Man, I was really liking this game. About halfway through Shinobi I was debating whether to rate it as 5 stars, or "just" 4.5. I really wish I still felt that way, because Shinobi is really dang cool, at its best.

Shinobi makes a damn good first impression. Look up literally any footage of this game, and one thing will immediately stand out to you. The scarf. It's just so cool, it trails behind Hotsuma, flows dramatically when he attacks, never gets in your view while always remaining an extremely memorable part of the game's visual identity- I've played entire games with not a tenth the style of this one piece of clothing. The rest holds up quite well too, it doesn't have any other incredibly cool tricks but it all looks very solid, with the one issue that stages are clearly built out of repeatedly reused rooms, which makes them feel a lot samey-er.

It's really cool to play an action game from this era that doesn't feel like it's just trying to be Devil May Cry at home- besides the basic concepts of the genre, there's basically no similarities. Shinobi focuses on movement and positioning over juggling and combos, which you aren't really able to do here. Your moveset is minimal, just an attack combo and a dashing charge attack, the fun comes into quickly chaining kills. Your sword gets stronger the higher your kill combo is, and if you manage to kill every enemy in the encounter at once, you get a really cool "Tate" cutscene, where their bodies fall apart as Hotsuma strikes a pose. Like the scarf, this somehow always looks cool, partially because of the skill that's sometimes required to do this, and partially because the camera angles and enemy positions are going to change every time, which makes it feel very dynamic. It almost feels like a precedent to MGR's Zandatsu- a really viscerally satisfying means of rewarding the player for a job well done. If you fail to string kills you might need to hack at a stronger enemy for like ten seconds straight, so it feels really good to not mess it up and kill them in a single slash.

Some hiccups come in the movement. You're very mobile, with a dash, a double jump and a wall cling/run, but all of it can feel strangely stiff? For example, when locked onto a foe Hotsuma's walking speed is greatly reduced, and since time is of the absolute essence if you want to keep up your combo, that can feel really bad. Similarly, your teleport dash somehow doesn't go through enemies (despite visibly doing so in the opening cutscene...), which means sometimes you'll be trying to circle around them (many enemies block attacks from the front, and even those that don't will take more damage from behind) only to just sort of bump into them and then get hit. The lock on itself can be finicky, too. In its defense, it's actually pretty good for the era, it's just that this game relies really heavily on it being perfect, and when you're on a very strict timer locking on to an enemy you aren't capable of killing quickly rather than the one that's a sitting duck always really stings. It does work mostly fine, it's just that with how much this game asks of you, it can feel unfair when it doesn't quite meet its end of those expectations.

Bosses are a mixed bag. Something I absolutely respect is that they're built around the chain kills just as much as the rest of the game- you may not deal much more than scratch damage at first, but if you build up a good enough chain you can quite literally one-shot any boss in the game. The problem with that is that this means the entirety of a fight hinges on bosses being a threat both with and without summons, and on them putting up a fair challenge when you try to get a hit in with a big chain. I'd say most of the bosses don't really pull it off. Some teleport around a massive battlefield in such a way that you can literally not have a chance to get any hits in before your chain runs out, including the infamously bad final boss. Those that are stationary or more aggressive tend to fare better.

I have been sort of mildly negative so far but I want to be clear that this is an incredibly fun combat loop- it's incredibly tense but whenever you pull off a hard Tate it's so, so satisfying. The problem with the game is in its later half. They start putting insta-kill bottomless pits everywhere, and the game goes from a tense race to keep up your health (did i mention your health goes down when you're not killing things?) to frantically handling the camera and the clunky platforming hoping that no enemy snipes you and makes you fall and restart the level from start. The only checkpoints are at bosses but honestly that's fine, most of the time, stages are short enough that I don't mind having to do them over, unless I fall into a fucking pit because the camera sucks and Hatsume's jumps are nearly as high-committal as your average Belmont's. The final boss too, man. I don't even understand how he's supposed to work, it feels like that kid at the playground with the everything-proof shield that just makes up shit on the fly to win every argument.

That's all, really. It's a damn shame that the second half of the game is pretty bad because the foundation is really great. I know there's a sequel, but word is that it isn't as good, so I don't know when I'll check it out. Be really cool if some indie dev picked up the gimmick or something, it's really worth perfecting.

PokéRogue is, in my opinion, very much too ambitious for its own good. It's an insane endeavor, for a browser game, to do all that it does (and indeed, even just on a mechanical level, a lot of abilities and moves are still not implemented, though obviously that will pass with time), and at a base level, it does it pretty well. Along the way to the final boss, you'll fight a bunch of wild pokemon trainers, gym leaders, E4+Champion and a rival, and after every fight you get a random item. It adapts Pokémon to a roguelite formula fantastically well- the more Pokémon you get, the more eggs you hatch, the more options you unlock. And on the other hand, every run is different, because while you will eventually start with your absolute best aces, you'll have to fill up the rest of the team with whatever else you run into (probably something like a Gyarados and an Ursaluna, if you're like me).

That is all well and good, but where it falls apart is just how much stuff there is. Mainline Pokémon has over 1000 critters now, 900+ moves and 300+ abilities- that is all just way too much for one game to feature. This isn't about Dexit, there's never been a Pokémon game where more than like, 150-200 Pokémon are available to catch before the credits roll, and I might still be highballing that number. And those games are some 20 hours long if you're rushing, PokéRogue is only... well it's like, 3 hours long, but we'll get to the length in a second. My point is, this is just too much. The sheer number of options means they cannot possibly be balanced at all, which paradoxically makes the game feel more repetitive because why the hell would I use most Pokémon when I could use much more versatile and minmaxed equivalents? A Pidgeot is never going to hold a candle to a Staraptor, and why would I ever use a Donphan when I have access to Great Tusk for just a few points more? Worse than that, only a few select strategies are really viable. By the late game every boss 'mon is going to be holding a few Lum Berries, which is going to make status effect-based strategies fare pretty poorly. On the other hand, stat boosts last until you enter a trainer battle, so anything that can do those well is automatically high tier (You can't take those buffs into Gym Leader fights, but you can against boss wild Pokémon. Plus, with the somewhat janky AI, you can definitely find some opportunities to set up a sweep). Also, the final boss and the Rival's ace are always the same, so you'll really want to build around them by the end. Starting with anything other than the "ol' reliables" you'll inevitably get a few of quickly begins to feel like a self-imposed challenge, and with how incredibly fucking long the game is, that's just not appealing.

Length, in fact, is in my opinion PokéRogue's biggest flaw. When I said the game took about three hours to beat, I was not kidding, runs go between 3 and 4 hours which is just nuts for a game that's mostly going to be you clicking the same move on a wild Pokémon 20 levels weaker than yours. It just doesn't need to be like that, too. You can get up to level 200 compared to the official games' cap at 100, but learn-sets still go up to 100 so the latter half of your journey will be a lot more samey (unless you replace some of your Pokémon, but it's not like the new ones will be learning anything new on their own too), and so much of any playthrough is just fighting wild Pokémon that it's really easy to see how a lot of that could be cut off. Make every 10th floor from 10 to 80 be a gym leader fight, 80-90 is the E4 and 90-100 is the finale, and you've cut off the runtime in half and the amount of actual content seen by like, 5%. The difficulty might feel better, too- a lot of the game is trivial, but you're eventually going to hit a brick wall that just sweeps you and have to restart from scratch (or just reload your browser page and start the fight over...). I just don't understand why this free game feels the need to have so much padding, there's even an infinite mode for those who do want the game to go on longer, but at least for me it does ruin a lot of the fun- it's incredibly addictive, so it's common for me to want to start a run, but I know that halfway through I'll be absent-mindedly clicking Waterfall after setting up a few Dragon Dances with my Gyarados, while watching a Youtube video. So I dunno, extremely impressive effort, but I do feel the result is only kind of ok.