SHINOBI NON GRATA

What a perfect little game. Its strength is letting you cut down enemies like the NES ninja of old but with some great controls and a decent arsenal. Blew through it in one sitting, enjoyed it immensely. Strikes a good balance of tough, but not too punishing. Will definitely return to it in the future to play it again.

Shinobi Non Grata is a homage to Irem's cool arcade game Ninja Spirit/Saigo no Nindo, very innovative for 1988 with its real-time weapon switching and relentless ninja action. It too has a number of secondary weapons that can be used at any time besides our katana to defeat the hordes of ninjas, animals, spirits and demons (throwing stars, kusarigama and bombs, plus three new ones: a hand cannon, a lightning bolt behaving like a seeking missile, and a magic smart bomb that destroys all enemy bullets), with the difference that they are not infinite and we need to keep killing enemies to fill their gauge, thus adding a risk/reward element to the combat (but they also can't be powered up). Unlike that game, however, this is more of a boss game a la Treasure's Alien Soldier and the like, with very short and fairly easy stages and several tough boss fights in each chapter. It's a cool game, but its arcade-style nature and lack of replayability mean that it's going to be short, so I suggest to wait for sales. Pros: + Stylish new-retro pixel graphics and chiptune soundtrack that improve the original game's muddy aesthetics and gives us some cool backgrounds. + Fast-paced action with very precise controls and gameplay that is easy to pick up but hard to master. + It's nice to experiment with weapons and see how certain bosses that seemed unsurmountable become much more manageable after finding the "trick". Levels are quite short, so repeating them over and over if the boss kills you doesn't become annoying. Cons: - Once you learned it, it's quite short and without any replayability, the only thing that changes is getting an achievement for either saving or killing the girl during a certain boss near the end. - No different gameplay modes, difficulty levels or additional content. - Bizarre and pointless scoring system that resets to 0 after each chapter and does not have a global leaderboard, only keeping track of your best scores, so there's no point in going after the 1CC or personal improvements, or getting the bonus for giving the katana killing blow to the bosses. - The awesome "ninja shadow clones" power-up from the OG game that tripled our firepower and turned us into a shmup protagonist has been nerfed and/or put in places where it is barely useful, to the point you can firget it exists.

I wanted to play more before i gave it a review, but it's a really rad indie action platformer that borrows a lot from Ninja Spirit on the turbo. Like super cool actually, check it out