It was a sense of admittedly obstinate ennui that I watched a fair bit of the launch fervour surrounding the arrival of Shinobi: Art Of Vengeance. I say obstinate because I’m a jaded and bitter old fool, and I say ennui because watching the various reviews and streams left me looking at a game, that much like Prince Of Persia: Voguish Roguelike and Ninja Gaiden: Rock Hard Platformer, seems to be a glossy rebody under the Dead Cells mantra of rock hard combat platformers that can make a bit of money. Now I am fully aware that Shinobi: Art of Vengeance is actually really fucking good, but it’s not the technical accomplishments of its combat systems that I have issue with. Much like the Ninja Gaiden platformer, this new Shinobi sounds brilliant, frankly, but I can’t say I have much desire to commit to learning it. I think it’s really down to a grinding sense of over-familiarity with the entire genre, which feels conceptually static since coalescing around a few breakout digi-store faves from a decade ago. The likes of Mark of the Ninja and Shadow Complex stapled together a workable template from directions signposted by Cave Story, with commercial viabilities underwritten by Braid and Super Meat Boy, and I have this sense of a kind of complacency at play as we see game after game forming a kind of homogenous template for this kind of thing. You make the player sprite quite small but you make sure the animation is always set to maximal lushness, you make it punishingly hard and you make the fighting good and make sure there’s at least one extremely balanced and optimised progression economy to drive the player onward.1 Even unassailables like Hades fall into this mould with the biggest difference being the isometry of its presentation. Largely though, there’s a sense of unity across all these titles that can absolutely deliver fun, satisfying gaming experiences, yet cast an uneasy sense of some kind of creative stasis. It lies in the conceptual, in the sense of ambition (or the focusing of it).
Seeing three greats with 8-bit roots end up in the glossy 2D platformer pantheon is a weird one to fully consider. The circularity is one thing, but the idea that two of them enjoyed much-loved 3D polygonal megahits in the early 2000s is a curious anomaly. Sure, Ninja Gaiden’s next 3D entry is very much on the way, but to have it return to a 2D universe alongside Prince of Persia feels more like some hedge bet to ensure extractable monetary value for the IP than some grand creative expansion into wider territory. Likewise Shinobi’s 2D rebirth after its daring, stylish (and admittedly clunky) PlayStation 2 entries feels like some admission of failure somehow. I’m not even sure if Art of Vengeance is even a Shinobi game at all, given how completely different it is to the Rolling Thunder genetics of its debut and 16-bit sequels. It’s not as if the PlayStation 2 Shinobi upheld a single fucking thread of the originals, but that’s a forgivable misdemeanour given the spirit of that particular age. But again, this new entry doesn’t seem to have taken much from the polygonal Shinobi.2 Art of Vengeance seems to uphold the IP’s visual traits but not the essential spirit - you could slap just about any ninja-themed IP onto the game with little effect on outcome aside the goodwill generated by venerating an 80s hero. To be fair, I’m not entirely sure Shinobi ever really had much it could call truly its own, or how I’d even substantiate what makes a Shinobi game a ‘true’ Shinobi title. As infuriatingly befuddling as that may be, knowing my argument is terrible doesn’t allay my sense of moderate disappointment in how old IPs are refashioned mostly as skins for highly optimised, extremely modern, quite samey commercial products. The fact that these products are really good almost makes the whole thing even worse. We’re supposed to shut up and be happy we got a good game, right? In the face of increasing homogeneity, perhaps it’s worth reminding ourselves that it’s the grit that seeds the pearl.
This brings me to a title that would surely be a shoe-in for making it three 80s IPs to get rock-hard action platformers this year. Capcom’s peerless Strider. Never mind that it got its turn to be a commercially-viable update in 2014, surely the time is right for a grandiose return to the discourse as a long-forgotten hero. The 2014 version, coming five years after (arguably) the establishment of the modern Metroidvania template with Shadow Complex, suffers from the same problems as the home and arcade sequels to Capcom’s glorious original; some vital charisma is simply missing. If I was to press hard on the thorn here, it’s really a problem of concept. Arcade Strider is not a Metroid,3 so shoehorning a 21st Century update into that box necessarily alters the fundamental bargain. Worse still, it ignores the magic that gave Strider such spectacular cachet in the first place, which is the idea that Strider is an opulent one-way journey. Fittingly, Strider’s director, Kouichi Yotsui, was a film school graduate and actively attempted to weave a rich, linear narrative through Strider’s progression - and I think this really shows in how the game is sequenced. Strider is uniquely separate from its contemporaries - most notably perhaps, Ghouls and Ghosts - in the way it feels like an ultra-premium videogame for the home that somehow ended up in the arcade. It straddles a kind of divide between the 8-bit establishment and the new wave of possibilities from a now mature 16-bit platform. Strider works as a showcase of design sensibility and creative imagination in taking a well-established staple, the side-scrolling action game, and allows it all the affordances of the best hardware that Capcom could muster. Despite Yotsui’s admission of taking inspiration from every game he saw in that period, Strider feels startlingly fresh. See more of his insights in this lovely interview, but there’s definitely something magical in his take on what a near-future ninja’s videogame should be, and that’s not just because Hiryu is really fucking cool.4 Given that the whole concept was devised as a manga, a NES game and a separate arcade game, it’s fitting that the arcade version not only excels in its mission, but made the biggest cultural impact. As I mentioned, the sense of Strider Hiryu undertaking a journey is incredibly resonant, from the opening across city roofscapes to the hillslide slide in the wilderness. Its sense of traversing places is stronger than you’d imagine. And to devote such luxurious resources as Capcom’s CPS board to such an endeavour feels like a real treat. Almost a mistake when looking back with the mercenary eyes of the modern market.
There isn’t much formal narrative on display here, instead it’s expressed through the environment and Strider’s tackling of it. Being a futuristic ninja, he has some unique climbing skills that the game is happy to provide many surfaces for, and this in turn offers a refreshingly novel population of inclines and angles to the environment - a world much more conceptually lush than its 2014 traditionalist reboot. Many of its platforming challenges spring from the choice to stand on or hang from particular surfaces, something that feels wonderfully imaginative now, and was almost revolutionary back in 1989. I first saw Strider at a swimming pool, of all places, and as a group, my friends and I were totally transfixed. The large characters helped a lot, as did the wonderful denouement of the city’s opening - Strider arriving by hang-glider and getting straight to work. When we came across the brilliantly odd senate and the surprise assemblage of a killer cyber-centipede from its members, we were awestruck. I remember the brutal trial-and-error of navigating the city in the arcade, but it was the Megadrive port where I first had that thrill of bombing down the hillside after defeating a boss, and having everything explode around you. The almost deliberate lack of conventionalism in its sequencing is another source of its charisma; boss fights can happen mid-stage rather than at the end, set-pieces arrive out of nowhere, a stage can end by killing a lowly NPC. That is literally what happens on the second stage, which has two boss fights in the middle and ends when you kill a pilot, which uses the same sprite as the very first enemy you face on the opening level. The explosion of ideas on display, along with the richness of the graphics, was breathtaking. And that’s why for all its mechanical greatness and graphical slickness, the 2014 Strider is a mere companion piece rather than the grand continuation it could have been. And likewise, to strike out a modern Strider as yet another Metroidvania with yet another excellent combat system with yet another set of beautifully drawn, tiny little sprites would feel like a crime.
Consider this; when Treasure set out to create the greatest run-and-gun it could with its debut game Gunstar Heroes, it went out of its way to pay tribute to Strider in its player abilities to climb and hang, and having you slide down a mountain after a boss fight. It even dedicates a stage to an aerial fortress, cast in much the same hues as Strider’s third level. That’s how much Treasure loved and respected Strider. I can’t think of a more glowing recommendation than that. And while I have no doubt that the team behind Shinobi: Art of Vengeance loves Shinobi and its sequels, I’m not sure they’d be able to capture Strider’s charisma if given the licence. Not because they couldn’t make a decent game of it, but because I doubt anyone could recreate its oddness, its non-compliance with the conventional. A modern Strider wouldn’t need a modern combat system, for its original setup was as binary as it could be. And it was never the point. It doesn’t need immaculately detailed and animated miniature sprites. It doesn’t need an environment to skip back and forth over with new abilities for new shit, or whatever. To truly qualify, such a game would need to match the conceptual depth of the original and find some way to operate beyond the confines of the commercially-sensible. It would need to carve a unique journey, all over again, in the context of the status quo. What that means in the modern age is beyond my immediate imagination, but the idea of such a thing fills me with excitement. And that’s perhaps what we lose out on when IPs are treated as skins for pre-existing templates, even if the resultant games are considered brilliant. The point is that Strider is so much more than that. More than a cool ninja and a collection of moves to be transcribed into what’s allowable in the modern vogue. He’s so much bigger than that.
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In a mad sense, the rock-hard combat platformer is following in the footsteps of the Danmaku shmup by assembling itself into a rigid set of conventions as a result of commercial necessity.
A shame, because the long flowing scarf is fucking delicious.
Interestingly, there was a NES version of Strider that predates the arcade - 1988 instead of 1989 . This NES Strider actually was a Metroid but nobody really cares about it, presumably because it was shit. I don’t care enough to even check, and yet I dug out a hyperlink for fucking Braid. That’s how little I care about it.
Strider Hiryu was cool enough to be included in Marvel vs Capcom, which must me mentioned whenever Strider (the game) is discussed. However, the coolest crossover character is actually Rolento in Street Fighter Alpha 2.