In 2002, Sega revived one of its classic franchises when it released Shinobi, a pure arcade-style action game featuring incredibly challenging missions and unique play mechanics. This new Shinobi bore little resemblance to the classic games that shared the same name, but it remained faithful to the spirit of its action-packed predecessors. Now this latest Shinobi game has its very own sequel in Nightshade, whose Japanese title Kunoichi is the word for the female counterpart to a shinobi, or ninja. Indeed, the main difference between Nightshade and Shinobi merely appears skin deep, at first. But in fact, the developers took Shinobi's unique play mechanics and expanded on them, so the resulting game is in many ways even more challenging than its predecessor, which, if you played Shinobi, you might find hard to believe. It's not that this is some completely unfair or needlessly frustrating game. It's a game that hearkens back to the days when games were tests of skill and timing. Those who like their games nice and easy shouldn't bother with Nightshade. As for the rest of us, we can heartily appreciate it for its monumental challenge and tight, responsive controls.

Those who played Shinobi know that it was a seriously tough game. They'll be the only ones expecting the similarly intense level of difficulty in Nightshade.

In Nightshade, you'll play as Hibana, the female counterpart to Shinobi's Hotsuma (who's actually an unlockable character here). She's a world-weary government-employed ninja who's tasked with taking out members of the Nakatomi Corporation, which has witlessly unleashed hellspawn upon futuristic Tokyo. Now everyone's after the shards of Akujiki, the legendary cursed sword that Hotsuma used to seal the hellspawn the last time. In short, Hibana will need to brave about a dozen perilous stages filled with enemy ninjas, robots, and monsters. Furthermore, she'll run across her former master and his cohorts, as well as a very nasty ninja cyborg, in the process. The game's story unfolds via prerendered cutscenes in between each mission, and it's not bad. However, the story takes a backseat to the action, as well it should.

Nightshade is structured just like Shinobi. Its missions are linear by design, and each one culminates in a battle against a challenging boss opponent...and these boss battles sometimes take longer to finish than the stages leading up to them. Without a doubt, you'll need to master--and not just learn--the specific play mechanics in Nightshade if you hope to reach the end of Hibana's journey. The game has the appearance of a typical third-person hack-and-slash affair, but it's nothing of the sort. The key to the gameplay is Hibana's limited ability to fly.

Hibana moves extremely quickly, just like Shinobi's Hotsuma. She can double-jump and attack with her sword, and she can also execute a stealth dash, which causes her to jettison forward very quickly for a short distance...or around and behind an opponent. She can also latch onto vertical walls and run along them like Hotsuma could. In Shinobi, you needed to perform some perilous leaps from wall to wall and over bottomless pits, and you could leap quite a distance by double-jumping and then using a stealth dash (though that's as far as you could go in midair). Nightshade ramps this core gameplay mechanic up a notch. Basically, it plays like a platformer, only instead of jumping from platform to platform, as in games like the Super Mario series, you'll be leaping from enemy to enemy, killing them one after another and using them as springboards to your next victim.

In addition to the double-jump-stealth-dash combo, Hibana may also execute a flying kick in midair, which sends her hurtling farther forward a ways, so long as she's locked onto an opponent. What's more, if she makes contact with an enemy, either with her kick or with her slashing attack, she may jump once more, dash once more, and kick once more, and then slash once more in midair before having to repeat the process. What this means is Hibana is theoretically capable of never needing to touch the ground, so long as her supply of airborne enemies doesn't run out. Many of the game's boss battles, as well as its later stages, become harrowing exercises in which you're jumping, dashing, kicking, and slashing multiple foes in sequence while certain death--or at least a very powerful boss--awaits below. The gameplay is very responsive, and the frame rate is perfectly smooth at almost all times, thus making the necessary finessing of the controls here somewhat easier rather than impossible.

All of Hibana's moves eventually come into play in this game, which has much more depth to its gameplay than is initially evident.

There's more depth to the gameplay than just flying around from bad guy to bad guy. Like in Shinobi, Nightshade challenges you to kill multiple enemies in sequence and rewards you for doing so not only with a cool cutscene and extra points but by making Hibana's sword stronger and stronger with each successive foe in an area that she slays. Basically, as you zip your way through a level, groups of enemies will spawn in. As soon as you kill an enemy in the vicinity, the enemy freezes, and a meter starts rapidly dwindling away. You have just several seconds to kill another foe. If there are four or more enemies in the area and you manage to kill them all in sequence, Hibana executes a tate (pronounced "tah-tay"), and all the enemies are split in half at the same moment. This is how you max out your score during the game's missions, and it's also the key to beating most of the game's bosses, who'll all but shrug off your standard attacks. Only after you've killed a group of regular foes in sequence (who conveniently spawn in from time to time while you're fighting the bosses) can you hope to deal some decent damage to the boss, so you'd better make these few precious seconds count.