Shinobi | Combat Overview 

Oh man I had totally forgotten about this game. It's been so long since I played

Glad to see the Shinobi reboot games still getting praise to this day! These are the only games I can think of where a boss throwing minions at you wasn't obnoxious, the Tate system is such a great mechanic. This duology has an arcade-like charm, especially the 2002 one with the boss rush design. The soundtrack is amazing and for the PS2 era the combat was surprisingly complex despite the small moveset. ...I also really want Hotsuma's scarf, that thing is hypnotic.

I was literally watching some of your videos right now and you upload the one game I was looking for subbed

Really well-formed review as usual. I have to ask, have you paid Shinobi 3DS? I only picked it up this year trying it various 3DS games and I just fell in love with it; it really felt like a true sequel to Shinobi III while taking some slight cues from other entries in the series. The combo system actually might be inspired by Tate now that I'm thinking about it and 2002 simultaneously since it improves your damage as you keep the combo up.

BRO WHERE HAS THIS CHANNEL BEEN AND HOW AM I JUST NOW SEEING IT?!

I learnt of this game thanks to Bumbles McFumbles. That dude goes in-depth with every game he covers, though he's not exclusively action game-oriented. Can recommend checking him out. That aside: As always, good to see you still going.

To this day I still train Kenjutsu while listening to this game OST, and it has been about a decade.

Your channel is awesome! Please do with all the Ninja Gaiden games as well!

Shout out to everyone who found out about Shinobi by way of Project x Zone, which had Hotsuma team up with Strider Hiryu.

I literally just searched your channel, just as you posted this video lmao.

Still play this on the go with my ps2 emulator. Too bad shinobi or nightshade will never have a remake. I will not stop loving this game. it's a big part of my childhood!:)

cool concept for a channel, good quality content. subscribed

Where did you get the render of Hotsuma in your thumbnail? It looks really good!

I played it back in the day, but it’s tough as nails and I just couldn’t beat it. Which really frustrated me, because I did love it!!

We need a new shinobi

Great advice, great review. Though if we're talkin music and favorite tracks, I like Cool Corporation, such an eery sounding bop.

Shinobi's awesome though the Lock On in this game can really just mess ya up w/o any fault from the player. The camera as well isn't ideal for the fast paced combat it's going for and then there'd be times when Hotsuma would just WHIFF on a locked on target right in front of him for no reason so yeah the game I'd say could've used more polish overall esp. for being as precision demanding as it is. I can't remember if the game even had an enemy/target switch button or not which means that Lock On better be behaving. I am familiar w/ it's very rocky development so I understand that it's still one hell of a miracle that it was able to launch on other systems and still be as good as it is in it's final state, all things considered. This was a very fair and good look back on this oldie CombView so good work man. Regarding your comments on Arcade influence and difficulty, I'll be pointing out a few things but don't take it anything personally as for a while now I have been seeing this sort of sentiment slowly coming back again and I just don't like it one bit. What muddies the waters when it comes to talking about the Arcade Era difficulty are a few things. First is that those games mostly were played on 1 difficulty on the cabinet even if they had multiple difficulty levels to em. Plus a lot of people would understandably believe in the idea of 'Coin munching' greed incentive for the publishers to make those games that much difficult back in the day but the thing is they weren't or at least not entirely. It was more the case that the Arcades spread outside of JP mostly in late 80s and 90s when JP already had em much earlier ( since 60s I think) so the devs were more used to fine tuning difficulty for JP audience and around their understanding of gamey concepts such as let's say 'I-frames', a concept that anyone new to arcade gaming back then wouldn't even know about outside of JP but the JP audience would be more likely to be familiar w/ it. Hence the perception of difficulty and what's fair and reasonable vs. just outright BS shifts. What might be seen as BS in rest of the world might just be slightly above average difficulty for JP players though I should say that I'm not implying that every JP player was some sorta arcade beast or something but rather I'm sure even they had majority of their players just as scrubby as everywhere else. The point is that it's the lack of familiarity w/ the type of games people were dealing w/ at the time really gave the Arcade era this infamy of being insanely difficult games and I will say yeah they had challenging games for an average player back then but we still have those even now. A lot of games are challenging to your average player on their hardest difficulty but the difference is that unlike the arcade era, games nowadays are much more generous, fair and more importantly respectful of player's TIME in their challenge. Having good checkpoints improves the replayability for the games overall which is something arcade games didn't even wanna bother w/ or they used code input specific level checkpoint systems that is if they weren't too busy sending the player back to the very first stage. That is something that works for the arcades as it's kinda a reset for the next player in the line to get their turn going on w/ a fresh new attempt. That's also a reason why arcade games lean on the shorter game length of maybe 15-30 mins or less than an hour at best for a full playthrough as by design they didn't want people in the line waiting for too long. This is why that approach of sending player back to stage 1 also kinda works as it's a small time commitment from em should they fail but this is just not practical at all for longer length games even in the PS2 era like say God Hand. Imagine getting shit on in the Flying Pyramid and God Hand just sends ya back to the very first stage. Would that be considered as a brutal hardcore punishment? for sure but wouldn't that be huge BS as well considering the much bigger loss of time and progress? also yes. I picked God Hand specifically because it is very Arcade like in nature (3D beat em up) but greatly benefits from not being an arcade game (the access to more buttons alone is a huge benefit). Viewtiful Joe is another example of such as well. Also since Arcade games are so strapped for time they literally couldn't waste any moment for any form of basic introduction or tutorial which further adds to this issue of their perception about difficulty as new players just wouldn't have even the basic information on things. Either the games relied upon the nearby community to hopefully spread that kind of information or they tend to use their very first stage for that instead. Hasn't the modern gaming taken way too far w/ their tutorialization going for hour long chapters w/ cutscenes and whatnot? yes that is certainly an extreme way to go about it but if the game's like 18-20 hours + then most players aren't thinking about their initial hour of tutorial even if said tutorial can sour the replayability aspect which is a good criticism for modern games. The answer to that however isn't to ask devs to do what the Arcade games did cause they didn't do shit for most part. I feel like the consoles kinda had a good idea in there regarding this issue w/ their manuals but that's such a thing of past as well. All in all one should be more careful before they go about glorifying Arcade era or any other era for that matter as it's all nice and rosy when ya look back at past and think that the games were just so so much better but in terms of memory, one mostly reminisces about the good experiences and the games (or even the complete opposite) but not the plethora of just average or mid ones. This happens all the time and isn't something restricted to Arcade era either. There's always overwhelmingly more DUDs than HITS not just in the past but in the present and I can bet in the future as well which is fine by me as long as people are trying new things.

Great game, great video Combat man. I just wish I have a better control over Shinobi's jump movement! ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Oh hey it's the game with the cool scarf

I’m saving this video for later, but i heard lots of good things about this game Also I would like to hear your thoughts about what i think of your No More Heroes 3 and Kingdom Hearts 2 videos

This series is awesome!!

This game was insanely hard from what I remember

I prefer the Nightshade/Kunoichi soundtrack

Good video Can your review earth defense force 4.1 or 5 or 6 There are action games wave based 3rd shooter have 4 different classes and each have different weapons and different way of movement

seems like you never did a video on bujingai, you def need to check this one out

It's only a matter of time before I see Gori: Cuddly Carnage on this channel. I tried the demo and the combat is pretty solid.

Great video!