Hibana, a futuristic female ninja (featuring a double bandana), takes the place of Hotsuma, but has mostly the same move set. A small collection of kicks and sword slashes combine with signature moves, like wall running and shadow dashing. They all work fairly well, but are a bit unprecise for my tastes.

The one real evolution Nightshade makes affects the coolest thing about the game, which also happens to be the coolest thing from Shinobi. Super-stylish, multi-kill Tates (pronounced tah-tays) are executed by killing a certain number of foes in a small amount of time. As you might expect, they are best achieved by shadow dashing and attacking madly all throughout the enemies. Here’s the catch. Now every time you kill an enemy, you receive an extra dash and jump. This means that potentially huge killing combos can be linked without ever even touching the ground! Now that’s style! However, it’s a shame that the controls and camera have to be so difficult, making things way more frustrating than they need to be. It’s also unfortunate that the payoff, a short cut-scene showing your frozen prey all die at once, had to dulled down as well. In Shinobi, creatures would actually fall to pieces from Hotsuma’s razor-sharp blade. But Hibana seems to never actually cut through her victims. They just fall to the ground with a mist of blood. Call me too violent, but this step down really decreases the game’s style.

While the Tates provide some decent enjoyment, the rest of game counters them with dull and repetitive gameplay. Basically, you spend the whole game just running around its boring levels killing monsters the same way over and over, no surprises. Shinobi suffered from the same crappy levels. Nightshade was supposed to fix all that, and no, fighting on top of some moving vehicles doesn’t count. There are also numerous places to fall to your death, thus returning you back to the beginning of the level. Again, bad controls and an even worse camera cause big frustration. And the worst part about dying is the realization that you have to play through all that boring crap again :-). In addition, enemies are extremely static, and dispense little challenge. They pretty much just sit there, waiting for you to come along and kill them.

If you want a great story then keep looking. Nightshade is almost devoid of any plot or reason behind your actions. It kind of makes you wonder why you’re still playing.

Going along the rest of the game, the graphics and sound are also generic and uninspired. Dull textures engulf the already unimaginative level design. Even worse are the horrible particle effects. Come on, PS2 is supposed to be great at producing topnotch particles. Maybe Sega Wow missed the memo, oh well. The creatures you fight are, again, unimaginative and boring, adding little to the game. As for the sound, generic techno plays nonexistently in the background, nothing special.

Nightshade falls incredibly short of fixing Shinobi’s wrongs. No element of the game stands out as new or different, and that’s its biggest shortcoming. Everything just ends up being so boring and predictable. It’s too bad, because Nightshade obviously had some real potential. If Sega ever decides to tries for a third chance, they’ll need to make a lot more changes.