Almost feels like a practical joke with how bad everything in this game feels. Hitboxes are a foreign concept, attack recovery cannot be gauged for shit due to the garbage animations and poor framerate so the only solution is to mash hoping it maintains the right rhythm. The screen scrolling is the type of shit you see in a Commodore 64 game and despite all that it's still a pretty easy game. No matter how shit a game feels if it's not hard to get through you should feel a sense of satisfaction in beating enemies and stages, but you feel nothing. Everything just sucks.

I honestly didn't know this game existed before and, looking at the reviews, it certainly seemed like it'd be really rough, but...

Honestly... it's not Awful? It's certainly not good either but it wasn't, Painful.

It looks like a vic-20 game and plays like a PC game in general, it's really odd... but I kinda had fun with the combat and the levels.

The amount of breakable floors that don't look different from regular floors is awful though.

I don't know, I didn't regret spending my time playing this? It's alright.

Based on my past experience with games throughout my life, I would say that, depending on how quickly I give up on a game, it all boils down to one single aspect: how it feels to play. Usually, no matter what the quality of a game is, I try to stick to it all the way to the very end, so I can get the full experience of a game so that I can judge it fairly, unless I make it far enough, or just run into a brick wall of an obstacle that I just can’t get past. Even with a game like A Boy and His Blob, which I absolutely hated, I played through the entire thing, just to see if it was gonna get better as it went on. But, there have been plenty of times where, based on how it feels to just simply control your main character, and how this control clashes with the other elements in the game, I will just straight up stop playing and move on to something else. With that being said, what we have here is a game that feels absolutely awful to play, to the point where I couldn’t get past the first stage before wanting to stop and move on with my life without thinking anything more of it. That game, surprisingly, was The Cyber Shinobi.

While plenty of Shinobi games were being made for the Sega Genesis at this point in the franchise, this particular one was made for the Sega Master System and only released in specific territories where the system wasn’t discontinued. For the most part, despite how stiff they felt and how difficult they could be, I found myself enjoying my time with most of the other Shinobi titles that I have played so far, and anytime I decide to play another game in the series, I do look forward to it. So, you can imagine my surprise when I found that this particular game is AWFUL, and without a doubt the worst game in the series so far. And it sucks too, because the cover art for this game is the best in the series so far, looking awesome, and getting you ready to do more badass ninja shit, but then when you actually get into the game… it is a whole different story.

The story is pretty detailed with its opening scrolling text, but it all boils down to a bad organization using nuclear weapons to destroy the world, which is a pretty good reason to go beat up a bunch of thugs, even if it is a little more simple when compared to other games, the graphics are good for Sega Master System standards, but the character sprites do look a little… off, the music is alright, although from the few tracks that I did hear, it all just sort of blends in together at times, the control is… well, I’ll save my complaints for that for later, and the gameplay is pretty much the same as your typical Shinobi game, but they went ahead and completely ruined it.

The game is, again, your average Shinobi game through and through, where it is a 2D side-scrolling action platformer, you travel through several stages, taking out plenty of enemies that will try to take you out, gather plenty of power-ups and health items along the way, and take on plenty of formidable bosses that will stand in your way. Like with past games, your primary weapons are a sword and shurikens, although you use the sword as your main weapon, and you also get special attacks that you can execute throughout the game whenever you need it. So, all in all, it has all of the right elements to make a proper Shinobi game, so it SHOULD work… so why doesn’t it? Well, again, like I mentioned earlier, it all comes down to how the game controls and plays.

I don’t know why, but for some reason, this game feels more like it wants to be a Castlevania game rather then a Shinobi game, and for those of you who have played both of these games, you know that they are very different beasts. As such, this time around, the speed of the player is much more slow, and even some of the extra weapons you get in the game do function similarly to sub-weapons in Castlevania. Now, this doesn’t sound that bad, but the problem is that this new style of play and speed is paired alongside the usual external elements that Shinobi has, which do not function well together at all.

The game will throw plenty of enemies at you in situations where you need to have very precise platforming and reactions, and once again, this would be all fine to deal with, but ON TOP OF ALL THAT, your menu bar takes up HALF of the screen, meaning that you can barely see anything around you, and whenever you get into position to take out your enemy, you are most likely gonna take damage, and needless to say, that isn’t fair or fun to deal with. Also, for some reason, this game incorporates beat-’em-up elements, where you have to defeat a set of enemies before you can move on in the level, which also lets you get used to the awful flow of combat in the game.

On top of all that, again, it feels AWFUL to play. The control feels much more stiff than the other games, which is also paired along with the choppiest-ass frame rate I have ever seen for a Master System game, making just basic functions like walking forward and jumping feel like an absolute chore and a struggle, especially when you are fighting enemies. Mix all this with level design meant to fuck you over, and what you have here is something that I want absolutely no part of ever again. Make no mistake, I really like the Shinobi games, and I absolutely wanted to play through the rest of this game, but I just could not bring myself to do it. It feels like complete agony to even try to play the game, and that is usually the deal breaker for me, so it is no surprise that it happened here as well.

Overall, while it does have all the basics down for what a Shinobi game usually is, the horrible controls, choppy frame rate, clashing of game styles, and the lack of polish make this, without a doubt, the absolute worst game in the entire Shinobi series so far. Who knows, maybe it will actually be even worse then the other games I haven’t played yet, because it feels like it could be a contender. I wouldn’t recommend that any of you check it out, not even for the die-hard Shinobi fans. It just isn’t worth experiencing whatsoever. Now, I would say that I hope that the next game in the series after this will be much better then this, but considering that it is a Game Gear game, I don’t have much hope for it whatsoever.

Game #321