Ninja Gaiden (1988)

Revisited this today to finally finish it up. The final gauntlet was pretty rough, especially the second boss, which had me second guessing my choice to complete the game. Thankfully I pushed through it and was rewarded with some actual fun with the final encounter.

I can't say that I didn't abuse save states, but I used them more sparingly than I expected to, and it only felt fair given how much bullshit this game tosses at you. I think if you eliminated the enemies that spawn right on top of you when you're mid-jump and tuned the duration and direction of the hitstun knockback a bit this could be more fun to play but it's pretty good as is too.

I will say there is a surprising amount of quality to the story's presentation and music. The story while not exactly complex, has more depth than I would have expected as well, with a considerable amount of cutscenes.

There is a little nuance to the gameplay and satisfaction when deciding when to use your limited subweapons that you can obtain, as well as when are get into to the flow of running through stages while using the limited range of screen that enemies can exist in to your advantage. The game is even somewhat forgiving by letting you restart at the beginning of a stage when you die and game over.

This generosity runs out pretty quickly in the later levels where enemy spawn points seem to be placed in a comically evil and cruel fashion. Need to make a long jump over a pit? A bird will definitely spawn just as you reach the ideal jump spot and would definitely collide with you if you didn't know to stall your jump ahead of time. There is a lot of spots like this in the later levels as well.

The very limited hit stun also creates many frame traps where if you were so foolish as to let an enemy hit you once, it will definitely hit you several more times before you can escape. A few more frames of invincibility would have made a world of difference in the end game boss sequences as well.

There is a lot of similarities to Konami's Castlevania in game design here. A casual run through of a stage feels riddled with trap areas to easily defeat an unseasoned player. But somewhat with knowledge and reflexes tuned to a stage through many tries can manage to find impress paths through the chaos and make the whole thing look easy. This kind of meticulous learning through repetition and stress can be fun but generally isn't my thing.

Preliminary: Oooo the guy who did Klonoa, and I'm already feeling these super tight NES responsive controls that I love so. I just played the Ninja Gaiden arcade version and it felt clunkier. So odd that NES started surpassing [some] arcade games in responsiveness. I'm glad you can attack mid-jump, tho disappointed you can't manipulate your jump distance/height more. It's looking like a pick up and play game, tho I do think I might eventually consult maps if the special weapons get confusing or I keep replacing one I like haha. I was having fun with the first stage, found it funny I suddenly/accidentally discovered you can cling to walls/signs lol and then jump off but also really wish the jumping off was more fluid that could have been a lot of fun, and then the darn timer said I had to hurry. I hate timers in action platformers, let me have funnnnn and explorrrre. Now I'm at this odd looking bar presumably for my first boss

Day 1

Oh wow we have a whole film noir vibe going on with the cutscenes. Super cool and ahead of its time that you can just skip them -- encourages replayability for sure. I'm noticing the great music especially during the cutscenes. And how quick and playable it is. I figured out the 2 bosses and haven't had to look at the StrategyWiki at all, not even for maps. Often the power-ups match what I need (I got frustrated with enemies being on pillars I need to land on but then realized that's what the fire surrounding me power-up was for).

The controls are a bit clunkier than I first considered them but I'm loving it so far. The music, the fast gameplay, the learnable mechanics. And like always, since I started this chronology project, I love when a game allows you to hit away projectiles. I'm already a good way through Act 4 and I just looked--there seem to be 6 Acts. Wellllp. I suppose I won't be OSRS bossing tonight lol. No surprise that in the late 80s I'm defaulting back to my pre-project preference for action platformers and RPGs. Surprise surprise heh. Let's be honest tho this is very Castlevania 1-esque, and considering that's an ultimate Favorite, this makes sense :-p Lol ironically right after typing that, this Castlevania esque screen came up

I'm never a fan of infinitely respawning enemies, like why even bother killing them then? But it did seem more so to have you learn the pattern, whether waiting a sec or jumping over or slaughtering, in order to solve the situation you're in. Al the music continued to be absolutely excellent, tho without the cutscenes, I'd find the Look a bit underwhelming. The levels and main character sprite just feel boxy and cluttered.

Okay I finally had to resort to StrategyWiki for the Act 4 boss. I kept healing the enemy it seemed? Turns out there's only one real Boss, the rest of the hopping statues are fake. Hm. And Act 5 definitely got more frustrating, still Castlevania esque but teetering on annoying (especially due to the way the enemies respawned, often right after killing them or when stepping on a spot). And some of the times you'd cling to the wall even if you are so clear at the top. Lots of frustrating mechanics in this, but still a great game. I'm now on the final Act, let's see if I can finish this tonight.

Jeez 6-3 was just downright not fun. Ridiculous. Without savestates... I can't even imagine. Oh darn I though 6-4 was the end but I guess there is a 6-5. That's enough for tonight. The difficulty is just obnoxious in the last two Acts (and I see reviews noted that), but it has a really fun early and mid game, and I will still finish this tomorrow/soon.

Day 2 The 6-4 boss continued the "so hard it's not fun" trend, and now I'm in 6-5 and lost my power-up I had. Boo. But this is the final boss. Let me read the StrategyWiki before I get too frustrated with it. (Ironically not much strategy nor some easy trick to it. Here goes nothing). Omg... wait... this is still 6-4. I hate this.

I pushed through. But only with copious abuse of savestates. Too bad the last 2 Acts are un-fun hard, because the music and Castlevania esque gameplay could've made a great game. The ending jingles are pretty good, not spectacular. And the screens are pretty good too. Goodbye Dracula's Castle, er, wait wrong game. But hey, I can't complain -- a sunrise ending segment and then a great credits jam.

Look: 8/10 Mostly just functional, but I feel like the cutscenes were quite well-done and there were some really stellar colors and moments.

Sound: 8.5/10 This is really what carried the game when the difficulty got to frustrating levels!

Play: 7.5/10 I can't deny my love of Castlevania type gameplay, but sheesh. Acts 5 and 6 just weren't fun. I'm trying to shake off that, and remember those are only 2 acts, and after all, the point of late levels is to be hard and have you keep replaying and replaying the fun early levels. So instead of giving a 7, I bumped it to a 7.5, recognizing that like the first Legend of Zelda and other Nintendohard games the idea was to add replayability with the difficulty. But ugh, those respawning enemies and brutal amount of damage when hit by bosses, without any way to upgrade... meh.

Feel: 8/10 Great Sound, good Look, and the Castlevania derivative, with a great ending. Can't complain.

Attachment: 8/10 This really probly deserves a 7 and, thereby, overall a 3. Since I don't see myself wanting to ever play through to the end with this. But it started a series I've always heard so much about, it encouraged replability with its difficulty, and I can't deny my love of the Konami Castlevania/Goonies 2 style UI and gameplay. On further reflection, this might drop down but for now, it's fine.

Overall: 8/10

Completion: Main Story (with savestate abuse)

Playtime: 1h 30m

The original Ninja Gaiden is undoubtedly a challenging game, with many frustrations common to action titles of its era. It ends with an unbelievably grueling final act that I have no intention of beating legitimately, but that can't ruin the fun I had up until that point. The game won me over quickly with its fast-paced action and simple but fun story.

Though you often have to slow down and be careful, many obstacles in this journey are best dispatched by pushing forward with quickness and aggression. Jumping right at a threatening enemy and instantly cutting them down before they can move feels really good. The combat is simple and snappy, pretty easy to get into, and not as archaic-feeling as you'd expect. I always felt very engaged with thinking about my timing and things like that.

Boss fights were an odd mix of foes that were either very difficult or a bit underwhelming. In some cases, the best strategy I found was simply standing in one place for the whole fight. I beat one tough later boss by simply mashing the attack button in his face and tanking his hits. Then in the final act, the bosses felt almost impossible for me to get a grip on. At least they had some pretty impressive designs, but overall, bosses just weren't quite as fun as the levels that led up to them.

Platforming is nice and fast-paced, though they haven't quite figured out how to make wall-jumping and climbing feel right yet. Not a huge issue, but it can especially be annoying having enemies repeatedly knock you into holding a wall against your will. Levels themselves are mostly pretty fun and well-paced, particularly the first few. Once you know the layout, you can really zip back through all their obstacles in a way that feels great.

After a while, I did find there were sections with too many enemies for my liking—it can be too chaotic. In some cases, repeated attempts at a certain stage became a drag because I was never reaching the boss with enough health to actually stand a chance. But many of these levels are enjoyable to run through, even after several attempts. If the checkpointing was just slightly more generous, that would have been great in my book.

The story isn't anything too amazing, with an ending I found pretty bad, but is told in an exciting way with a cliffhanger or twist around every corner. Cutscenes between missions are surprisingly cinematic for an 80's action-platformer game. I knew that was a big hyped thing about this game, but it was even better than I expected.

I thought this was very good, one of the best NES games I have ever played. Will definitely check out at least one of the direct sequels.

That was amazing.

I tried to beat the game on hardcore mode, but when I died on last boss that was a knife in my back. Again, again, again.

I know that someone might say that I wasn't persistent enough and they will be right. But that was too tough for me, I hope that someday I'll do it and master the game on RetroAchievements. But untill then I needed to beat the game the first time.

And I love it.

In my quest to complete all the Nintendo Switch Online games (the good ones anyways) - I decided to dive into Ninja Gaiden. I expected to be frustrated, as I've never been very "good" at video games like this. While there are a few situations that are eminently frustrating (enemy push back). Largely I found the difficulty pretty fair - and liked mastering sections as I went through them over and over again.

I used save states liberally, but tried to only use them at the start of stages or boss fights. This made the last series of bosses actually surmountable for me, as I wasn't pushed back to 6-1 every time

Speaking of the final bosses - this was far and away the toughest part of the game for me. I hadn't quite mastered the quick slashes and was confused that I wasn't doing damage to the final boss. Jaquio probably took me the longest, but I eventually developed my own strategy that got me through with some patience.

Startropics is next!

My interest in this game goes back to watching the AVGN video years ago, but I'd never given it a chance until this week. I played The Messenger last year and loved it and now that I've played this I can see what a love letter that game is to the Ninja Gaiden series. Moreover, I understand the love that people have for this game.

[I feel obligated to note that I did use save states to complete this, but only to return to level 6-3 after a death in the final boss fight and to practice against the different final boss forms. For those that do not know, you have three lives in this game and are typically sent back to the beginning of the current stage at a game over, e.g. get a game over on 3-2, return to the beginning of 3-2. However, for some reason, if you die on the last boss, you start at the beginning of Act 6, which is just insane. Not even a game over. is required. I think the decision to send the player back to 6-1 after that fight is patently unfair and unconducive to motivating or training them to complete the game because it requires so much time to get back. Not only that, but it doesn’t do this with other bosses, so the choice just doesn’t make sense to me. I also read that the Japanese version of the game doesn’t include this brutal feature. One day I may go back for a trve run, completing it all in one go, but today is not the day.]

The speed of this game is its greatest strength. Going full blast just feels so good. What seems impossibly unfair at first becomes simple once you’ve taken the time to study the enemy placement, layout, and your options for getting through it. Then it all comes down to what is most enjoyable about these old NES games, executing it all over and over again. There’s a big payoff when you finally beat one of these levels and get to see the next cut scene.

It should be noted that these graphics are excellent for the NES and the sound is great too. I would criticize some of the enemy designs. They’re totally random at some points and don’t make much sense when all seen together. You have camouflaged american style soldiers next to ninjas and huge birds, cannons that look like frogs, weird jumping skeleton things… Boxers… I don’t know what the decisions were like leading up to those sprite designs, but it is charming in its own way.

If you like fast-paced action and a good challenge, I would suggest biting the bullet and trying this one out. I feel pretty accomplished. Now I need to finally grind through the first Castlevania.

Played the SNES trilogy version. Went through the first 5 stages without knowing how to use power ups; the only ones I could get to use were spin sword jump and rotating fire. There were so many time where I though "boy a ranged attack would sure come in handy". At stage 6 I looked up a walkthrough to find out; Up + attack?! So simple yet in my random button mashing trying to figure it out I never got it.

I found the respawning enemies and time limit to be very annoying; especially the damn birds that hit harder than swords and guns. The game started off very easy though difficulty ramped up fairly quickly until the 2nd and 3rd last bosses , which were both ridiculously difficult. The final boss was so easy it was a joke.

7.0/10

The game made you feel like a real ninja more and more the better you got. Enemies rush you incredibly fast and hesitation often results in new enemies spawning or getting knocked off a cliff leading to an extremely fast and intense level design that you gave you no time to breathe. The music was heavier than other NES games and the designs and themes more serious, reminding me of the colorful and violent 80s and 90s OVAs. This combined with the how intense it was and it's extremely high difficulty made it stand-out among the other titles on the system. It's place in history is somewhat overblown by people who only look at the console side of gaming history, as there were many other serious extremely hard arcade games around the same type as well, for instance, Strider.

I feel the reputation of NES and extremely hard games, in general, would be better if one of Ninja's Gaiden's sequels got more attention. The first game was filled with some awkward design problems, like how you sometimes get knocked back and end up clinging to a wall making you vulnerable to another hit. It's silly for Ryu to die from inadvertently climbing; to the designer's credit, they did give a lot of hitpoints for an NES game to compensate for the wall problems. The other Ninja Gaidens also had more balanced difficulty curve (as anyone who has beaten this game without save states knows you spend as much time struggling on the last level as all the previous ones combined). So strictly speaking this is the worst Ninja Gaiden on the NES and not an ideal of representation of how to do difficulty in the genre.

There's one thing I think it did better than it's sequels, and better than any platformer I played was the story, in that it fulfilled the role of a story in a platformer perfectly: to draw you in and incentivize you. Ninja Gaiden's story is basically a series of extremely well-paced cliffhangers devoid of any filler or unnecessary length * what happened to Ryu's father* * who is that mysterious woman* the mystery will be revealed but only if you beat this next level. Every scene get's you motivated to chase after and stop the bad guy while edging you on to be worthy of using the Dragon Sword. Platformers are not capable of the same indepth types of stories as RPGs or adventure games, but they can get you really, really pumped to become a master ninja.

The all-time most controller-smashing side-scroller in video-game history. Anybody who can beat this without cheating and using Wii U's suspend-game function is a true master. (Incidentally, playing this on the Wii U really highlights a glaring problem with the gamepad--or actually maybe it's a huge advantage: it's highly unlikely, no matter how frustrated you get, that you're going to hurl a $150 controller at the wall.)

Didn't remember all the typos in the dialog from back when I first played this as a kid in the '80s (not surprising). And let's face it, the story's pretty silly. The cutscene animation, though, 8-bit or not, remains iconic, unforgettable. Stuff that'll haunt your dreams for going on three decades.

History:
I can't say with complete certainty that I've never played this game before. There's like this pool of generic 2D platformers from the NES era floating around in my memory that I can't really distinguish. That's not to say this game is generic, probably, just that I may or may not have played it...

Expectations:
Another tough one, I understand. Coming off Castlevania I'm just hoping to make some progress!

Day 1:

That's right, we're switching to days now!

So I finally got around to playing for just a bit today and actually found the game to be really enjoyable. Hard, but enjoyable. I made it halfway through Level 2 before I was harshly reminded I was playing a 27 year old game...

Looks like it's time to do some cartridge cleaning...

Day 2:

After a quick contact cleaning I decided to fire this back up right after getting home from work! I did a bit of reading and got a better understanding of how this game's power system worked and using that awesome jump spin slash.. thing... I was able to quickly tear through the first two stages.

Stage 4 proved to be much more challenging, however, and i played through it several times before making it to the boss, then several more times to make it to the boss with the right power-up, then even more times trying to figure out how to USE said power-up and beat the boss without dying!

This game is hard.

Stage 4 was no better, and proved to be a bit of an endurance round. I did manage to make it to the boss, but never found a good tactic for them. After a few tries, I accidentally fell asleep on the couch.

Day 3:

I killed the boss! I studied up on some speed runs and found where to get the Spin Slash ability for the one hit kill. After dying several times in the early stages of Stage 4 I was able to make it to the final area with Spin Slash... where I died again and lost the ability.

Still, after a couple attempts and trying new strategies I was able to take those twin aliens down with just my trusty sword!

Then Stage 5 happened...

I did actually make it to 5-3, the ruins area, but at that point I was ready to throw my controller in a wall.

Best effort guys!

Liked:
This game controlled insanely tight, just as a game where you control a badass ninja ought to. The music was pretty great to, though not as memorable as some other games. The game was very difficult, and at times it felt unfair, but it was a difficulty that could be learned, and I'm sure with enough time I'd eventually be able to progress all the way through it.

Disliked:
As stated, sometimes the difficulty felt a bit unfair, and many deaths felt cheap. Also, while the controls were very good, things like wall clinging could feel awkward and not always feel like they should.

Play it Again?
Yes, probably. I had a lot of fun with this one and I'm sure I'll want to pull it down again.

Personal Score: