 I think anyone watching this video is familiar with the usual suspects when it comes to the companies that were able to consistently crank out great arcade games. There's Capcom, Konami, Data East, but one that gets slept on a bit is Technos Japan. And this game here, Shadow Force, will not let you sleep on that any longer since they have their logo front and center on a giant billboard in the first level. They also developed Double Dragon, the Combat Tribes, Super Dodgeball, and the WWF arcade games like Superstars and WrestleFest, but Shadow Force ended up being the last arcade game they would develop released in June of 1993. And yes, it's a beat-em-up, and there are about a million of these that are being made around this time, but Shadow Force still manages to stand out on its own without any problem. One token gives you two lives to get through five levels, and you start with four players to choose from. There's Kai, a ninja with a staff, and my pick as the most fun character to play as. There's Tengu, the strong Hagar type with a big Pinocchio nose for some reason. Coyote, who you might recognize as the bug, I mean the werewolf from the movie Werewolf. And Bluene, the fastest character with two swords, who reminds me a lot of the dagger women from Ninja Warriors. The big hook this game has going for it, however, is that no matter who you pick, you have the ability to take the form of other enemies and play as them. Each enemy has at least a couple special moves, and the game straight up tells you how to do them right when you take control, so that's really cool. And if you get sick of a certain enemy type, you can revert back to your character with the press of a button. The only real problem with this is that it can be hard to keep track of who you actually are at times, especially when there's a second player. Early on, these enemies are pretty weak, and the only real reason to play as them is just for the novelty and to see what their special move is, but eventually switching to an enemy becomes the smarter option. Like this section here with these incredibly cheap enemies that use rifles. Take over one of those guys, and now you can fight fire with fire. Or really fight beat-em-up cheapness with more cheapness. Later, there's an instance where you fight these amoebas that make clones of you, so of course you'd rather take the form of just a regular enemy in the spot instead of having to fight a powerful shadow version of your own character. This is smart game design, especially for a beat-em-up. Adding to the depth of this game is the move set of each character, which comes courtesy of a six-button layout, which makes this closer to a fighting game than a beat-em-up. There's weak and strong punches and kicks, and you can do low and high strikes when holding up and down on the d-pad or joystick. Plus, there's another button to jump. You can do fighting move style inputs, like a half roll and then an attack button to do, say, a Hagar-style spin attack. And you can press both strong attack buttons to do a special move. Most importantly, however, is that the controls work really well. It's really cool having all those attack options right at your fingertips. And even better is that all four characters each have small nuanced differences in how they perform each attack. A lot of the typical beat-em-up trimmings are here as well, of course, like the first level has a section where there's pieces of steel eye beams falling from the sky. The second level has you jumping down a waterfall to fight in a place where I think I'd rather be fishing instead of fighting bad guys. Later, you fight through a factory with all sorts of different robots you can take over and play as. Before you end up in this weird cathedral that looks like something out of Castlevania Bloodlines, which sets up an even crazier final level. The sprites, settings, and environments are what I like the most about this one. This isn't the typical crazy looking monsters beaten up by dudes with t-shirts tucked into their jeans. It looks like something out of the Ninja Warriors universe or something closer to Hagane. Of course, I have to mention that Shadow Force has lots of typical arcade cheapness, which is to be expected for a beat-em-up. Melee combat like this means you have to be right next to enemies to do damage, and that's always going to give the AI plenty of opportunities to land some cheap damage out of nowhere. The boss fights in particular are big time quarter munching slogs, where you have to hit the guy a gazillion times to bring him down, but a simple three hit combo from them drains half of your health. But still, when you play a 90s arcade beat-em-up, you know that's gonna go with the territory. I'm willing to brush that stuff aside because Shadow Force is an intelligently made game. Most of the time with beat-em-ups, especially for the time, you get two buttons and you get your usual tropes like fighting on a construction site or fighting on a giant conveyor belt or in an elevator, all of which are in this game, of course. But the fighting game style of gameplay, plus the mechanic of being able to take the form of enemies, puts this game over the top. Plus, this game just looks cool. You gotta love the cyborg ninja motif. I highly recommend this one. It was never released outside of the arcade, so this is another game you've gotta play any way you can. All right, I wanna thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.