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 …
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.
