To this day, one of the best scarfs in any game of all time.

30 years old and I still remember the "Shinobi is back" tag line from the trailer

It's not an especially important thing, but I always liked how Shinobi managed to have a darker visual style while still being really colorful. I know that's a bit of a weird thing to note, but I always thought it was cool.

...You leanr to appreciate the visuals of each level because you're gonna be seeing them a lot after dying and retrying, that's for sure.

My friend was a serious gamer that worked at Gaestop. He sold several copies of this game under the challenge "if you can beat the last boss on the hardest mode he would give the person his car." Nobody won the car

One of the most underrated ps2 games on the console. Hotsuma and his scarf is one of my favorite ninja character designs along with strider and ryu hayabusa

This was an admirable attempt at breaking into the genre, its just a shame it never got successfully iterated on.

Dude, I always loved Shinobi, and Kunoichi, and miss seeing the dude’s scarf all over the place, leaving illusions around, slicing up so many enemies within a minute.

If this game got a remaster it would be so popular!

The OST for this game fucking slaps. I'm still listening to Henbou, Moritsune, Enjo 20 years later.

I love this game, it's super simple but it's all about execution. The dash mechanic is still one of the best implemented yet, it feels perfect and with that scarf...

I never in my life, suffered so much to beat an end boss like Shinobi and I was able to have a 9+ string combo and killed him in style...toke me so long too. Man It almost cathartic reading comments and seeing that I'm not the only one who suffered from this boss

Nightshade was my childhood ❤

One move that I don't think you mentioned is the charged dash attack. If you hold the attack button down, Hotsuma will go into a pose while charging energy. If you charge to the maximum, you can dash to the nearest target on the ground to get that final kill you need in case an enemy is too far away. This attack also seems to negate enemy blocks, so useful to kill annoying blocking enemies easily. I noticed people who play this usually don't know about it.

Character designs in this game were so badass. There is also always a monster boss fight in one level followed by a humanoid boss fight in the next (Stage 1-A > 1-B, 2-A > 2-B etc.) Rarely it's double humanoid fight.

The final boss of this game is like a prototype, rom-hack version of metal gear revengeance bosses. You start with no music and when the first phase is done it starts slapping.

Bro you have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for a remaster or even a little upscale update on this game it’s definitely an underrated gem

One of my all time favorites. Even with the aneurysm inducing final boss.
Tip for the hardest difficulty with the boss.
Get to him with all the scrolls(easier said than done) and use the invincibility power to kill the annoying talisman monsters with the wonky hit boxes. It makes u fasterI think, and you don't have to worry about their fireballs and accidental hits messing up tour tate attempt or even killing you. Start the powerup on the later batches only when six or eight enemies have appeared on screen, though, so you can make sure the tate or hit does enough damage. Also, if you die reset the run before the game over screen so you keep the scrolls and can try again. I managed to do it in roughly an hour that way after DAYS of trying with no success. That's as close as you'll get to an "easy" way to beat him. It's still pretty hard,though.
If I can spare someone the days and hours of frustration I had before figuring that out, I'm glad.
Have fun

My first and favorite PS2 game I ever owned. This and Nightshade/Kunoichi will forever hold a place in my heart. The entire soundtrack goes hard too.

those damn dogs with the katana still haunts me till this day

This was my VERY first game along with Ratchet & Clank. I played them both as demos at first when I was barely 5 years old and they stand as my foundation for my gaming understandings, skills, patience, and appreciation to this day

This is an extremely underappreciated game that deserves its place in character action game history.
People who meme about Souls games being hard need to play this.