Imagine not being able to admit its a shit game

The goat commercial tho

youtube.com/watch?v=8wf8jx6jWJM

OP here, i really want to like this game. Bad, but it just is shit. It has little flashes of greatness, but playing it, it feels like it never was play tested at all. The meat of a good game is hidden under a lot of poor polishing and poor tweaking, and it could be a good game if someone copied it and just made their own homage or ripped it off to make their own franchise.

All the Mega Drive Shinobi games are leagues better.

Yeah, there was a lot that could have been better, but for the year it came out it was decent, and the aesthetic holds up to this day.

i want to say that the aesthetic is almost all the game has but even that feels rushed and half assed.I understand they felt floating enemies were neded for their idea of jump dashing combat chains, but fucking really? Floating tiki heads? Floating stone triangles? I think there may have been fish with wings or something. If they wanted to go all in on aesthetic they fucked up hard on that end also. So that makes me feel even worse because on the one thing they seem to have double downed on, even that feels lazy to me.

Imagine still being mad that a thread a week ago said Shinobi was better than Sekiro.

op here i didnt see that thread, and i also havent played sekiro. It looked like a stupid meme game. Wasnt interested in the new dark souls band wagon. Im a ninja gaiden guy or tenchu. Metal gear solid 2 is even a better ninja game than this is.

great sound design and music though.

The best Shinobi games are the 2D ones. But it's kind of the opposite for NG, where the 3D games are the best. At least the first two.

SOME of the music is well made, a lot of it is generic. maybe 5 tracks or so are noteworthy. Not enough for me to say it has good music but that many tracks still makes it have better music than the average game. Sound design didnt stand out much but there isnt much annoying in it either other than the voices.

I can admit to all that. But here's my counterpoint
The scarf is cool and tate is a neat mechanic.

Why do people say this game is hard? It had a combo gimmick that made it very easy from what I remember.

It gets pretty ball busting in the end levels.

Why is there always a late night ps2 shinobi thread?

I dunno I beat it a long ass time ago and I don't remember having any problems at all due to the gimmick. At least with Dmc3: Dante's Awakening I get why people would say it's hard

because every level manages to have hard things that really dont need to be there, that dont improve the game and only make it worse.

Im fighting the robotic buhda statue, and its surrounded by a vat of acid. if you fall off you lose. there are a lot of bullshit ways you can fall in that, then you have to restart the entire fight.

its a long fight because he only sends out four minions at once, so your tate is low unless you get lucky and he sends two waves.

if you fall in the acid its game over. and there isnt any reason it has to be there. they could have just made a playform under it and stairs to get back up if they wanted to punish you with something annoying if you fell off.

They're either shitters that get stomped on normal or chads that play exclusively on Super.

That boss is fucking easy as long as you understand how air dashing works.

>can't defend
>defense
>concede to anything even an inch
This is why you dont make absolute statements user. But I'm genuinely curious. Why did you make this thread?

Camera is fine, enemies are cannon fodder by design, because you have to dispatch them in quick succession. The only really terrible level is the one in the mall because everything looks the same. The platforming is excellent, and "shit saves" tells me you ran out of bullshit to cry about so you started padding your list.
The graphics are serviceable for a PS2 game of the time.
It seems you played it for 30 minutes, got obliterated and came here crying like half of these faggots usually do.

if everything goes right, yeah, but ehen you have 6 or 7 tate kills and one second to connect with the boss, rarelt do you have time to orient the camera, meaning you are making a dash at the head, and after connnecting, may not be able to reach the patform if you fall off. The issue is the games tate system rushing you to such an extent, and irs terroble level design. they synergize into a fucking mess.

to see if im proven wrong which i dont think i have been.

Try nightshade instead, it's much more fun.

Dude it's pretty obvious that you don't remember dick about the boss. It and the platforms don't move. If you die from a fall it's 100% your fault.

You've clearly never gone near finishing it. Go fight that last boss, then come back to me. No, describing a youtube video you just watched doesn't count.

>Shit bosses and boss gimicks- most bosses are retarded or stupid, many overly rely on using the gimmic of killing all the small enemies before attacking the boss- trivializes the boss itself, and is maddening to perform right.

This criticism only works for the final boss. the others just demand that you use the mechanics of the game, the final boss can just say fuck you sometimes which makes it frustrating. some o fthe bosses have cool designs though like the spider white tiger thing.

shit saves? thats no checkpoints. Which in a clunky platformer like this is a death sentence. you can have cannon fodder enemies and have them be visually interesting. The ninjas are at least something. The Wall climbing ninjas are unique. They tried with those. Floating tiki heads is when youve got five bucks left of your budget because the rest went into scarf physics.

And no if you read the thread Im almost on chapter 7. The game is a mess. To really perform well you need a good understanding of the games mechanics and the game fails to prepare or teach you most of it. So you just die until you figure it out. Maybe in some games this is okay, but in games without checkpoints where the levels are these ugly and boring to go through again and again? its terrible. stop defending that.

I've beaten it and the last boss was long but not particularly hard. This is all from memory though, I played it back to back with Dmc 3 and didn't think it was anything special.

>To really perform well you need a good understanding of the games mechanics
Wow, totally unplayable.

i'm having trouble believing that people found this game genuinely difficult.

i picked it up from a bargain bin at walmart when i was like 8 or something and remember beating it in a few days. sekiro whopped my ass way harder.

>To really perform well you need a good understanding of the games mechanics and the game fails to prepare or teach you most of it.

To perform well at a game you must understand the mechanics, pretty simple. With the dogs you literally just dodge behind them or use shurikens. With the biggest filter of the game being the dogs I don't see this as a valid criticism, the game shouldn't be tutorial city there's plenty of ways to learn and the game does fine as is to teach you how to play it. It's not a complicated system just demanding in terms of performance from the player. Once you understand shuriken = paralysis and the simple tate system going from weakest enemy to strongest so you can kill them more easily the game is done teaching you pretty much after the first level.

Wasn't Tenchu better?

Apples and oranges.

Tenchu was a stealth game and Shinobi is an action game. The combat in Tenchu was serviceable but the stealth gameplay was the main draw.

sekiro is like a better version of tenchu mixed with ninja gaiden

>sekiro whopped my ass way harder
This is because From is up completely up their own ass when it comes to video game challenge.

nice reading comprehension. Im saying the game does a terrible job showing you its own mechanics, and this is a game where if you dont know them, youll fail. some games have wiggle room where without knowledge of a lot of quirks or gimmics, you can still succeed by jusy trying hard enough and changing your tactics enough and improvising

A lot of this game is simply not intuitive and to discover a lot of its nuances, will merely happen by accident in time, if you play long enough go do it.

A game like this without checkpoints, tedious monotonous levels, strict boss fight strategies with almost no room for deviation, a game like that needs to prepare the player better.

Anyway i just reached level
7. The issue with chapter 6s budha bosss i have, is that directly under its chin, if you fall down, you fall into the acid, but two feet backwards is the platform you fight on. That only exists to force the player to dash forward, hit, then dash back. It only is there to make the fight more tedious. and there is 0 room to experiment or improvise. the only way to beat the boss, is to jump around, lure and wait for waves of enemies, avoiding attacks until enougj amass, then you have to kill them all and rush the boss. I could defend that if normal attacks did more damage, giving you an OPTION of how to approach the boss, yet there is none. I think good games gove two or three viable ways to beat a boss. just something.

>dog has a sword in its mouth
>try to attack it head on
>bounce off ineffectually
>hit it from the side or back
>attack goes through just fine
what's so hard to understand about this?

>Im saying the game does a terrible job showing you its own mechanics
How is this anything new when Souls games exist?

I never finished it but the bosses I fought seemed hyper-simple, they had like two moves each.

I got it because PSM raved about it. I played it for like an hour and never touched it again. It was boring.

I rarely get so turned off with a game so fast.
Maybe it got better but I'll never know.

ds was largely artifical difficulty, hard and inconvinient for the sake of being "hardcore" when there were sometimes more logical ways of doing things

i mean other stuff, like, getting a free dash, anytime you hit something in the air, allowing you to chain infinite hits. stuff you would have to find out on accident by mashing buttons.

Stuff like the tate system and how
no boss is really meant to be killed without it. it being not an option but a neccesity. the game treats tate kills like a choice and if you dont practice any use it the game is unbeatable, until you go back and treat it as your go to strat.

I played it for a while but never touched it again. I should probably go back to it, there's a lot of stuff that looks great here.

youtube.com/watch?v=HJYoD5dtok0