Why The Revenge of Shinobi is the best guide to becoming a ninja
The Revenge of Shinobi (1990)
The Revenge of Shinobi (1990)
It was a tearful experience for me when I realised that ninja was not going to be a viable career path for me. I couldn’t even choose to study it in college. Basket weaving, yes. Harry Potter, yes. Even sociology, yes.
But no modules on shurikens, ninjutsus, swordplay, kais, nunchuks, jet black clothing… they’re all massive gaps in my knowledge to this day. Uncle Monty wistfully made his eventual conclusion that he would never play the Dane. And I too had to come to terms with the sad fact that I would never be a Shinobi.
But perhaps I wouldn’t have been cut out for it anyway. Back when I was a lad, it seemed that you had two choices as to what ninja you could grow up to be. The first was a Ninja Turtle, which seemed viable up until the point where I had to reckon myself with the fact that I wasn’t a turtle, nor was I likely to ever become one.
There might have been an opportunity to morph into a turtle at some point in my life, if I came into contact with some form of benevolent nuclear waste. All I’d have to do is hold a turtle of my own, and my transformation would be complete.
But where to find this green stuff? Not in Ireland, that’s for certain. Back in school, we used to get terrible scaremongering about a nuclear plant in Sellafield, North-West England, and what would happen to Ireland if some terrorist nutter blew the plant up.
Well, see Fallout 3 for what would have happened, if the posters were to believed. Seriously, Ireland would have been a brown, burned wasteland by all accounts. And it worked on me, you know. We had all seen and heard about the dreadful effects of Chernobyl, September 11th had happened in recent memory and Al-Qaeda were really beginning to rare up.
It was a tough geopolitical situation, so the government gave us an Irish solution to an Irish problem by sending iodine tablets out to each household in 2002. This, they assured us, would keep up safe from any radio-iodine that might contaminate our morning coffees. That’s tremendous, isn’t it? Take one tablet and a localised nuclear holocaust will leave you with little but a scratch.
But anyway, why would I want to do a thing like that? This was my big moment - stand in the right place when the Sellafield facility went boom, and I could be granted the superpowers I always wanted. Then I could become a superninja. Unfortunately the bomb or airplane or articulated lorry never did hit that facility, and I was left saddened.
It wasn’t much of a loss though, considering those iodine tablets went out of date a mere five years later. I think larger households only got so many to go around, and anyway the government later owned up and said that they wouldn’t have done anything really. Well, they really had us going there, didn’t they?
It all meant that becoming a turtle was off the agenda for me. A pity, because I look great in green, as well as shellsuit trackies. Well, no matter. I would have to become a ninja the old-fashioned way.
This meant a lifetime of the most intense training for me. A time where I would need to focus my mind, body and spirit to learn the way of ninjutsu. And I thought I could take some inspiration from my pal Joe Musashi on this, protagonist of the Shinobi games.
But blimey, did he make it hard on me. For some reason, possibly because I was a bit of a pilchard as a kid, I could never make it at all far through The Revenge of Shinobi for Sega Mega Drive. As in, I don’t think I could beat the second level, because I never realised that you had to activate a switch, then go backwards before continuing on. A powerful ninja should only move forward.
It would have helped as well if my shurikens, the main form of attack and something that gives you a bit of desperately needed range, didn’t keep running out. You can change how many of them you start off with in the Options menu, which incidentally is the place where you should change the Difficulty setting to Easy, or be killed horribly, early on. What I didn’t know was that there was a nifty cheat to give yourself infinite shurikens, making this whole ordeal a lot easier. A powerful ninja should always be prepared to cheat.
The next hurdle to stumble over was mastery of the double jump. Well, Joe Musashi himself can’t even do this consistently, so what makes you think I can? In any game with a double jump, you press the jump button once, then you press it again with a fairly kind leeway. Or, Donkey Kong Country style, you can cartwheel off a ledge and then do a last gasp jump to save yourself.
Not a bit of it for us budding ninjas. In Revenge of Shinobi, you’ll have to jump, and then at the very crest of your jump, and in a window of mere yoctoseconds, press jump again. Get it right, and you'll somersault triumphantly through the air ready to rain shuriken hell down on fools. Get it wrong however, which you will time and time again, and it’s almost certain death as your body rigidly falls into one of the many bottomless chasms around NeoTokyo.
This is the sticking point that keeps getting you in this game, and if you don’t get good at the double jump, it’ll be your neck that the top ninjas hold a knife to. But I’m telling you, the double jump just doesn’t work properly, which is a shame as its use is necessary to keep your frail body away from the zillions of enemies and pits. A powerful ninja should at least partially conform to the laws of physics.
The levels and settings are a bit odd too. You start off in some early 17th century rural Japanese zone, which is OK, but then pretty soon you’re doing battle with army lads toting machine guns and throwing bombs.
What’s even weirder is that sometimes you’ll get hit by an enemy and a huge chunk of your health gets swallowed, and then you’ll get hit three times in succession (possibly by a salvo of machine gun fire) and not take a scratch. And then suddenly your maximum health bar expands and you’re not sure why. What are you meant to believe? A powerful ninja must recognise why they’re fighting Chun-Li at one point, then Rambo the next.
And here’s the really mental thing. You already know that you can’t trust the setting, the time period, the enemies, the health system, or the double jump. But you can’t even trust your own ninjutsu powers either.
I mean it. One of the powers at your disposal explodes your body, costs you an extra life, kills everybody at a thousand paces and then brings you back to life again. Now, that is plainly bizarre. It's almost an admission by the game that it is so plum difficult, you'll need to sacrifice men behind the scenes just to keep trucking.
But doubling all of this in the bonkers stakes is the range of bosses. The first guy you face seems innocuous and Japanese enough, all normal. But then pretty soon it’s - and I’m not joking here - Batman, Spiderman, The Hulk, The Terminator and Godzilla.
Wow, is that enough copyright infringement, do you think? Wouldn’t Gojira have been better suited as a final boss? Better him than the real last boss, which is just some stereotypical evil old master that throws his hair at you for massive damage while your girlfriend gets crushed to dust. A powerful ninja must always be up on his modern pop culture references.
That’s an awful lot of things for a prospective ninja to take into account… it might sound fun being a ninja, but it ends up being a pretty damn stressful life, let me tell you. And you’d probably die hundreds of times before even getting close to graduating from The Revenge of Shinobi, leading you to question if it’s even really worth it anyway. The hardcores will love this, but me, I’d much sooner do the waster college courses. Do you think they’d offer a course on the Ninja Turtles?
26 September 2023