Shinobi III: Return of the Ninja Master

THE BAD:
Can get frustrating if you can’t get past a certain bit

SUMMARY:
I got this game as a birthday present along with one called Zero Tolerance. It’s not one I’d have gone out and bought I don’t think, but it is one of my favourite games for this console. There are plenty of levels, and while there aren’t that many different moves you can execute, you hardly notice it as you’re playing through the game.

This is actually the third Shinobi game for this console. You play as Joe Mushai (Shinobi), a lone warrior who fights for good. I can’t remember the exact details of the storyline or even the spelling of his real name, but it doesn’t really matter. Some games need a storyline in order to be good, but this game doesn’t. It is a side scroller like many for this console. You can walk, run, jump, climb along hand rails and ceilings, double jump, throw daggers and do a flying kick in the air. Your main weapon is your shuriken (daggers) which you throw at enemies. You do have a limited supply but there’s always plenty around to pick up. If you run out or you are close enough to an enemy then you will hit them with your dagger, but you won’t throw it. If you pick up a power up then your shuriken are 3 times more powerful and you will hit with a big sword instead of a dagger in close combat, also 3 times more powerful. Another attack is your ninjitsu attack. When you press A you will do this attack. In the pause menu you can select from 4 different attacks. One creates pillars of fire to cause massive damage to enemies on screen, one creates lightning around you allowing you to take 3 hits without sustaining any damage, one creates copies of yourself allowing you to jump higher and one blows you up causing massive damage and also causing you to lose a life. This may not sound like a good idea, but it does give you a full health bar and I found myself using this to sustain my battle with the end boss instead of being killed and having to start again.

There are 7 levels you have to work through, although they are all divided up into sub parts. Generally you need to defeat a sub-boss or a few low ranking people to pass to the next section. Quite often the next part of the level is quite different to the part you were just in. You can be riding on a horse one minute then spending the whole time going up an elevator the next. Also as the levels go on, they get progressively harder in their own right, not just because there are tougher enemies or something. The bosses themselves don’t really, but getting through the level intact becomes hard. In one level you have to jump on falling rocks to climb up the level and if you miss just one then you lose a life. Using the Ninjitsu attack to give yourself extra jump comes in very handy if you find this part too tough. There are several other sections where you die if you miss a hand rail or a jump. One thing about this game is that the levels are actually interesting to play because you are doing something different mostly in each level. The final part of the last level involves jumping from wall to wall to climb up while one of the walls slowly closes in on you.

The game has 4 difficulty levels. The easiest means you have a full life bar and 9 lives, the next hardest one you only have 2 lives. But when you go up another difficulty your maximum health bar is reduced to about 3/4 and on the hardest difficulty your maximum health bar goes down to about half. So getting through some sections then becomes very difficult. I did manage to beat the game on the hardest difficulty, but it took a while. Mainly I had to conserve lives early on for when I really needed them. Not being killed and losing all your shuriken also helps. The bosses in this game are all pretty unique. Each of them has their own weaknesses and quite a lot of them have parts where if you hit them then you do no damage. Fighting bosses was the usual time when I used my Ninjitsu attack to deal a lot of damage, particularly if I didn’t have powered up daggers.

This game on hardest mode is quite difficult and some of the sections require you to be very accurate with whatever you’re doing. Having such a low health bar makes some parts where there are lots of enemies quite tough to get by. I myself had to play on easiest before I could beat the game. Then as I got better I was able to advance through the difficulty levels. The end boss is tough to beat for many reasons. One is that he takes so many hits to beat (no surprise there) but he also has a wide variety of moves to use on you, quite a lot of them moves you can actually use yourself. There is also something sneaky about him regarding Ninjitsu attacks, but I won’t say what so as not to spoil the surprise.

All in all this was a very enjoyable game. For a Mega Drive game it actually was pretty long and the difficulty modes meant that a lot of people would be able to play it and actually get a challenge out of it. I remember enjoying it when I was younger and when I played it again recently I still got the same amount of fun from the game even though I knew exactly what to do and when.