Within the Blade Review (Xbox One)

STAFF REVIEW of Within the Blade (Xbox One)

Tuesday, August 3, 2021.
by Adam Dileva

If you grew up in the classic 8 and 16-bit era, you’ll no doubt probably have played or seen classic side scrolling ninja games like Strider, Ninja Gaiden or Shinobi, just to name a few. There are very few things cooler than a ninja, so Ametist Studio made their own Shinobi based game, Within the Blade. If it looks familiar, that’s because it originally released a few years ago on PC under the name Pixel Shinobi: Nine demons of Mamoru. Now that it’s coming to console, and most likely because Sega owns the Shinobi name, it’s been renamed but seems largely the same experience. Since I never played the original release, I was excited to dive right in and get my ninja on.

A 2D side-scrolling stealth adventure, Within the Blade tells a tale set in 1560 A.D. about a massive civil war happening across the land. With every clan fighting it out for power, the “Black Lotus” ninja clan is Japan’s last hope to stop the “Steel Claw” clan and their warlord, or else demons, death and despair will consume the land. There’s a handful of levels, each with a narrative about getting one step closer to finding the one responsible, but you won’t care too much about the story and will instead focus on the ninja action gameplay.

There’s a few mechanics to Within the Blade that takes center stage, but at its score you’ll be playing as a Shinobi in a 2D world, complete with stealth and RPG elements. You’re encouraged to take a stealthy approach, as trying to mix it up face to face usually doesn’t end well, but you also need to be quick as well. On one hand the game wants you to not be spotted and act as a ninja, but most of the time simply rushing seemed to work much better overall. As soon as you get spotted you either need to quickly kill them or run away, the latter you’ll be doing the majority of the time once you reach the last few stages.

There are basically three different types of missions. Outside ones where you hop from building to building, avoiding traps and trying to sneak up on your opponents for some quick assassinations, trying to get to the end of the stage on the far right. The indoor levels were my bane, making me sigh every time I had to complete one of these. These levels give you a Metroidvania-like style grid map where you can see every room you’ve either been in or not. You won’t know where the exit is initially, and when you do find it you’re first going to have to explore to find the red key for the red door, green key and sometimes blue as well, making for a lot of backtracking. I didn’t enjoy these levels at all, as they were generally quite packed with enemies and traps, always giving you secondary objectives for more experience should you wish. Lastly are the boss levels at the end of each chapter, the highlight of Within the Blade by far.

There’s an optional tutorial you can choose to play at the opening menu, and it teaches you everything from the basics to dashing, assassinating, blocking and even using a hook rope to climb ledges high above. Sounds cool right? Well, you won’t get many of these abilities or tools until much later in the game, and that's if you even decide to purchase them.

As you explore each level trying to reach the end you’ll come across numerous enemies that can be killed for experience and loot. You’ll also find randomized chests along the way, generally giving you a handful of crafting materials or some secondary items like bombs or shurikens. For those that want to level up, earn more skills and loot, you can take your time and explore every inch of the stages and kill anyone you see. For those that want to progress quicker, a speed dash to the end is what you’ll be looking for.

Combat is quite fast and fluid, when it works properly that is. You’ll only start with a basic combo with your blade, but as you level up you can unlock new perks and skills based on your playstyle. The issues arises when you try to actually connect with your combos sometimes. Each attack makes your character ‘slide’ slightly forward and since you’re spamming the attack button, the moment you whiff an attack, the enemy will usually retaliate and punish you for it. You sometimes have to be pixel-perfect and this takes a lot of practice to learn the distancing and timing before attacking.

You have a block button that can deflect basic attacks, but this will need to be upgraded if you want to be able to deflect almost anything. Eventually I was able to stand on a boss and simply hold block and pick my shots. This button is also how you perform assassinations if you sneak up to an enemy undetected. If you unlock the ability you’ll also have a dash by utilizing the Bumpers, yet the game incorrectly says to double tap a direction. As you dash, flip, jump and attack, the animations look quite smooth as they string together, making you feel like a ninja when it all goes to plan.

At the end of each stages you’re given a scorecard based on a number of factors like how often you were spotted, how many damage you took and other things. You’re given a score and a title based on how well you did, but I found it quite difficult to get a decent score, as you’re going to be spotted quite often for numerous reasons, some of which are out of your control like difficult enemy placement.

There are a variety of enemies you’ll face, even zombies that only ‘die’ for a short time before coming back to life. The harder and more difficult enemies later on becomes quite a challenge until you have some critical abilities, some of which can even one-shot assassinate you as well if you leave your back exposed to them. With plenty of enemies to face, the real excitement came from the ten unique boss fights. These were the highlight of Within the Blade for me and was the reason I wanted to continue on my journey to face off against the next one.

Then there’s the weapon degradation, one of the mechanics that made me want to stop playing outright at times. Samurai and Ninja swords are supposed to be some of the most quality steel and blades known, yet can completely break on you at any given time. That’s right, your forged steel sword can simply break, leaving you to fight with just your equipment you’ve found along the way and your fists. Now, I will say that once I put my points into the bare handed skills and abilities, this wasn’t a big deal, but it takes time to do so and fighting more than one boss without a weapon wasn’t the best experience.

After most stages you’ll have the option to go back to your village to buy items, craft new ones and spend your skill points. The shop has some basic swords and such, but are much too expensive until you start knowing how to make money later on. Instead, you’ll be crafting weapons and items from materials you find along the way. With more than 200 recipes there are plenty of items to craft, but I never had a great stream of items flowing in to make much use of doing so. Also, there’s a few NPC’s in the village that you can talk to and shop at, but this isn’t told anywhere, so I didn’t even know you had to press ‘Up’ on the D-Pad to check their wares until I did it by accident.

The 16-bit style pixel visuals are a treat to look at for old-school gamers like myself, with each enemy looking unique and plenty of smaller details in the environment. Cutting down tall standing bamboo never gets old, nor does seeing tons of blood explode from an enemy. The animations are quite fluid and well done. While there’s no voice acting, the soundtrack definitely suits the feudal Japan era and has great sounding sword clashes when in battle.

The ‘floaty’ combat still caused me to make mistakes hours in and I had plenty of unfair deaths causing level checkpoint restarts. While I wasn’t a fan of the indoor level design, the boss stages made the effort of suffering through them worth it in the end, as did eventually unlocking and upgrading enough abilities to feel like an unstoppable ninja by the time the credits rolled and starting New Game+.

**Within the Blade was provided by the publisher reviewed on an Xbox Series X**

Overall: 6.5 / 10
Gameplay: 6.0 / 10
Visuals: 7.0 / 10
Sound: 6.5 / 10

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STAFF REVIEW of Within the Blade (Xbox One)

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