Shien's Revenge
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Region: USA
Media: Cartridge
Controller: Gamepad
Genre: Action, Hack & Slash, First Person
Gametype: Licensed
Release Year: 1994
Developer: Almanic
Publisher: Vic Tokai
Players: 1
_________________________

"Cool premise, but it feels like an interesting minigame packaged into a standalone game"

Ninjas are certainly a hot item in videogames. Ever since such games as Ninja Gaiden and Shinobi (and probably even before) there has been an endless flow of games based on ninjas. That brings us to another parallel; something has NOT been utilized in gaming to its fullest extent. That thing is the mouse. In this review we will be talking about the SNES mouse. Shien's Revenge, the game in the hot seat for this review, is both a Ninja game and an SNES mouse game.

The basis of the game is one in which you play as a Ninja, the title character Shien, and you have to ward off a seemingly unending horde of fellow ninjas, demons, and other monsters. This is the ninja part of the game. The mouse part of the game comes into the gameplay. The game consists of you taking on such hordes with only a knife and you ninja stars. The only representation of Shien onscreen is his hand consisting of a lone knife. Underneath said knife is a little square target. The target is the key element to this game; essentially the games equivalent of a mouse cursor on a computer.

With this cursor and your ninja-styled hand, you have several abilities that must be utilized for their fullest extent in order to succeed in the game. The most obvious of these is the shuriken throwing ability, which is of course a mainstay that all ninjas must be able to possess. Their whole representation of badass is dependent on it, so of course Shien must be able to possess them. Well of course he does have them, and he is particularly adept at their use. The stars are thrown with a simple left click of the SNES mouse (remember this isn't an ordinary mouse, I have to use the "SNES" adjective every time I mention it). This I find is a no-brainer in how it is implemented. 

The other melee weapon possessed by our hero is a Ninja knife, used for melee attacks. Unfortunately the developers seemingly didn't put much thought into implementing this. The blade is only activated by moving it across the enemy. It brings many problems, especially with blocking. Blocking is done by positioning your cursor on top of an enemy projectile, be it a shuriken or fireball.

This brings up the problem that ends up being the really downer for the game. Blocking and stabbing really act upon one another, making certain parts of the dastardly impossible to successfully block every attack. Sure you have a secret "NINJA POWER" that can be used to destroy all enemies onscreen for a long time by secretively pressing the right button on the SNES mouse, but you want to save those for the vastly overpowered boss battles. This inconsistency in difficulty with the blocking and melee attacking is even apparent on the easy difficulty. Who knows how bad it is on the hard difficulty? I've only played the Normal and Easy ones, both are rather hard. Sure, this is an arcade shooter, and difficulty is at a premium. But that difficulty should be on well timed attacks and hits, not on excessively cheap antics pulled by such ninjas.

Another problem is with the limited capacity of the Super Nintendo. There are three planes of action for the ninjas. The farthest two planes are reserved for your throwing of ninja stars. The closest is reserved for your melee attacks. Some enemies seemingly exist in between two planes, particularly the closest and the middle plane. This makes it unnecessarily difficult for players to distinguish what attack you should use for defeating it. Sure, some are incredibly obvious, because of the fact that there is obscene scaling done to their respective sprites and you can tell it's up close. An example of this is the first boss fight. However, on the second boss fight, there is this dragon and it literally exists between the two planes of action.

You have to somehow hit its mouth, but how do you know if the mouth is directly in front of you or somewhat in back? You don't, and the friggin' thing kills you in seconds, with its far too fast fireballs that are almost impossible to judge the distance of. It takes multiple continues and defeats to gauge the attacks of certain enemies. A new player who thinks he's doing rather well suddenly comes across a new small enemy and BAM! The thing takes away several bars of life. Or well, candles, which is the games representation of Shien's health.

The whole thing feels like a giant evil minigame. It would have been decent as part of an extended party game, but the whole thing just gets tiring after a while. I mean, there is a story to it. Apparently Shien and his greatest buddy Aska are the two greatest ninjas in the world. Somehow Aska gets captured and taken forward in time by some demon. It's up to Shien to take revenge on Aska's tormentor and proceed into the future and kill off all the baddies in each respective level, fight off a boss, and go to some other time zone. Who would have thought that evil demons from the future really processed things in such an extended and concrete way? That's right; the game's story is really just a foil for the gameplay to have a real background for what it is doing. It could have just thrown you into the story and done nothing more, but at least some effort was put in to keep things interesting.

I should also add that there is a training mode which becomes essential for completion of the game. It's one of those training modes that really have a point. I would have had no clue about the melee attacks if it weren't for the training mode. For some reason though, your trainer has absurdly high levels of expectations for you. Miss a few targets here and there and he just says, "NO GOOD!" and wants you to practice more. The game is also unfortunately password based, so get out a pen and paper (or at least the notes section of the game manual) and be prepared to start writing some absurdly long passwords in order to save your progress.

One fairly positive thing is that aside from the perspective problems, the game definitely looks pretty great. There are only a few frames of animation for most enemies, but they flow rather nice and bring the illusion of movement to a great apex. The game is also rather bright and colorful; the backgrounds and enemies radiate with a sort of nice bright light and everything looks clear. If only the levels of enemies were better defined and you could actually tell where they were on the plane. Oh well, that's what a Super FX chip is for.

One of the highlights of game for me was the soundtrack. Nearly every sound byte resonated with joy and gleefulness. It sounded a lot like a good Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack. I mean look at the title screen, with its depiction of a forlorn battlefield with a mystifying and altogether ninja-like sound being played. It's a testament to the world of ninja games; nearly all of them have really sweet soundtracks.

In the end, this game really could have been far improved if only a little bit of effort went into making enemy patterns actually compliable with a human's ability to move that darn SNES mouse. You see there is a reason why the Mario games are set up like they are. The enemy patterns and the like are really puzzles that Mario must complete in order to go through a level; they aren't just randomly placed there. Sometimes it seems like enemies are just randomly thrown at you in this game. It could have been a classic, it could have been innovative, but it just falls short and ends up being an interesting minigame that was packaged into its own full game. That just doesn't cut it.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/05/08

Game Release: Shien's Revenge (US, October 1994)

Tips:

Codes
Press Start 7 times on controller 2 at the title screen  7 secret special weapons Hold L and R on Controller 2 and then start a new game with Controller 1 

Control Bosses
Press the L button 7 times at the title screen 

Super Easy Mode
Press R seven times on controller 2 at the title screen 
Super Hard Mode

Press Select 7 times on controller 2 at the title screen. 
Various Cheats

Level Passwords:
At the title screen select password and enter the following:

?JBFZ18N235D9Z (almanac) 16 Stage 1 clear
PTCBMHV923?6KG (almanac) 17 Stage 2 clear
SS0D3K1M6R2B9Q (almanac) 18 Stage 3 clear
WMZYXVKMYRKM9Q (almanac) 19 Stage 4 clear
S205X55D23GFQG (almanac) 20 Stage 5 clear
YGKSV7496R8G9Q (almanac) 21 Stage 6 clear
9XSXFMRNG35D07 (easy) 01 Stage 1 clear
KL8Y1R4GG3SL0Z (easy) 02 Stage 2 clear
S43SR6WC233BDG (easy) 03 Stage 3 clear
55VHLT0N6RR1SQ (hard) 10 Stage 1 clear
7GZ11ZKB6R2B2Q (hard) 11 Stage 2 clear
8K6WFZHC6X3BSD (hard) 12 Stage 3 clear
NXGVRFQS6R8G2Q (hard) 13 Stage 4 clear
?N4WRG?NG3S32Z (hard) 14 Stage 5 clear
8Q1?QP4ZYRP1MQ (hard) 15 Stage 6 clear
NN9MZ5F?6R5D7Q (normal) 04 Stage 1 clear
9K?XV5VZG31V6G (normal) 05 Stage 2 clear
5MWWP9?C6G?66X (normal) 06 Stage 3 clear
GS1?3KFSG32B7Z (normal) 07 Stage 4 clear
FW9?BWRK6R3B6Q (normal) 08 Stage 5 clear
0B8PZHV96RGFYQ (normal) 09 Stage 6 clear

Reviewer: XCommander
http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/snes/review/R123064.html
