The Cyber Shinobi

The Cyber Shinobi
Behold, the black sheep of the Shinobi series.
Genre(s): Platform Platform(s): Master System Release Date: 1990 Developer(s): Sega Publisher(s): Sega Country: Japan Successor: Shadow Dancer (Genesis)

The Cyber Shinobi, also known as Shinobi Part 2, is a platform game developed an published by Sega in 1990, exclusively for the Master System and only in Europe, Australia and Brazil . The game is a spin off of the Shinobi series.

Why It Sucks

1. Unlike every other Shinobi games, this game is ungodly slow, moving at less than 20 FPS at best.
2. The slowness also translates to Joe Musashi himself, who moves in a pretty orthopedic way and has extremely low movility.
3. The HUD takes a third of the screen.
4. There are 2 types of jumping (the higher jump is executed by pressing Up + 1). With the exception of the section with electric generators, the lower jump is completely useless and doesn't help you with dodging obstacles.
5. There is no after-hit invincibility, which means you can get hit by many projectiles at the same time.
6. You can get P power-ups that supposedly enhance your attacks, but it does not affect your hits.
7. The game is really stingy with both ammo and Ninjutsu energy.
8. Graphics are pretty lame. While the sprites are decent; the stages look fairly boring and rehash a lot of elements; backgrounds do not change during the stage.
   • The worst part however is that you can see the uncut boxes in the sprites, as if the developers got lazy and didn't even bother to remove the boxes.
   • Animations are also extremely choppy and ugly.
9. The sound effects are unsatisfying and weak.
10. Enemies can attack you from off screen.
11. The enemy roster is generic: There are only 5 types of enemies, grey ninjas, red female ninjas, guys in green suits, astronauts that fly and try to tackle and guys in grey suits armed with guns.
12. The physical attacks of Joe in this game are awful, they have barely any range and are somewhat delayed.
13. The hit detection is inconsistent, sometimes you are clearly touching a hazard or an enemy, yet it doesn't count. However, when you clearly dodge the attack, it counts as a hit.
14. Bosses are really boring, most of them only have one attack and an extremely simple pattern, which can be countered with ease.
    • The only exception is the final boss who has a ton of attacks and no pattern.
    • The enemies have a lot of health, making them even more tedious to kill.
    • The game tells you at the start of the level the weak point of the bosses.
15. The difficulty is a mess, the enemies are really easy and simple, the only thing that gives the game any difficulty is the awful level design, and even then, the game is the easiest of all the Shinobi games.
16. The level design is abominable:
    • With the exception of the first level, all the others are extremely lazy and basic, because in these levels, all you do is just going forward until you reach the end.
    • Enemy placement is terrible, enemies can ambush from both sides in screens that are filled with annoying traps.
    • At some points it is impossible to avoid taking damage, this is specially truth with the enemies that shoot.
    • The traps can be extremely annoying, like extremely fast spikes that come from the ground and have massive range, ridiculous amounts of boulders that fall at the same time, and even parts of the ground falling.
    • 2 levels in particular are asinine, one stage is just walking forward while jumping over the fire, then followed by a small set of enemies.
    • The other level is just a free fall in a cascade. While trying to pick power ups, there aren't any enemies at all, only the boss at the end.
    • There are parts that force you to kill all the enemies to advance, this presents another problem, if by some chance you are stuck inbetween the enemy and the border of the screen, you are stuck until you die without any way to escape.
    • The game has a timer that continues to run even after losing a life.
17. The game is also shorter than any other game in the series.

Redeeming Qualites

1. The sprites look well-designed.
2. Decent ending.
3. The music is not bad, even though the first Shinobi and even the Game Gear games has better soundtracks.

Reception

The game was rated 68 out of a 100 by Sega Pro, which criticized it for its lack of content and easy difficulty. Richard Leadbetter gave the game a score of 46% and compared it unfavorably to the Master System version of the original Shinobi.

Videos

Load video

YouTube

YouTube might collect personal data. Privacy Policy

ContinueDismiss

Comments

Loading comments...