Sega looking at Shinobi: Art of Vengeance as a chance to fully revive the Shinobi franchise
Here’s a declaration of confidence in a new game that you don’t hear often from Sega or their partners. Sega and Lizardcube are working right now on Shinobi: Art of Vengeance with the aim for this to be the smoking gun that brings Shinobi back as a top IP at Sega. We think they got a fighting chance so far.
That sentiment was shared by Game Informer (A publication that can relate to dying and then rising from the ashes) as they wrote an article about the hard work being done to not only make a great game out of Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, but for it to be so great that it can potentially bring Shinobi as a whole back to its long lost status as a franchise on the level of Sega’s best, like Sonic the Hedgehog. Certainly no easy task, in fact Sega have tried it 14 years ago with Shinobi (3DS), only for the momentum from that game to have quickly fizzled out despite people generally liking that game well enough. If that game couldn’t pull it off, how could Art of Vengeance do it? Sega’s content production department director Kagasei Shimomura and Lizardcube CEO and creative director Ben Fiquet feel they’ve cracked the code.
Wanna hear what got them fired up to get Shinobi back in style? Slip on in past the break and find out for yourself.
SEGA AGES Shinobi finally has a proper release date. For those that live in Japan or have a Japanese account, SEGA AGES Shinobi will release on October 31st on the Japanese Nintendo Switch eShop for ¥999. In addition to the original arcade game, players will have several quality-of-life options available, such as the option to change the difficulty and select any of the stages within the game. It will also come packed with a new SEGA AGES version, which overhauls the game to play more similarly to The Revenge of Shinobi, complete with Joe Musashi now wearing white attire.