Extremely underrated entry in the Shinobi franchise. Less Revenge of-style action in favor of slower, more cautious play, figuring out when to move in and attack or send your dog in to grab the enemy first. Very fun pacing when you get into the rhythm of it. I'm not a huge fan of the one-hit deaths, but the stages are generally fair and well designed enough to not need to totally commit them to memory. Only a few late-game slip-ups (in particular, the final boss is awful) feel a little too extreme.

Also, the soundtrack is incredible.

Cho Aniki for the ladies. You can spot this devteam's work from space. A poorly balanced, rotten feeling Final Fight clone carried hard by the aesthetics of the sukeban-bosozoku themed spritework and rockabilly soundtrack. It won me over by letting me buy a cool poster of the game's composer to put on the wall of my room.

+ detailed, cool, and funny spritework and a fitting soundtrack really sell the vibes
+ the room customization between stages is a cute touch even if it doesnt really do anything
- gameplay is repetitive and depthless, the whole roster feels samey, and the difficulty is only either irritatingly brutal or boringly easy
- the grossly overdetailed spritework was mostly what i expected but man this has like the most hateful depiction of a fat lady ive ever seen jeez

I still think I'll play it again sometime, though...

Everyone's favorite homophobia-lite flavored shmup with some fighting gaminess sprinkled on top. Traditional powerups are exchanged for having your entire potential arsenal available at all times, with each one using a different special input akin to a fighting game. It'd all be far more fun to blaze through if the special inputs weren't so finnicky to perform while avoiding obstacles, but doing a 4~6+shot input to shotgun away rows of enemies over and over again is extremely satisfying when it works.

It's a surprisingly forgiving game too, maybe the fastest I've ever gone from first try to a 1CC. You get plenty of healing opportunities and an available-at-all-times invincibility button to help deal with the large size of your character. Outside of taking direct hits, the game really only seems to mildly penalize you for taking too long, and it all ends pretty quickly, probably making it too easy for some.

Has the kind of graphical presentation you'd expect from a Masaya game: tons of varied, often grotesquely detailed sprites of all shapes and sizes, and the oddball soundtrack contributed by anime composer Taku Iwasaki has some solid standouts I think about from time to time.

+ gorgeous and plentiful spritework, fun sound design all around
+ mechanically simple, giving lots of freedom to handle scenarios in the way you prefer thanks to all your options being immediately available as fun to execute fighting game inputs
+ uminin
- special inputs often run in conflict with player movement, making it difficult to reliably get the attacks you want, when and where you want
- all of the multiple endings are walls of text on a black screen, fairly middling incentive to aim for higher ranks
- very odd pacing and progression, some stages and sections feel much shorter or out of place compared to others. i'm a fan of breezy game lengths for replay value's sake, but the finale feels rather abrupt