Genesis: Shinobi Return of the Ninja Master
December 20, 2008 - 10:11 am - Posted by Sean
Shinobi III for the Sega Genesis is one of the best ninja games I’ve ever played. The graphics, sound, and control are all spectacular.
The first stage is set in the wilderness, with ninjas hiding in the trees. It’s pretty cool, except for the guy walking around with the bucket on his head.
In the second stage, you fight armed guards in a high-tech, biological test facility.
The action never gets repetitive. The scenery is constantly changing, there are plenty of surprises and you have several attacks and power-ups at your disposal.
The bosses are incredible, and there are even some nice high-speed levels that let you ride a horse or jet-ski.
I really like the audio in Shinobi 3. It’s remarkably good and pretty realistic, especially the sound of your weapon slashing into human flesh.
If you like ninja games, you cannot afford to live without this one in your retro game collection. If you have the means, I highly recommend it.
Ah, Shinobi, one game in a proud tradition of unrealistic but still freaking hard ninja games. As I recall, I actually quite liked the first level of this game and the whole ninja war aesthetic, but then it went to things like the second stage or the jet ski level and even as a kid I thought “What the balls is up with this? This isn’t what ninjas did!”
Indeed, the Ninjas in Shinobi are not the typical feudal Japanese society of mercenary agents at all… but hey, I thought it was still a cool game even with jet skiing Ninjas
I never played Shinobi on my Genesis, but my brother use to own the coin-op version of this game. Lots of fun. I wish he still had it.
This by far is the BEST side scrolling platformer I have ever played. It easily has the best sprite work for the genre and fantastic mechanics. The music in this is well themed and the stages, well thought out. The arsenal of moves you get are fantastic and all useful, block, block crawl, block walk, jump, wall jump, double jump, jump attack etc etc, its all great. There is really no other platformer that comes close to being this intense and less whimsical then Shinobi 3, and yes I agree, this is easily best Ninja game of its time and maybe even now IMO.
BTW for anyone’s information, this game is actually a remake of the revenge of Shinobi, meaning its not really Shinobi 3, its actually called “Super revenge of Shinobi 2″.
@BitMaster: Interesting information about it being called ‘Super revenge of Shinobi 2′. The box art says ‘Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master’. Maybe because of the different releases (US, JP, UK, etc.)?
I love this game so much, I snagged a nice Japanese copy off of Ebay a year ago. I’m pretty sure do to marketing strategy, is the reason for a different name. I have a about a dozen or so Megadrive titles from Japan, strictly for there box art and some minor changes in some of the games, but mainly kick ass box art and the quality and paint job Shinobi got in Japan was great LOL
This is a tough one. Love the improvements in gameplay and graphics, but ultimately the level design and music are a significant step backwards from the 1989 Revenge of Shinobi. Thus, this is merely the 2nd best 16-bit Shinobi.