Shinobi: Art of Vengeance

Joe Musashi has been dead weight for two decades. Not the character — the idea of him. SEGA’s ninja has been trotted out, rebooted, and shelved so many times since the Genesis era that his name had curdled into a nostalgia asset, something to license out and quietly bury. The 2011 3DS entry was competent. Nobody remembers it.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is the first time in a generation that someone has treated Musashi as a design problem worth solving rather than a logo worth reprinting. That someone is Lizardcube, the French studio that already pulled this trick twice: first with Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, a hand-painted restoration that respected the original’s bones down to the frame, then with Streets of Rage 4, which did the far harder thing of modernizing a combat system without sanding off what made it feel good. SEGA publishes. The pedigree is not incidental — it’s the whole thesis. This is a studio that has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it understands the difference between remembering an old game and understanding why it worked.

The setup is pure 1987: Musashi returns home to find his village torched and his clan turned to stone, this time by the Enè corporation, and goes hunting. The story is a delivery mechanism and nothing more. What matters is what’s bolted to it — a momentum-driven combat system built around the Oborozuki blade, scored kills, an in-run gold economy, more than a dozen hand-drawn stages, and a light Metroidvania spine that asks you to come back with new tools.

Market position is unusually clean. This lands in the space between Katana ZERO‘s lethal precision and Hollow Knight‘s sprawl, undercutting both on commitment. It sits at 86 on Metacritic, which is not an accident of goodwill. It’s what happens when a studio with a specific competence — animation-first 2D action — gets handed exactly the right property.

• Momentum-driven combo combat: Katana chains, air juggles, kunai, dodge and parry, with meter you spend on screen-clearing Ninjutsu arts and heavier Ninpo attacks. The system rewards uninterrupted aggression rather than punishing it.
• Scored kills and a live build economy: Stylish combos generate gold mid-run, spent on new moves, amulets that meaningfully reshape your build, and consumables. Your performance funds your power curve.
• Ningi tools and gated backtracking: Progression unlocks traversal tools that open previously blocked routes, turning linear stages into semi-explorable maps hiding scrolls, side missions, and optional challenge rooms.
• Hand-drawn stages with real variety: A dozen-plus environments — ninja villages, burning forests, military bases, deserts, surreal spirit realms — each mixing wall-running platforming, environmental puzzles, and elaborate bosses.
• Difficulty tiers plus an arcade rank system: Newcomers get a genuine on-ramp; score-chasers get a grading system that treats survival as the floor, not the goal.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is simple to state and very hard to build: enter a room, kill everything without touching the ground or taking a hit, get paid.

What makes it sing is that Lizardcube has front-loaded expression rather than gating it. Most action platformers hand you a two-hit combo at hour zero and dole out the interesting verbs across the runtime, which means the first third of the game is a tutorial wearing a costume. Musashi starts capable. The Oborozuki chains are built to feel authoritative from the first swing — real weight in the wind-up, a satisfying snap on the connect — and the launcher-into-juggle vocabulary shows up early enough that improvisation is on the table by the end of the first stage rather than the fourth.

The kunai are the load-bearing mechanic, and they’re smarter than they look. They function as a juggle extender: pop an enemy up, throw two to keep him hanging, close the distance, resume the ground chain. This is standard character-action grammar imported into 2D, but the implementation is tuned so that ranged filler never becomes the dominant strategy. Kunai are limited. They restock through aggression. The economy of the moveset points in exactly one direction — forward.

Dodge and parry are where the skill ceiling actually lives. Parry timing is tight but legible, with clear tells telegraphed through animation rather than UI flourishes, and a successful read pays out in meter. That meter feeds Ninjutsu and Ninpo, which means defense converts into offense converts into score converts into gold converts into new moves. It’s a closed circuit, and it’s the single best design decision in the game. There’s no grinding here — the loop is always spending what was just earned on the thing that earns more.

Progression and the Metroidvania Question

This is where reservations set in. The Ningi tools do reopen the map, and the hidden scrolls and challenge rooms are worth the detour — the challenge rooms in particular are the best pure-combat content in the package, stripped of platforming noise. But the backtracking is structurally Metroidvania while being emotionally something else. Because stages are discrete and menu-selected rather than continuous, returning to an earlier area plays like replaying a level, not like discovering that a world you thought you knew was lying to you. The revelation that defines the genre — oh, that was here the whole time — mostly doesn’t fire.

That’s not a failure so much as a mismatch between ambition and architecture. Read it as an arcade action game with generous optional content and it’s easy to be delighted. Read it as a Metroidvania and the back half becomes a wait for a map that never quite coheres.

Difficulty and the Rank System

The arcade rank system is the game’s most honest feature. It refuses to congratulate players for merely finishing. Grades weigh aggression, variety, and untouchability, which means two players can clear the same room and receive radically different feedback — and the lower grade is informative, not punitive. It tells you that you played safe. It’s the difference between a scoreboard and a coach.

The difficulty curve is the weak link, and it’s uneven. Not brutal — uneven. Several bosses land at a markedly higher intensity than the stages feeding into them, and the late-game platforming introduces precision demands the combat system never asks players to develop. The game teaches you to be a hurricane and then hands you a sequence that requires you to be a metronome. The multiple difficulty settings cushion this, but tuning a slider is a blunt fix for a pacing problem.

The story deserves one sentence, which is roughly what it earns. Village burned, clan petrified, corporation punished. It’s connective tissue between fights, delivered with style and zero ambition. That’s a defensible choice. It’s still a missed one, given how much personality the art has.

The runtime is short. It’s also correctly short. This is a game built for a second and third clear at higher ranks, and padding it would have poisoned the loop.

The hand-drawn presentation is excellent, and it’s the studio’s signature pushed past Streets of Rage 4 in a specific way: the frame counts on Musashi are lavish enough that the combat reads as choreography. The weight transfer in a landing is visible. Cloth and hair carry inertia through direction changes. Attack animations have distinct silhouettes, which is not decoration — it’s readability, the practical reason four enemies and a projectile can be tracked without losing your own character in the noise.

The art direction earns the variety in the stage list. The burning forest is beautiful, all ash-orange backlighting and particulate haze. The spirit realms go properly strange, trading grounded ink-wash palettes for something closer to fever. Parallax depth is used with restraint — layered without becoming busy.

The UI is the one place restraint slips. Combo counters, score pop-ups, gold notifications, and meter indicators compete for the same corner of the screen during the exact moments that demand clean information. It never becomes unplayable. It does become cluttered, and in a game this fastidious about visual legibility elsewhere, that’s a notable oversight.

Technically, hand-drawn 2D of this scope is light on hardware, and the art direction is built to look correct without demanding a modern GPU.

Steam is the performance-first option and the right pick for rank chasing. High-refresh displays matter more here than the genre usually admits — parry windows are tight, and extra frames of visual information translate directly into successful reads. A controller is the way to play. The game is a fighting-game descendant; analog and face-button chaining is what it was authored for, and keyboard-and-mouse works without ever feeling native. Steam Deck is arguably the ideal configuration: the art scales beautifully to a small panel, and stage-length sessions fit handheld play precisely.

Nintendo is the portability play, and the design suits it better than most action games of this intensity. Stages are self-contained and roughly commute-sized, and the challenge rooms are perfect twenty-minute engagements. The trade-off is the one you’d expect from the platform — a visual fidelity ceiling in exchange for taking it with you, and in a game where reading an animation tell is the difference between an S rank and a restart, that ceiling isn’t free. As a sole copy, it’s a good one. When choosing, and intending to chase rank, choose Steam.

One genuine caveat regardless of platform: the Simplified Chinese localization is a real problem. The complaints center on translation quality, not gameplay. If Chinese is your primary language, wait for a patch.

• Players who want a deep narrative attached to their swordplay.
• Anyone expecting a true interconnected Metroidvania world.
• Chinese-language players, until localization is fixed.

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is a revival that understands its source material well enough to disagree with it. The original Shinobi games were stiff by necessity — hardware constraints made precision the only available design language. Lizardcube identified that stiffness as a limitation rather than an identity, and rebuilt the ninja around momentum instead. That’s a genuine act of criticism expressed through design, and it works.

Does it break new ground for the genre? No, and that’s the correct reading. The Metroidvania layer is the seam where ambition outran architecture, and the difficulty spikes suggest a late-development tuning pass that didn’t quite land. This is strong execution of understood ideas, not a new idea.

But execution at this level is its own achievement. The animation is superb. The combat economy is airtight. The short runtime is un-padded by design. At $29.99, this is confident 2D action design in the lineage of Lizardcube’s own Streets of Rage 4 — this time with a better character to build around, and with enough rough edges that the recommendation comes with an audience attached.

Joe Musashi is finally worth the name on the box.