Ninja Gaiden [NES] + R2RKMF: Scrolling Action Monogatari

[velo]

Tried the demo for the new Shinobi game, and that completely killed any expectations I may have had for it.

It's a metroidvania-light. I think it has individual stages, but they have maps with backtracking, secrets and such, and you can revisit earlier stages whenever you want. Even in the demo I came across several obvious "treasure hidden behind blocked path that you need to come back with a new skill to access later" moments, which is the laziest school of metroidvania design.

Combat is basically roll-to-win. You can dodge anything by rolling through enemies, and defeat them by spamming attacks. This was just the first stage of course, but everything still felt way too easy, nothing puts up a fight - and every encounter with the same type of enemy is completely identical to the last time you encountered that enemy.


Whatever this is, it's definitely no R2RKMF

Apparently the only thing in the blocked treasure chests are some point items. All it really amounts to is that when you replay the level in Arcade Mode, there are a couple more chests you can get to for additional score. If the rest of the game is like this, you could go straight through story mode and finish the game without replaying any levels. According to the status screen, you've already unlocked almost every special ability by the end of the first stage anyway. It's bound to annoy some people here that you have to finish levels on Story Mode before doing score attack, but in the long run, when you've beaten each stage numerous times anyway, I don't see that it makes much difference. At least you don't have to beat the whole game to unlock it.

The iframe roll at least requires you to commit to movement which creates some danger with stage hazards. Those undodgeable purple attacks also seem fairly common. My biggest problem is that the enemies feel too spongey, but that might go away if I had a better grip on the combo system. Defeating them is pretty easy, defeating them efficiently takes a little more work. It's only level 1 anyway. There's also a no-damage bonus, so for the purpose of rank, this might be a 1HK game after all.

I dunno, I think this is going to turn out the same way as people's issues with GnG Resurrection's infinite lives and skill tree and so on, where it turns out the devs actually knew what they were doing all along.

[Sumez]

I like the optimism, and there's a chance for that I'm sure.
But it definitely requires enemy combat to be a lot more fun in the later stages Because the game hinges on them entirely