Like Rolling Thunder, though, Shinobi’s levels are based on fixed, learnable patterns of specific enemy types, with each distinctive type of enemy having their own way of moving and attacking. To make the latter option feasible, Joe doesn’t die simply by making contact with an enemy as in some games instead, both simply get knocked back slightly - although you should still take care, as many foes have the ability to quickly lodge a knife in your gut while this is happening.

While Namco’s protagonist Albatross had a limited amount of ammunition, necessitating a somewhat cautious, careful approach to enemy encounters, Joe carries an unlimited supply of shuriken with him, and is also able to make use of melee attacks when close up against an enemy. Shinobi diverges a little from the formula established by Rolling Thunder when it comes to combat, however. And he’s also very fragile just a single hit will fell him in the original arcade incarnation of the game. He has the ability to make enormous jumps between different “layers” of the level - including in some circumstances between the “foreground” and the “background”. Joe is an agile, responsive hero who proceeds at a relatively sedate pace through each level, encouraging you to think tactically rather than run in flailing wildly. Mechanically, Shinobi resembles Namco’s Rolling Thunder - which came out a year prior - in quite a few ways. We can assume he’s not planning on leaving any witnesses who could confirm his identity. Joe is pretty confident in his own ninjutsu skills we can tell this because although all the key art for the game - and its own title screen - depicts a ninja (presumably our hero) clad in the traditional, full-on zukin and fukumen hood and face mask combo, his sprite in the game is unhooded and unmasked. In Shinobi, you take on the role of one Joe Musashi, a modern-day ninja with enormous eyebrows who is setting out to rescue the students of his ninjutsu clan from a terrorist organisation known as Zeed. Hailing from the height of the “ninja boom” of the 1980s - a popular culture phenomenon that is regarded to have kicked off with Menahem Golan’s 1981 movie Enter the Ninja - Shinobi remains a solid, challenging game today, and well worth revisiting. This time around, it’s 1987’s Shinobi, an important game from the relatively early days of Sega’s video gaming portfolio, and a title that doesn’t seem to get talked about all that often these days.

With apologies to Senran Kagura Peach Ball for shamelessly stealing its Dad joke-tier ninja pun, it’s time to look at another in Sega’s excellent Sega Ages series for Nintendo Switch.

Shinobi sega ages