The first Shinobi game, barring some cheap bosses,was a really well designed game and generally considered a Master System, classic one of the best titles on the platform.
It's sequel, (The Master System version) is inferior in every respect barring graphics. Even at that, the game is runs clunk,y with much smaller and less interesting levels. The original Shinobi had multilevels, sometimes you would make your way upwards, sometimes down. Exploration yielded hostages, and hostages resulted in health and weapon upgrades that become useful.
In Shadow Dancer, these levels aren't even a quarter of the size and almost exclusively consist of walking along a straight line.
The original had varied melee and projectile enemies with simple, but varied methods of dealing with them. Shadow Dancers enemies mainly consist of static crouching men with guns, with the occasional jumping Ninja showing up (I counted 5 of them), which the player can simply walk past.
Much like the original, the boss battles are cheap, and seemed designed here to artificially increase the playtime. This is a very short game, much shorter than the original, can be finished in about 25 minutes,.
To sum up- boring enemies, boring levels, exploration and character upgrading pretty much non existent and the even cheaper boss battles. Instead of improving upon a winning formula, it's became a generic action-platformer with visuals (at the time) it's only real selling point.
