'The Revenge of Shinobi' Did the Multiverse Thing Before It Was Cool (or Legal)
Night falls. Evil lurks around every corner of the city. A ninja named, uh, Joe wields his ninjutsu skills and weapons against — um, that looks like… Godzilla? Damn. They can do that?
Welcome to The Revenge of Shinobi, a hallucination of a game that’s been hailed as one of the Sega Genesis’ better titles.
The Revenge of Shinobi was a sequel to the hit arcade game Shinobi, and one of the earliest and best displays of the 16-bit power the Sega Genesis (known as the Mega Drive outside of North America) was bringing to the table. It’s a rock-solid arcade-style action game, and there’s a lot to appreciate about it.
The graphics and level design are amazing, and the backgrounds are often interactive. A few years ahead of Super Mario World, Revenge of Shinobi granted players the ability to run around on either side of a fence. It may sound minor today, but 35 years ago this added depth gave the game a real… added depth. Shit.
The soundtrack is phenomenal, also. Listen to this Chinatown cut. Not only does it go way hard, but it fits the material perfectly. This is exactly what a dark and neon level in an action-y ninja game should sound like.
The controls are fine. There’s a double jump that you really have to nail the timing on, which I never quite mastered. Your three buttons are attack, jump, and special move. Sadly, there’s four available special moves, and players must pause to change which one is equipped. That isn’t super smooth. I don’t have any ideas for how this could’ve been handled better in 1989, but I think it sucks a little bit. It’s an unavoidable limitation on this era of games, though. Maybe that’s why I preferred the Super Nintendo, with its four face buttons and two up top. Eventually the Sega started to come with this six-button controller, but what good was it if games like Revenge of the Shinobi were already four years old?
But alas, what I love most about The Revenge of Shinobi is the way they just stuck whoever they felt like from pop culture in there as bosses. It’s absurd and genius, and a little bit shocking that they got away with it — until you remember this was the 80s, and companies were a little less protective of their intellectual properties. Or maybe movie studios weren’t expecting a sequel to a Japanese ninja game to straight up use Rambo in their game.
How did they get away with all of this? Well, they didn’t. Sega actually had to keep patching and repatching the game to keep up with the consequences of putting The Expendables together 21 years before the film’s release. For that reason, there are four different versions of the cartridge out there in the world, as Sega seemingly addressed these issues on a complaint-by-complaint basis.
Oh, except Spider-Man. Since Sega was concurrently working on a Spider-Man game, Marvel was cool with it. Director Noriyoshi Ohba even stated that they were instructed to make the boss look more like Spider-Man. Oh, and Spider-Man doesn’t die when you beat him. In fact, he appears to transform into Batman. Marvel had two rules:
He’s gotta look like Spider-Man
Can’t be killed by a ninja named Joe.
Fair enough!
Not every boss in Revenge of Shinobi is from a different series, but about half of them are. Let’s run them down:
Level 4 Boss: Terminator/Hulk
If you read a list of the cameos featured in this game, you might rightfully assume that The Terminator and The Hulk appear separately. As it turns out, when they’re not characters you own, you’re beholden to nothing. So this version of The Terminator turns into The Hulk for a little bit, before you’ve blown his skin completely off. And he throws engine blocks at you the whole time.
Level 6 Boss: Spider-Man/Batman
After you beat the up-to-Marvel’s-standards Spider-Man, he starts to transform. He turns all black, seemingly about to become Venom. But nah, it’s Batman! Why not?! This is a version of Batman that is a villain, flies around, and shoots bats at you. He explodes when you defeat him. One of my top three depictions of Batman of all time, easily.
Found throughout the game: Rambo
They call this guy Gunner, but I have the feeling he’s a Vietnam vet who had a standoff with police, in which they debated over who drew First Blood. And that his name is John Rambo.
That’s what I think.
Level 7 Boss: Godzilla, King of the Monsters
Err, excuse me, a “brontosaurus.” Not sure what I was thinking. I mean, look at that brontosaurus. The big, green tail. Folks, that is a huge brontosaurus.
Decades before Ready Player One, MultiVersus, Space Jam: A New Legacy, and whatever is happening in the Marvel movies anymore, The Revenge of Shinobi discovered the joy of mixing popular characters in unexpected ways.
Noriyoshi Ohba and the rest of the Shinobi team weren’t concerned with corporate synergy or shallowly chasing trends of the moment. Theirs was a purer intent — just playing the way kids play, asking important questions like “Who would win between the toughest Ninja in the world and Batman inside of a Spider-Man suit?”
