Shadow Force

[Discoalucard]

HAHA. I can't understand all of what Kunio's saying, but it's basically like "Bullys cannot become heroes!"

In America we just gave anti-drug warnings from the FBI, while Japan has a pudgy little dude who made a living for himself by beating up people, telling people not to become bullies.

[Ryu the Grappler]

admin said:

HAHA. I can't understand all of what Kunio's saying, but it's basically like "Bullys cannot become heroes!"

In America we just gave anti-drug warnings from the FBI, while Japan has a pudgy little dude who made a living for himself by beating up people, telling people not to become bullies.

Pretty much. In Kunio's defense, his original game was about him standing up for his friend Hiroshi, who got bullied by every gang in the game.

Here are the character profiles.

A rokushakubo-wielding ninja who is the last descendant of the "Iga" clan. He suffered a serious wound during a previous battle and became a cyborg soldier.


The sole female member of the group. Wields two swords. Although she is the only one who still has her human flesh, her fighting abilities are just as good as the other three members.


A cyborg soldier who has a crimson-colored body and a face like the mythical "tengu" from ancient Japan. Fights using his bare hands. He was once the leader of a resistance movement.


He became a beastman due to a reconstruction surgery performed on him by the Teaser organization. He escaped from his brainwashing and now uses his power to seek revenge. His claws are his weapons.

EDIT: Added the translated text. Feel free to use them on your site.

[Ryu the Grappler]

I've replayed the US version just to verify things. The game does force both players to kill each other when they finish the Bio Mother together. Then you'll have a rematch with one of the previous bosses in the game. If you lose this battle, the game gives you a "screw you" ending. On the other hand, the US version is the only one of the two versions to allow you to transform into one of the bosses (Oni, Mars, Raizo and Raizo with a sword), if only for the final fight. I recommend Oni.

The dialogue and stage descriptions don't seem to differ that much. However, when Dr. Wong dies in the ending, he spits out blood in the Japanese version.

[Ryu the Grappler]

Translated the whole intro. It wasn't that hard, since its a pretty basic plot, but I got distracted by other things.

[zzz]

Revisions/extra text

Third paragraph - change first two sentences to this:

Shadow Force's plot concerns an organization called Teaser that's led by a guy named Mr. Wong, who looks kind of like Sigma from Mega Man X. He's creating monsters to take over the world, and the four heroes are out to attempt to bring an end to his plans.

Fourth paragraph, beginning of second sentence - change "Kai is a ninja" to "Kai is a cyborg ninja".

Third from last paragraph about difficulty - place this sentence at the very end:

If you can pull of the miracle of finishing the game, the ending differs for each character.

Extra paragraphs to place separately before last paragraph:

The Japanese release has several differences from the American version. Most significantly, there are only three buttons - jump, kick, and weapon/punch - so you only have half as many attacks. It seems like a really horrible idea to reduce movesets in a beat-em-up, but several of the game's attacks are too similar to be absolutely essential, so it really isn't a problem. As there's no longer a specific button for it, possessing enemies is performed by pushing both attack buttons at once. Also, the command to release your bomb has been changed so that you have to push all three buttons. Another change is that those fighter sections have been removed entirely. This also means that it's possible to finish the game with two characters, and there are extra endings for each possible pairing. Yes, this release does have less content, but if you'd rather avoid the fighter sections, and you find the movesets to be more convoluted than genuinely beneficial, then you might actually prefer this version. There's also a bat shit insane message before the intro telling people not to be bullies below an image of that neon billboard of Kunio. Yeah, not the best way to get a point across - the character that originated the beat-em-up genre, in a beat-em-up game, by the developer that invented beat-em-ups, telling everybody not to beat people up.

[Ryu the Grappler]

The message from Kunio actually appears when you start up the game (before the opening intro), not under the billboard in the Construction Stage.

[zzz]

That's what I meant. I changed it slightly to avoid any possible confusion, and made it into a lone (yet MASSIVE) paragraph to reduce space.

[Ace Whatever]

Wow! I always wanted to ask for the name of this game since I fondly remember the body-snatching concept. Great article.

So basically which version is better? The one I played was the 3-button Japanese version.

[zzz]

The moves that you lack are mostly just slightly different version of the moves that you still have, so that aspect is really not that big a deal. It mostly comes down to whether or not you would rather skip the fighter sections and be more likely to see any kind of real ending. If so, you might prefer the Japanese version.

[Ryu the Grappler]

The Japanese version is lacking the Hard Punch and Light Kick buttons to be more specific. I prefer the Japanese version myself, since the one-on-one battles are gimmicky and were only added as a blatant attempt to cash-in on the fighting game craze back then.

[Ryu the Grappler]

www.arcadeflyers.com/?page=flyer&db=videodb&id=5673&image=2
Looking at the back of the flyer, I noticed the title screen is a bit different, as the subtitle says "Cyborg Ninja vs. Dr. Wong", instead of the "Henshin Ninja" Japanese subtitle. An alternate American version of the game perhaps?

[Discoalucard]

So running up to people and punching them repeatedly in the gut is an "authentic ninja technique" according to Technos?

[zzz]

I actually found similar translations of those characters profiles when I was writing it, but it didn't say where they were from, and I didn't consider them interesting, so I didn't make any character profiles for the original write up. Anyway, looks good.

[Ryu the Grappler]

zzz said:

I actually found similar translations of those characters profiles when I was writing it, but it didn't say where they were from, and I didn't consider them interesting, so I didn't make any character profiles for the original write up. Anyway, looks good.

The character selection screen has some half-assed translated descriptions if you look closely behind the red and blue window things highliting your character.

"Kai - A kombo stick wheeling descendant of Iga Ninja"
"Tengu - A long-nosed, red faced cybog warrior."
"Coyote - Due to reconstructive surgery by Teser"
"Blunet - The only female worrior. Uses two swords as her weapon."

Yeah. They're not very good translations.

[zzz]

Oh right, I saw those too. I completely forgot about those.