Mostly the exact kind of teenage bullshit we need to be fostering.
Every now and then I get into a mood. There's this feeling that rises in my chest and makes me feel like an animal in a cage. I look at my backlog for something to play, and then I leaf through the Steam store, and then I pull up some list somewhere for some "hidden gems" on some console, and then I give up. I sit there anxious and twitchy as the ennui sets in. It falls around me like wet towels. There is only one possible cure; I need to play some shitty PS2 game that nobody has ever heard of.
Nightshade ended up being a pretty bad pick for that, because it turned out to be something like the eleventh game in the Shinobi series. It's just one of those sequels that doesn't use the original name anywhere. That hasn't stopped it from largely slipping into obscurity, though, especially in the west; I'd never heard so much as a word about it before I stumbled across it on a masterlist of PS2 exclusives, and all it gave me to go off of was a title. I went into Nightshade essentially as blind as I could have, with no foreknowledge nor expectations aside from the vague hope that it would be good. At the very least, I hoped it would be interesting.
Nightshade is occasionally good, and significantly more interesting than I'd expected.
The game opens strong. Hibana must have gone through about six or seven different costume designs in her head and decided to incorporate all of them at once; she's clad from head-to-toe in gleaming white latex, she's wearing red gloves with blades on the elbows, she's got insect carapace boots, she's got what is incredibly obviously a Kamen Rider headband that descends down and over her face to act as an augmented-reality visor, she's got mandibles on the sides of her mask, fishnet stitching holding the entire outfit together, and the requisite Shinobi scarf that's about as long as the Mason-Dixon line and which flows behind her like water when she runs. When each element is listed individually, you'd expect her to look like an overdesigned monster, but it actually all comes together shockingly well. She looks kind of like one of those "what if a Pokemon was actually a human" fan drawings, in a good way. I imagine that if she'd been a supporting character in Shinobi first — the Akane to a Ninja Gaiden, so to speak — fans would be clamoring for her to be in a lot more games than just this and Project X Zone 2.
While I won't try to pit two bad bitches against one another, it does need to be said that Bayonetta 2 ripped the opening level of Nightshade completely the fuck off. Slicing apart monsters on top of a fighter jet as it weaves between buildings and keeps your feet glued to the hull even as it flies in a path perpendicular to the streets below is something Kamiya should have gotten a smack on the wrist for. Nightshade nails it, though, and it flawlessly pulls off the sequence a full decade earlier; you're kicking away missiles, you're spinning sai blades and slashing through Hellspawn, you do battle with a robot ninja who ends up ascending to humanity after he gets continued exposure to a shard of the evil red blade that eats souls. The tate system returns from Shinobi, too: killing enemies in rapid succession grants you an exponentially increasing damage boost, and if you manage to kill all of the enemies on screen in a short enough timespan, you get a cutscene of Hibana executing them all at once. What they don't tell you is that this works on bosses. Bosses will summon adds, and building a sufficiently long tate off of the mooks will open up the chance for you to charge a long Stealth Attack that will instantly kill the boss and give you a unique cutscene if you do it before the tate combo drops. It rules. It fucking rules so hard. It's probably one of the best rewards for playing stylishly and smoothly I've seen in a long time. Once you find an opening, you can kill any boss in a single strike.
Regrettably, though, the levels between boss fights can't hold up to the same level of quality for very long. A lot of the early stages are predicated on clambering around on rooftops and running through dark city streets, and those are all fun and good. Later levels can't help but put bottomless pits fucking everywhere that will instantly kill you and send you back to your last checkpoint, and a thirty-minute level might have two or three checkpoints at best. Getting across these pits steadily starts relying on bouncing between enemies with very few platforms you can actually stand on, and the armored enemies can only be bounced off of with a kick. You can only kick once while in the air, for some reason, so throw out one kick just a bit too early and it's back to the last checkpoint for you. I eventually just gave up on fighting every enemy and settled on running past them when I could, instead. It's possible to be a little too annoying with what you're asking the player to do, and this steps a few toes over the line.
I do want to bring attention to the writing, though, because it’s wonderfully absurd. This is a game where your corrupt CO warns you over radio comms that "astral sensors are at Level 3", meaning that "there is a large-class Hellspawn nearby", and everything just keeps rolling along as though those are two regular sentences to say to a person. Hibana is on a revenge quest against her former master and the new side-piece he swapped her out for. She ends up rebelling against the orders of the Japanese government and the Nakatomi Conglomerate because she realizes that she's little more than a disposable pawn to them, fit only to reassemble and return the cursed sword Akujiki into their care. Every other sentence out of her mouth is “it’s not my day” or “it’s not your day” or “this really isn’t my day”, because the writers are trying to give her a cool catchphrase. It's the sort of heightened realism often found scribbled in the back of a teenager's math notebook and too-often derided when presented as art by the public due to being "juvenile" or "appealing to the lowest common denominator". I'd counter by saying that the biggest prestige video games on the market have been taking themselves a little too fucking seriously lately and could strongly benefit from reigning it in. This isn't a suggestion that we abandon all pretense and make everything a joke; rather that it's our idiosyncrasies which make us interesting, and to play it safe is to play it boring. You'll never embarrass yourself if you hide those strange little parts of you, but you'll never find anyone who likes you for your true self, either. How much of you are you willing to surrender to spare your precious ego?
Nightshade ultimately ends up stumbling too hard and too often in its second half for me to enthusiastically suggest that everyone play it, but it’s absolutely worth trying out. It’s nonsense, but it’s good nonsense. At the very least, it’s good for your soul to play something that’s just a little bit trash every now and then. It’s like sitting under a waterfall and meditating. Cleanse yourself of impurities by not holding games to a prestige industry writing standard that’s still lagging about twenty years behind shit that your dad would have watched on the SciFi channel at 3 PM on a Sunday.
This easily has one of the best soundtracks on the console.
Every now and then I get into a mood. There's this feeling that rises in my chest and makes me feel like an animal in a cage. I look at my backlog for something to play, and then I leaf through the Steam store, and then I pull up some list somewhere for some "hidden gems" on some console, and then I give up. I sit there anxious and twitchy as the ennui sets in. It falls around me like wet towels. There is only one possible cure; I need to play some shitty PS2 game that nobody has ever heard of.
Nightshade ended up being a pretty bad pick for that, because it turned out to be something like the eleventh game in the Shinobi series. It's just one of those sequels that doesn't use the original name anywhere. That hasn't stopped it from largely slipping into obscurity, though, especially in the west; I'd never heard so much as a word about it before I stumbled across it on a masterlist of PS2 exclusives, and all it gave me to go off of was a title. I went into Nightshade essentially as blind as I could have, with no foreknowledge nor expectations aside from the vague hope that it would be good. At the very least, I hoped it would be interesting.
Nightshade is occasionally good, and significantly more interesting than I'd expected.
The game opens strong. Hibana must have gone through about six or seven different costume designs in her head and decided to incorporate all of them at once; she's clad from head-to-toe in gleaming white latex, she's wearing red gloves with blades on the elbows, she's got insect carapace boots, she's got what is incredibly obviously a Kamen Rider headband that descends down and over her face to act as an augmented-reality visor, she's got mandibles on the sides of her mask, fishnet stitching holding the entire outfit together, and the requisite Shinobi scarf that's about as long as the Mason-Dixon line and which flows behind her like water when she runs. When each element is listed individually, you'd expect her to look like an overdesigned monster, but it actually all comes together shockingly well. She looks kind of like one of those "what if a Pokemon was actually a human" fan drawings, in a good way. I imagine that if she'd been a supporting character in Shinobi first — the Akane to a Ninja Gaiden, so to speak — fans would be clamoring for her to be in a lot more games than just this and Project X Zone 2.
While I won't try to pit two bad bitches against one another, it does need to be said that Bayonetta 2 ripped the opening level of Nightshade completely the fuck off. Slicing apart monsters on top of a fighter jet as it weaves between buildings and keeps your feet glued to the hull even as it flies in a path perpendicular to the streets below is something Kamiya should have gotten a smack on the wrist for. Nightshade nails it, though, and it flawlessly pulls off the sequence a full decade earlier; you're kicking away missiles, you're spinning sai blades and slashing through Hellspawn, you do battle with a robot ninja who ends up ascending to humanity after he gets continued exposure to a shard of the evil red blade that eats souls. The tate system returns from Shinobi, too: killing enemies in rapid succession grants you an exponentially increasing damage boost, and if you manage to kill all of the enemies on screen in a short enough timespan, you get a cutscene of Hibana executing them all at once. What they don't tell you is that this works on bosses. Bosses will summon adds, and building a sufficiently long tate off of the mooks will open up the chance for you to charge a long Stealth Attack that will instantly kill the boss and give you a unique cutscene if you do it before the tate combo drops. It rules. It fucking rules so hard. It's probably one of the best rewards for playing stylishly and smoothly I've seen in a long time. Once you find an opening, you can kill any boss in a single strike.
Regrettably, though, the levels between boss fights can't hold up to the same level of quality for very long. A lot of the early stages are predicated on clambering around on rooftops and running through dark city streets, and those are all fun and good. Later levels can't help but put bottomless pits fucking everywhere that will instantly kill you and send you back to your last checkpoint, and a thirty-minute level might have two or three checkpoints at best. Getting across these pits steadily starts relying on bouncing between enemies with very few platforms you can actually stand on, and the armored enemies can only be bounced off of with a kick. You can only kick once while in the air, for some reason, so throw out one kick just a bit too early and it's back to the last checkpoint for you. I eventually just gave up on fighting every enemy and settled on running past them when I could, instead. It's possible to be a little too annoying with what you're asking the player to do, and this steps a few toes over the line.
I do want to bring attention to the writing, though, because it’s wonderfully absurd. This is a game where your corrupt CO warns you over radio comms that "astral sensors are at Level 3", meaning that "there is a large-class Hellspawn nearby", and everything just keeps rolling along as though those are two regular sentences to say to a person. Hibana is on a revenge quest against her former master and the new side-piece he swapped her out for. She ends up rebelling against the orders of the Japanese government and the Nakatomi Conglomerate because she realizes that she's little more than a disposable pawn to them, fit only to reassemble and return the cursed sword Akujiki into their care. Every other sentence out of her mouth is “it’s not my day” or “it’s not your day” or “this really isn’t my day”, because the writers are trying to give her a cool catchphrase. It's the sort of heightened realism often found scribbled in the back of a teenager's math notebook and too-often derided when presented as art by the public due to being "juvenile" or "appealing to the lowest common denominator". I'd counter by saying that the biggest prestige video games on the market have been taking themselves a little too fucking seriously lately and could strongly benefit from reigning it in. This isn't a suggestion that we abandon all pretense and make everything a joke; rather that it's our idiosyncrasies which make us interesting, and to play it safe is to play it boring. You'll never embarrass yourself if you hide those strange little parts of you, but you'll never find anyone who likes you for your true self, either. How much of you are you willing to surrender to spare your precious ego?
Nightshade ultimately ends up stumbling too hard and too often in its second half for me to enthusiastically suggest that everyone play it, but it’s absolutely worth trying out. It’s nonsense, but it’s good nonsense. At the very least, it’s good for your soul to play something that’s just a little bit trash every now and then. It’s like sitting under a waterfall and meditating. Cleanse yourself of impurities by not holding games to a prestige industry writing standard that’s still lagging about twenty years behind shit that your dad would have watched on the SciFi channel at 3 PM on a Sunday.
This easily has one of the best soundtracks on the console.
3 Comments
@psychobomb: Sega composers will create the most jaw-dropping piece of drum and bass you ever heard and dip from making music forever. the GOATs.
gruel
3 months ago
here's a Cool Nightshade Fact for you: some of the music in this and Shinobi was done by Fumie Kumatani, who did Shadow's music in SA2, E-102's theme, and a lot of Rouge's music.