The Cyber Shinobi (Sega Master System) review "It’s sad, finding a flop in a series that has produced great games, the black sheep as you will. Every series has one, even the most popular games have one, Mario had Super Mario Bros. 2, Sonic had Sonic 3D blast, Zelda had Majoras Mask and Metroid had the dreaded Metroid Prime on the Gamecube. Shinobi also had one of those bad games, the twisted and battered Cyber Shinobi released in 1990 on the Sega Master System. I was upset and disappointed, as a huge fan of the series I found this one a bit..."

It’s sad, finding a flop in a series that has produced great games, the black sheep as you will. Every series has one, even the most popular games have one, Mario had Super Mario Bros. 2, Sonic had Sonic 3D blast, Zelda had Majoras Mask and Metroid had the dreaded Metroid Prime on the Gamecube. Shinobi also had one of those bad games, the twisted and battered Cyber Shinobi released in 1990 on the Sega Master System. I was upset and disappointed, as a huge fan of the series I found this one a bit tedious and generally boring to play. It was a huge letdown for all those Shinobi fans who expected something like the original or like ROS on the Genesis, for many reasons.

You start off in an Alaskan-style base, a curious place to begin no doubt, expecting some robotic monsters, Terminators (as seen in ROS) and the other dark recesses of technology, then you get jumped by a bunch of guys in green Eskimo jackets with not even a shuriken to defend themselves with. Attacking them the Shinobi way has been replaced by an inept new weapon system, a pole! The way he uses his sword is a mystery as he tends to spin around instead of slashing and the fact that you start off with no (and I mean no) Shurikens is a big problem here. The new sword has a poor range and you’ll have to wait until the enemy is right on top of you (literally) so you can smack them one, of course by then they would have already hit you twice and then some.

Now, all of the Shinobi games have great and original bosses, right? I mean who could forget the giant samurai, Spider-man, the giant Colorado beetle (from Shadow Dancer) and the oversized brain. That is eccentric and exotic seen in other Shinobi games while in this Shinobi game you’ll come face to face with a snowplow. Bland, is the correct word here; followed by the statement “They should have tried harder”. The controls make battling bosses a nightmare, since your “sword” weapon has next to no range and firing a shuriken is a real pain. So an inexperienced player won’t last five minutes in the big bad world here, I have to admit it took me a while to get past the first stage but when I got used to the stiff controls I managed to proceed a little further.

Squinting at the screen for an hour or so makes the sprite of Shinobi look a bit like a ninja but not much. In fact Joe resembles more of a walrus than a ninja with his lurching neck and bizarrely shaped head. What happened to the threatening stalking Shinobi seen previously? Now he just looks silly, anyway the other sprites like the bad guys are absolutely awful, the green snow suit men look purely awful, with no originality or general detail in them . Even for an 8-bit game the graphics are bad , not the worst of course but are still pathetic. Backgrounds in the game aren’t that bad to say the least but they are pretty poor, e.g. the first level has some kind of city background in it although to be honest it looks more like writing or something. Maybe Sega were trying to sneak in something self-promoting like what they’ve done in so many of their games. Anyway, all that matters are that the backgrounds are pathetic and too be honest so is every other graphical aspect of the game. GG Shinobi had better graphics than this game and that was on a handheld console.

The music is also another part of the game that is not even worth mentioning, but I will anyway. The tunes have awful quality and they are a bit on the loud side. The music is blurted out of your speakers in an distorted fashion and I haven’t heard anything like it. The actual tunes themselves are very repetitive and if you are going to play it then you don’t have to torture yourself by listening to the music. The sound effects are nothing to sing about either, just your usual crap that brings together the essence of a really poor sound of a pitiful game.

Overall, a poor excuse of Shinobi game, unleashing a pox upon a series of good games until this one came along of course. With poor gameplay, terrible graphics and sound that drills into your forehead, it makes a reasonably poor excuse for a game and make no bones about it’s the worst game in the series so far. I can’t even begin to say how frustrated I was when I first played this game and believe me it’s something that Sega should have been kicked for creating this pitiful excuse of a game. Stay well away at all costs.

Community review by goldenvortex (July 05, 2004) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.