Game Review: Ninja Shadow: Shall We Date? — Ninja on the tin, actually just old syrup.

I’ve been playing this visual novel game for the past few weeks. It’s free to play, but if you’re sucker you’ll pay for more of the little perks and to read more. After a few weeks of guffawing and rolling my eyes, I posted my review on the app store — although I haven’t actually seen it pop up yet.

Ninja Shadow: where you play the main character, a girl who is meant to be the most powerful ninja in her village, offers her service to the vigilante of a bigger city in return for protection for her people. Sounds noble, right? Except she does minimal ninja-ing and the few instances we see of her actually in action, it’s pretty disappointing. She is well on her way to becoming a Mary-Sue, being accepted into the group and being liked by everyone for being nothing special whatsoever, and is embroiled in drama that only she, being so special, can solve.

The art is beautiful and it’s quite a cute design of a game. The need to wait for more free chapters before you can read it means you do come back for more.

But the story itself is quite the laughing matter. The chapters are short and often don’t end on much of a cliffhanger. The characters are all the same — once you’ve chosen them, they become moody and mean (is that meant to make them attractive? Cos being a dick is not attractive) and one-dimensional. The main character is spineless and equally superficial. How is she the lead ninja in her village when she is so useless — gets caught when sneaking, has no control over her outward emotions, and needs back-up with every mission — and has the emotional maturity of a 12 year old? The writing is hilariously awful, full of bizarre expressions like “glare dubiously”, “creased his eyes”, and “wryly smirked”, not to mention enough “whereupons” to make a drinking game. I’m not sure if it’s a translating issue, but the writer is evidently amateurish with their overuse of adverbs, purple prose, and telling, rather than showing, which are major beginners’ faults, and should have some writing lessons before taking on a project that asks for its users to pay for the content, because the writing quality so far is probably barely good enough to be free as it is. There are increasing amounts of typos later in the game, most noticeably when Soshiro’s name, for some reason, became ‘SojiroSoshiro’ despite the title of the speaker’s name remaining Soshiro, and several ‘waswere’s.

Makes a good laugh amongst my writer friends though.

Verdict: 1 star.

101 on "How not to write"

Posted by Katrin Hollister on Sunday, May 7, 2017

Did you play this? How did you find it?