Ninja Gaiden Series

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, for anyone who has literally gone out of their way to avoid every word that I have ever said, it should be obvious that I'm a fan of Ninja Gaiden. But no, not just a regular fan, I have a fucking obsession with these games. I figured I should point out that, while some people are naive and just let nostalgia bias their opinions too much, I'm perfectly aware with how little the 2D and 3D games have in common, but IMO the 3D games still deserve to be called NG games in terms of being spiritual 3D successors to the 2D games. In reality, the first 3D Ninja Gaiden game was never meant to be an NG game. Itagaki had planned a new action game as a brand new IP from scratch, and then someone at Tecmo asked him to slap on the Ninja Gaiden name-tag because it would make for better marketing being based off of a classic series, so he obliged. But, you know what, I'm glad, because now NG had great games in both 2D and 3D.

So, I'll start off by briefly going over what I love about the classic 2D games, but in all honesty, as anyone can tell, I'm much bigger on the 3D games because they are honestly just more fun as games for me. Now, that shouldn't give anyone the mistaken idea that I don't still love the 3D games. The first true NG game was actually and arcade beat-em-up with no story-line that shamelessly tried to compete with the much more popular Double Dragon. For what its worth, it was a solid game for its time, but can't compare to the depth of the DD games, and by today's standards its easy to fault it for some of its poor design choices. Still, it deserves credit for starting up the series and giving gamers a good experience when it came out. Also, I have to say that it had some damn good graphics for its day, and it possibly has the most intense and memorable fucking continue screen that I have ever seen in a video game, as far as the traditional arcade countdown from 10 types of screens go. In those 10 seconds you could input a coin, and in doing so you would save Ryu, because you see, the continue screen featured an animation with Ryu being tied up in ropes by the game's enemies, desperately struggling to try and get out while a circular saw slowly descended down towards his skull. The screen would flash red if you ever let it reach him. Pretty awesome stuff, overall.

Now, of course, the series is most well-known for its NES games. The first NES game was certainly an outstanding game for its day, but also wasn't perfect. It did have some moments of cheap difficulty, and while Ryu had some amazing acrobatic abilities, it was frustrating that he lacked the ability to actually scale walls, and that just a single enemy attack of any variety would knock him back so much. Still, the game was fun because it was the first truly successful game of its time to be so frantically fast-paced and really make the player quickly and efficiently use all of the acrobatic skills that they had at their disposal to skillfully platform through tough levels, while also swiftly slaying any foes that dared to get in their way, or that they dared to take on. It was a formula that was just plain fun when finally mastered, and it was even fun working one's way up to mastery, but it was the 2nd game that truly brought in all of the improvements that the series really needed. In this game, Ryu could scale walls and also had some cool new power-ups, such as the cloning ability, and overall the level design felt more fluid and more inspired. There is an interesting story about my experiences with the 3rd game, and my situation with it is somewhat similar to Desensitized's experiences with DKC3, but I'll get into that at a later time.

I'll leave off at this much for now, but later I'll go into why I love the 3D games so much, and how they are truly brilliant gems. It really ticks me off at how ignorantly some people (who I can tell you obviously have never even touched the 3D NG games) insult the 3D NG games just for stupid reasons of hate towards Itagaki and Team Ninja. I'll tell you some of the main reasons right now: People are nostalgia-fags who just can't stand the thought out their favorite 2D NG classics sharing the same name with the 3D series; people hate Itagaki for dissing some games that they liked; and of course the most recent reason is because a lot of people hate how Other M isn't as good as previous Metroid games, and how it has some similarities to Ninja Gaiden, so they take their frustration out on those games.

Well, a little tid-bit of info that I want to share to all of those idiots is that Ninja Gaiden Black is the NG series equivalent of what the Metroid Prime Trilogy is to the Metroid series. All any of those idiots would have to do to see that is actually try the fucking game.

**Ahem**

But of course I'll stop myself before I go into a rant.....

At any rate, I'll go into just why I love NGB so much, next time, and what qualities make it my personal favorite game of all time.

[Avaitor]

Longest post on the board so far. *we need an applaud smiley*

I found the original X-Box NG at Gorilla Games for $10. Since I don't think I'll find Black again soon, I might hit that up after I finish the games I already got for Christmas.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Sure thing. Its still a great game, and honestly the general consensus is that Black actually makes things a bit harder than the original game, if anything, unless you play on Ninja Dog mode, which is fine as long as you don't mind Ayane making you her bitch and forcing you to wear a feminine accessory throughout the duration of the game.

The only problem with the original game is that its not as polished as NGB, though I would have actually recommended it over NGB if XBL was still available from the original XBOX, as you could have downloaded the Hurricane Packs for free, and NGB is essentially NG with both of the Hurricane Packs already downloaded, minus the Intercept ability which kind of broke the game (as in it basically let the player cheat their way through most of the game's challenging moments).

Anyways, the only real setback in terms of gameplay is that you don't get the Lunar Staff in the original version of NG, which is fine since its not like it was that useful in the 1st game to begin with, and also you can't charge up attacks manually, but that only proved to be a truly useful feature at one particular point in the game, and you'll still do just fine without it (its probably better since it'll force you to learn how to charge attacks using essence, which is a necessary skill, anyways). You also get one less difficulty, but I don't count that as a setback since, somehow, I doubt that you intended to play this game on Master Ninja mode, anyways.

The original version of the game also lacks Mission Mode, but once again I doubt that you would have invested in that either, anyways

So, yeah, I encourage that you go ahead and play any version of the game that you can find, because whichever version it is, its still an amazing game.

[talonmalon333]

While that post was long, it was nothing in comparison to your Yu Yu Hakusho review on TV.com.

As for Ninja Gaiden, I liked it on Nintendo. I still plan on playing the new series, so don't think I forgot your recommendation.

However, I have made a promise to myself. And I know you've said that the first Sigma game isn't that much inferior, but I have convinced myself that I WILL play the games as they were on the XBox, even if it means borrowing my cousin's XBox 360.

[Foggle]

While that post was long, it was nothing in comparison to your Yu Yu Hakusho review on TV.com.

That wasn't a review, that was a goddamn novel.

[Avaitor]

That was long as hell, but if you want novel-length, check out my EEnE review.

I'm still recovering from that.

[Foggle]

So, E-K, how is the arcade Ninja Gaiden game? I've never played that one.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Beat Ninja Gaiden Black on Hard mode to unlock it.

Anyways, its something that I'd call a decent game for its time. Its kind of fun to play for a little while, but honestly it hasn't aged all too well, especially when compared to other beat-em-ups of its era, like Double Dragon (which was the original Arcade NG's biggest influence). Its still a competent beat-em-up game, though, so its worth playing through at least once, IMO. Its really easy to abuse certain attacks, though, such as Ryu's Guillotine Throw (which I thought was kind of cool to see brought back in the 3D games as a tribute to the Arcade game). Ryu mostly fights with his fists in the arcade game, but a certain power-up allows him to use the Dragon Sword for a brief period of time, which is pretty cool since it instantly kills enemies in that game.

Oh, BTW, if anyone owns the original version of Ninja Gaiden for the XBOX, you can unlock the SNES trilogy version of the 3 NES games by collecting all 50 Golden Scarabs in the game, in which case Muramasa trades you the game's cartridge for them, and then you can go into Han's Bar and insert in the cartridge to unlock the games (yeah, that thing actually had a purpose after all ).

[Spark Of Spirit]

How about the Master System game?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I've honestly never had the oppurtunity to play that game myself, but old-school NG fans tell me that it was a descently-made game, but was fairly boring to play due to its lack of challenge (and without the challenge, the old-school NG formula's simplicity can be pretty dull).

As for a really obscure NG title, does anyone actually know that there was an NG game on the Game Gear? The game looks like shit, though. There was also an unfinished NG beat-em-up on the Sega Genesis that was never officially released, but a Beta version of it is available online somewhere.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Game Gear game is shit. It looks worse than the Master System game despite the Game Gear basically being a portable Master System.

I mean, compare:





That's just embarrassing.

[Foggle]

That fucking skeleton.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, this time I thought I'd just touch up on Ninja Gaiden 3 a little bit. Similar to Desensitized revisiting DKC3 and realizing it was better than he gave it credit for, I revisited a different version of NG3 and realized that it was much better than the crap-fest version that I played, and even the other version I played was still not the definitive version of the game, as it had many problems of its own.

Now, one thing that bugs me is that when reviewers or other people reference the NES NG games, they often reference them based on nostalgia and clearly haven't played them in a long time, or maybe not even at all (which is what I think in some cases). Now, for any U.S. NG fan who only has access to any U.S. versions of the original NG games (including myself), NG3 on the NES was a travesty. The first 2 NG games functioned mostly on memory-based difficulty, like most difficult NES games did at the time. The reason that the first 2 games got away with it was because they were fair to the players in terms of giving them unlimited continues, allowing the player to keep their progress in the game no matter how many times they died as long as they were willing to keep playing. For some reason the Japanese developers got the impression that American gamers loved a challenge more than Japan did, so they decided to make a special harder version of NG3 to be released in the U.S., and to be honest, that in and of itself would have been perfectly fine. Unfortunately, they half-assed the hell out of their job of making NG3 harder, and unfortunately what was actually quite a good game suffered a lot for it.

For starters, they took out the unlimited continues AS WELL as the password system that the Japanese version had, and limited American players to only 5 continues. In addition to that, they idiotically modified the U.S. version to have Ryu take double the normal amount of damage from enemies, to the point in which having a half-full health meter in NG3 was considered a low-health state in the American version of the game, because only a good 1 or 2 more hits could easily kill Ryu.

However, when I finally got around to playing the SNES trilogy which ported each of the 3 games, I found out that the SNES version released in the U.S. contained a port of the original Japanese version of NG3. Now while the SNES games had some problems in terms of glitches and even lag (yeah, its pretty sad when an SNES game actually lags from too much activity happening on-screen at once....I don't know how the developers managed to miss that), the SNES version of NG3 was still infinitely superior to the American NES version. When I played this version, looking at the gameplay from a fair standpoint, NG3 honestly has the workings of what could be considered the best of the NES NG trilogy if it didn't have those technical issues bogging it down as well.

I mean, think about it, here are what it had going for it that the first 2 games didn't:

-Ryu can now hang from ledges and can scale up a ledge without having to use a complicated jump mechanic to do it
-Ryu doesn't fall back nearly as much when hit by an enemy, and doesn't get knocked back into the nearest groundless area automatically
-You can now see the power-ups in containers, so you don't need to have to stupidly memorize what each container has in the game so that you don't lose a special ability that you like to have on you by accidentally picking up another one
-The level design is honestly better with more variety to it, including new sections in which Ryu scales up rather than simply going from left to right or vice-versa
-Ryu can now upgrade his Ki slot so that you can hold more ammo for whatever special ability or item that he has
-Ryu's sword extension special ability add-on is one of the most useful new additions to the game, and it doesn't even use up any sort of ammunition
-The bosses were more fun with less bull-shit tactics, but some were also kind of dull for being far too easy

Overall, the original game was clearly much easier than the first 2 the way it was originally intended to be played, but was also more fun at the parts that were done perfectly right because it relies much less on memorization-based difficulty and much more on just fun gameplay mechanics, with a perfect combination of both platforming and action. The only real negatives that I could sum up for the version that I played aside from its glitches and that one instance of lag would be:

-Weaker music than the first 2 games (but it still had a great track in its own right, and even it has some great stand-out themes that could be as good as the best ones from any other NG game)
-Ryu's jump mechanic was stupidly changed, specifically in terms of its physics and Ryu now floated down slowly, but that was more of a matter of getting used to as it didn't make the game cheap in any sort of way, though it did make the game feel like it played a bit slower in comparison to the first 2, and part of the charm of the NG games are their intense speed and pacing relative to other action games
-The clone power-up was removed (I loved that power-up and saw absolutely no justifiable reason to remove it in the 3rd installment of the game)

Other people would complain about the story being weaker than the first 2 games because it was "too ridiculous," but I find it laughable that anyone finds a different in quality between the 3 NES games in terms of story-line, because all 3 had ridiculous story-lines that made no sense. I fail to see how NG3 stood out at all from the first 2 games in this regard. My only guess is that most people remember the games when playing them at young ages, and at the time NG1 and 2 were among the only few games with cut-scenes, to it was a cool thing for that particular period of time relative to other games. People probably overlooked how nonsensical the stories were and only remember them through nostalgia, but by the time the 3rd game came people were a little older and cut-scenes were now a more common thing in games with some games having done it much better than NG games by that point in time, so people could finally see that the story aspect of NG wasn't that great, but only applied that knowledge to the 3rd game's story and let those of the first 2 slide purely based on nostalgia. Because, honestly, other than that you can't honestly tell me anything to really differentiate the story from one NES NG game as being more or less poorly written than any of the others.

So, overall, I found the version that was closer to the originally intended version of NG3 to be a worthy entry into the series, and a good end to the original trilogy in terms of gameplay. It really makes me interested in wanting to seek out the original Japanese version of the game someday and play that one, with the least amount of technical problems. It could end up being my favorite NG game in that case.

Overall, while I have to admit I used to mindlessly generalize the game as being terrible, I now see it as having the unfortunate fate of having a terrible U.S. release. The original version of the game truly is a fun experience, though, and despite being easier is just as much fun as the first 2 games for the right reasons.

Next time I get a chance to post, I'll probably talk about why I love the first 3D game, and why I consider the 3D NG games in general to be better games than the NES games, but subjectively and objectively speaking.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Oh yeah, I also forgot to mention the fact that NG3 has no birds to deal with. That alone makes it worth playing.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Someone needs to hack 1 and remove the birds and fix the checkpoints. Then I would really have a hard time choosing between which game to play.