Sega‘s arcade game, Shadow Dancer, is the sequel to 1987’s arcade hit, Shinobi. It is the second (and final) arcade game in the Shinobi series, and was first distributed into arcades in 1989.

In this game, you play as an unnamed ninja, with a canine companion, who must fight his way through various scrolling stages in order to defeat a group of terrorists and diffuse a bunch of time bombs. You have an unlimited supply of shuriken (throwing stars), and a sword for close-quarters attacks.

The primary addition to the game is of course the dog companion. You can ‘sic’ the dog onto enemies by pressing the attack button while crouched. The dog will then leap forward and knock them down, but you must finish them off quickly with your sword or shuriken. If you take too long to follow-up – or if the enemy is particularly strong – the dog will be hurt and will turn into a harmless puppy, and will stay that way until you either finish the stage, or diffuse the next time bomb.

When you’ve collected half of the available time bombs on a stage, you’re awarded upgraded weapon damage, until you finish the stage or lose a life. You can also use ninja magic again, although this time it’s chosen randomly from three available techniques, which basically clears all enemies from the screen. I did read that bonus points are awarded if the player completes the game without using shuriken or ninja magic, but to do that would be extremely difficult – if not impossible…

In total, there are four different stages. The first stage has three sublevels, and the final three have four sublevels. The final sublevel in each stage is a boss battle against a unique and powerful enemy, and the dog disappears and takes no part in these.

In-between each stage is a bonus level where you must throw shuriken at enemy ninja that drop down from a building (similar to the bonus level in the original Shinobi arcade game). If a single ninja gets through, the bonus level immediately fails, but if you manage to keep them all at bay and complete it, you’re awarded with an extra life.

Shadow Dancer is unfortunately a bit of a ‘blip’ on the Shinobi series, and doesn’t look as good, or play as well, as the Shinobi sequels on the Megadrive/Genesis.

The animation of the main character isn’t too hot (he looks very rigid to me, and doesn’t move very dynamically); enemies also move in a very formal manner, like they’re paper cut-outs, and the character animation overall isn’t as good as in The Revenge of Shinobi or Shinobi III.

The gameplay in Shadow Dancer is okay – nothing special. It’s arguably too difficult to be much fun, and there are plenty of surprises that result in immediate death. To be fair, though, Shadow Dancer does introduce the idea of being able to jump over fences and fight enemies on both sides, which was also used in The Revenge of Shinobi. But overall, the gameplay in Shadow Dancer neither innovates nor excites.

Shadow Dancer was ported to various home computer formats in Europe in 1991. Versions were released for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum, and were developed by Images Software and published by US Gold. The game was also ported to the Megadrive/Genesis – as Shadow Dancer: The Secret of Shinobi – in 1990.

More: Shadow Dancer on Wikipedia