This game is rated ESRB: Everyone 10+ for Mild Violence.
Shinobi is a 1987 arcade action game developed by Team Shinobi and released across numerous platforms including the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Atari ST, TurboGrafx-16, DOS, Amstrad CPC, and MSX. Players control Joe Musashi, a ninja tasked with rescuing hostages across five missions, each divided into three or four stages. Every stage except the final one in each mission contains captive characters that must all be freed before progression is permitted; mission finales instead culminate in a boss fight. Joe's default arsenal consists of unlimited shurikens alongside melee punches and kicks. Collecting a hostage power-up replaces his throwing stars with an explosive firearm and upgrades his close-range attack to a katana. A single-use ninja magic ability clears all on-screen enemies per stage. Enemies can block projectiles with shields or take cover behind obstacles. Performance bonuses reward players for completing stages without magic or ranged weapons, and leftover time converts to additional points.
The player controls a ninja named Joe Musashi who has to stop a criminal organization called "Zeed" who are kidnapping the children of his ninja clan. Through five missions (consisting of three stages for the first mission and four stages each for the rest), Musashi must make his way to Zeed's headquarters and free all the hostages in the first two or three stages before confronting the boss at the final stage of each mission. At the start of each mission, the player is shown their objective, followed by a file containing a photograph of the enemy boss and a map display pinpointing the location of the next stage.
