi was one of the earliest Sega Genesis games to truly show the potential of the new 16bit hardware back in 1989, and it is a true testament to the quality of its design that when the system was retired nearly ten years later, RoS still had the distinction of being one of the platform's best games.

Amazing stuff.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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