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Believe it or not, there was a time when most video games were blind purchases. Well before Twitch streamers were doing full live playthroughs of unreleased titles — hell, before trial demos were even a thing — the decision to buy a game often came down to looking at the box. And more often than not, the real experience at home failed to live up to the slick illustrations promised on the sticker of a Sega Genesis cartridge.
How could they? In the eight- and 16-bit era, the key art used in a game’s pack-in manual was more intended to stir the imagination. Their detailed drawings and context said, sure, the game looks like pixel puke, but here’s what it’s intended to be.
Now, it’s reversed, with bland marketing materials barely scratching the surface of what a photorealistic, motion-captured epic can look like. But every so often, a game comes around that harkens back to those Toys ‘R Us days, aiming to make good on bringing the beauty of illustrated box art to life as an authentic experience. Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is one of those — reviving the long dormant Sega series with kind of panache that makes it feel like the game kids were once only playing in their heads.
The art of shinobi
Dating back to 1987’s arcade original, the Shinobi series was once one of Sega’s big staples alongside platformers like Alex Kidd and Sonic the Hedgehog. Building its legacy through multiple arcade and Sega home platforms, it was one of the premier ninja franchises, standing alongside Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden as one of two go-to options for brutal action and acrobatics. By the time Sega backed out of the hardware race post-Dreamcast, Shinobi mostly limped on with a couple of 3D entries for PlayStation and Nintendo platforms before fading into obscurity.
Announced back in 2023, Art of Vengeance serves as a reboot for the franchise — and it couldn’t come at more opportune time. For some reason, 2025 has unofficially become the year of the ninja in the gaming industry, with not one but three entries in the Ninja Gaiden series launching and games like Assassin’s Creed Shadows pivoting its setting to feudal Japan.
Despite the threat of oversaturation, Art of Vengeance does well to differentiate itself immediately with a rich visual style that plays like an illustration come to life, setting it apart from the retro, pixelated look of Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound or hyper realism of Shadows. From its opening moments, the game’s world is vibrant, with tufts of grass flowing in the foreground while fires rage far into the distance.
While even the most gorgeous games can often end up losing their initial luster over time, the hand-drawn aesthetic of Art of Vengeance never fades into the psyche; multiple hours in, the constantly shifting landscapes and minute details are jaw-dropping. It’s the type of game where down time and extra layers of exploration are welcome, if only for soaking in the lush backdrops and pencil-and-ink details that flesh out every asset.
But as easy as it is to get hooked on the art design, the game wouldn’t amount to much if it weren’t gripping to play. Fortunately, from a combat perspective, it most certainly is.
Punishing yet satisfying combat
In reliable fashion, Art of Vengeance makes use of dozens of storytelling tropes from across ninja media. There’s an ancient clan led by the protagonist, Joe Musashi, who’s thrust up against an evil paramilitary corporation and supernatural entities. It’s nothing fans of games and anime haven’t seen before, and borders on being trite — especially compared to the pure shlock value of other titles released this year. By comparison, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound leaned more heavily on its inherent b-movie goofiness to tell a compelling action saga. Here, the tale is a little more measured, pensively pushing the fantasy story along in between big set-piece moments.
Make no mistake, it’s all silly and fun. Musashi regularly rides jet skis and uses helicopter missiles like airborne surf boards, slicing up and exploding commandos and demons along the way. But whereas Ragebound serves up a full breakneck sprint through cascades of action, Art of Vengeance takes more time amping up its challenges in complex fight scenes broken up by extended puzzle and exploration zones.
Unlike Ragebound, where most bad guys can be killed with a single blow, Art of Vengeance has more methodical battle systems, requiring players to utilize specific combos and abilities to take out certain enemy types. Chaining together standard and heavy blows with acrobatic spins, slips, and dives is fluid and intuitive — leaving combat feeling like an ever-climaxing dance of death that often ends with insta-kill execution moves.
Even at normal difficulty, players can be easily overwhelmed by enemies if they’re not careful. Although most only take a few hits to kill and can be stunned into helplessly receiving punishing blows, the variety of enemy types demands constant strategy changes. Later level and Ankou rifts (secret battle stages) require adept knowledge of the game’s overlapping combat systems.
A perfectly placed kunai can stagger certain opponents for an execution, but almost every move comes with some risk, especially as character animations cannot be canceled once initiated. It might seem wise to begin chaining together a specific set of moves with a mental map carved out for the next strike, but one enemy’s shield or unblockable attack can leave an entire stratagem dead on arrival.
At times, it feels like combat has the complexity of a fighting game like Street Fighter, but without the flexibility to back out of a miscalculation that titles of that genre provide. Even just a few levels into the game, there are challenges where seemingly endless waves of enemies grow progressively stronger and one poor choice can lead to redoing an entire gauntlet of fights.
Misalignments of the Metroidvania formula
Once perfected, the combat encounters and extra hard challenges become the game’s bread and butter. Pound for pound, there’s probably not a more satisfying 2D action experience than Art of Vengeance when it comes to chopping up demons and fluidly executing visually arresting power moves.
It’s the in-between portions that become more of a slog. Again, compared to Ragebound, Sega’s ninja game is less interested in extreme forward momentum and instead operates at a much slower pace. This mostly presents itself in the form of extended exploration throughout its many stages, tasking players with finding switches to hit and alternate paths to unlock. Each stage has multiple checkpoints that can be traveled back to, which becomes essential as players realize they’re routinely being soft locked out of certain areas until they have a specific ability or tool.
Wide open areas with branching paths and extremely verticality are key to Metroidvania games like Hollow Knight, but usually the pleasure derived from unlocking a previously dead-end space comes from having an interconnected world. When traveling through one vast open world, players come to expect marking down spots on their map or taking mental note of places they’ll need to return to — it’s entirely expected.
Here, however, the open-ended nature of each level feels more forced. You’ll only be able to complete maybe 50 percent of the early stages until you find new abilities later and have to replay previous missions to open all the pathways. It frequently feels arbitrary to see all the places you can’t go, especially when you know what’s hidden there based on the checklist of secrets laid out in the pause menu. It’s not really a mystery, just a means to forcibly bring players back to replay multiple levels for challenges and secrets that could’ve otherwise been made a simple skill challenge.
It doesn’t help that the level design invites explorative thinking while punishing actual leaps of faith. While it apes the idea of a Metroidvania with slightly labyrinthine map layouts and branching paths, most areas are filled with pits that simply lead to death, even when they look like they hold some kind of secret.
Even combing through the in-game map, it’s common to see an area that should be approachable from above, travel there, and be met with a death because it wasn’t the intended means of uncovering the secret. In short, it’s borrowing the visual language of a 2D exploration game without actually delivering on the gameplay that people expect from it.
A promise fulfilled
Even though it fails to live up to the comprehensive exploration aspects of a true Metroidvania, Art of Vengeance does manage to carve out its own identity among an increasingly packed crowd of similar releases this year. Less arcadey and more mechanically complex than Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, its action is second to none for a 2D adventure game.
And while it embodies the overall spirit of the older Shinobi entries, Sega’s reinvention of the franchise is very much a modern take on the concept. Leaning into its own evolution over retro homage or elegant pastiche, Art of Vengeance shows the value that a two-dimensional platformer can have at a time when exorbitant AAA games all suffer from overly ambitious bloat. Its attempts to shoehorn extra replayability out of its levels leads to missteps, but it rarely feels like a total waste of time. Everything here is crafted with extreme care and a personal touch from the developers at Lizardcube.
Art of Vengeance uses its various skills to toy with the idea of what an action game can be, all the while nailing an idealized vision of what older players hoped they would get when they looked at the cover of that box sitting on a store shelf.
Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is available now for Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
