Shinobi: Art of Vengeance – Switch Review
"It just gets the blood pumping!"
Finding hidden gems is one of the best things about this job. It’s easy to get swept up in the wave of larger popular titles, massive IPs and pre-established gaming titans. But sometimes an unexpected blast comes through and shakes things up, and Shinobi: Art of Vengeance did just that for me.
I may be talking as if this is an entirely new game, but Shinobi is actually one of Sega’s greatest classics – but it had vanished in the shadows since 2011 until this triumphant return 14 years later. And now, it is the first Shinobi game I ever played, so let me tell you what I thought of the legend of Joe Musashi.
The Good - This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.
When I was a kid, I learnt that ninjas were awesome. Now, as an adult, I can amend that – ninjas are really awesome, and Shinobi cemented that fact for me.
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is one of the most stylish games I’ve played in a long while. Snappy, fast-paced combat filled with different combo techniques that the player can weave seamlessly into one long string of satisfying cinematic pain. Playing feels incredible – it feels like a 2D Devil May Cry game in the best possible way.
Joe Musashi has a wide arsenal of tools, techniques and Nipou to mow through his enemies, and all of those look and feel amazing. Combat can get quite busy and flashy, but everything is almost perfectly balanced so that it is also easy to follow.
And I mean easy to follow and easy on the eyes as well! This game is beautiful. The animations are great, the art style of the character portraits is beautiful and the stage backgrounds are detailed and immersive.
The stages themselves are no slouches. The level design is incredible – it’s fun to fight through them for the first time, and plenty of them are very challenging, but each stage also has a good number of secrets and power-ups that may only become reachable later on with some new ninja tools or abilities, like a grappling hook or the ability to break down mystical walls.
Revisiting stages is also made very easy due to the fast travel options – explore the stage enough to unlock checkpoints and you can be back at any of them at any moment. Great additions for any completionist looking to squeeze as much out of the game as possible.
The original Shinobi game was an arcade game by Sega, and I can say for sure that this feels like the ultimate culmination of an arcade game – there even is an entire postgame mode unlocked literally called arcade mode!. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance truly feels like the peak of bombastic arcade games, and it was a joy to play.
TL;DR
- Stylish, fast-paced combat done right
- Beautiful visuals while avoiding confusing clutter
- Amazing stage design
- Quality of Life implementations for completionism and stage revisits
- An entire new game mode added after beating the story
The Bad - Should my map be glitching?
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is a brilliant game, but it did release with plenty of performance issues. As of the time of this review, most of them were patched out, yet there were still very noticeable moments where the game completely malfunctioned on the Switch – textures and frame rate both went completely out the window until the game was completely reset.
For game-related issues, the map feels quite treacherous sometimes. It’s not always clear what is or isn’t a death pit, especially on some of the stages with a lot of verticality – there are parts where you are meant to explore downwards, while others will just kill you, and the map will not help you determine which one is which.
The story and characters also aren’t particularly deep, but I will readily admit that is more of a nitpick than anything. It didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the game at all, but if you are looking for a game with a particularly engaging story above all else, this will most likely not deliver that.
TL;DR
- Persistent performance issues on the Nintendo Switch
- Unclear death zone definitions on the map
- Basic story without particularly deep characters
Final Score: 8/10
God, this game is awesome. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance felt like the dream mixture of a Devil May Cry game with a beloved Saturday morning cartoon’s theatrical movie. The story and characters are so over the top, covering ninjas, private armies, yokai, death itself and all sorts of crazy shenanigans and ... it just gets the blood pumping!
It’s not perfect, but it’s awesome. In some ways I feel like it could have been ambitious enough for an even higher score – a little more time given to the story and characters in between the incredible gameplay may have pushed it further, but it didn’t truly have to. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is as awesome as kids in the 90s thought ninjas were, and more. Sega may be old, but between this and Crosswords… they proved that they still got it!
Thank you for checking out our Shinobi: Art of Vengeance Switch review, thank you to Sega (via Five Star Games) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:
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