Next up on my NES Classic odyssey was a journey through the Tecmo classic, Ninja Gaiden. I'd played this game on cartridge before, but it was just too hard and long for me to clear on cart, so I decided to tackle it on the NES Classic so that I could save and break it up between days. Now that I've stretched my muscles at the game, I could probably beat it in one sitting now with some practice, but for the first run through, having some save states to allow me to pop in and out of the game as my schedule allowed was greatly appreciated.
The game tells the story of the player controlled protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa, who goes on a quest of revenge following the death of his father (his name is Ken, for a nice combo of Ryu and Ken-I don't know if this is coincidence, homage, or theft, but Street Fighter was released 2 years earlier). On his way to vengeance, Ryu discovers a sinister plot of typical 80s anime heft and delivery, and his quest of revenge broadens to save the world!
Ninja Gaiden is, to put it politely, a polished clone of Castlevania. The UI is the same. The controls are the same. The basic structure of the game is the same. You get powerups not from killing enemies, but by killing lanterns on the wall. And yet, despite the overwhelming similarities between the two games, Ninja Gaiden definitely has done enough to differentiate the two games to warrant having a separate series.
First, Ninja Gaiden was certainly part of the ninja zeitgeist of the late 80s and early 90s, with Ninja Turtles, Ninja Scroll, Shinobi, and 3 Ninjas (I'm definitely forgetting some). Ninjas were just cool, and far more cool at the time than vampire killers/horror themes, although they would get their own zeitgeist later.
Second, the actual control of Ryu is actually far more responsive and enjoyable than that of Simon in Castlevania. Ryu can move throughout his jump, flips around delightfully, moves more quickly, and even has an additional power (see below).
Third, Ryu has the power to cling to walls, enabling him to flip back and forth on the walls to give you some fun ninja style interaction. Taken as a whole, the controls are just delightful, and really make you feel like a ninja as you're flipping, wall jumping, and slashing your way through the game.
Fourth, and finally, the game gives you its most lauded feature, the cutscene! These are, frankly, jaw dropping for the era. There's not a ton of animation, but for the NES, this was as detailed as story conveyance had ever been in an interactive format. There had been several RPGs with in-depth stories conveyed through text, but actually animating them was truly a landmark achievement, and it works well, even today. The plot it communicates is also pretty good, with plenty of twists, turns, and character development to draw your into the world of Ninja Gaiden in a way other games of the era really couldn't match.
The music for the game is pounding and excellent, with a bunch of really memorable tunes to it.
The length of the game is very good, and with the amount of repetition you'll need to do, a kid in 1989 would have definitely gotten some good bang for his buck. There are 6 worlds with several stages in each, with a boss at the conclusion of each.
Despite all of the brilliance, there are some things about this game that just flat out suck. The boss fights are beyond stupid, and if you like them, I think you're stupid, too. Several are just identical to earlier bosses, and most just feature you running up and slashing the boss until he dies.
There's hard, there's Nintendo hard, and there's Ninja Gaiden. This one plays a lot more like the truly unfair games on the NES, like Silver Surfer or Battletoads, that were designed with the old arcade mindset of getting kids to pump quarters into the machine, rather than with the Super Mario Bros. mindset of teaching mechanics and gradually sloping difficulty until you are naturally prepared to meet the more challenging aspects of the game. I don't necessarily have a problem with repetition as a teaching tool, having had to grind out beating that stupid Yellow Devil for a long time in Mega Man, but Ninja Gaiden's difficulty is so seemingly random that it makes it for which to prepare. You'll wait out a bird flying at you, jump over him, jump over the gap, and find that the game simply spawned another bird right in front of you in the middle of your jump! Other times you'll jump over enemies and no new ones will spawn, with no apparent logic as to why. There are birds, and you'll hate them! You'll find enemies on tiny postage stamps of platforms, and you'll need to leap at him with precision, not so high that you can't reach out with your sword, and not so low that you can't both kill him and land on the platform. If you get a game over on a level, you'll return to the beginning of that level, but if you die on a boss, you go all the way back to the beginning of the world! In World 6, a particularly savage place, this will absolutely crush your morale beyond all reason. It took me probably 45 minutes each time to get through World 6-2, meaning that dying against the end boss (which I did several times) meant an extra hour of grinding through things that I already beat once.
There are plenty of dumb moments like this in my favorite of the holy trinity of NES third party series, Mega Man, but they are far fewer and far less frustrating than here. And compared to the gold standard of difficulty curving in Super Mario Bros., this game is downright regressive.
Despite all of that, I still enjoyed this game quite a bit. It definitely broke a lot of new ground, and created a more enjoyable experience for me than Castlevania, despite not being quite as innovative due to its rampant theft of so much of the Castlevania formula. I'd definitely recommend any of the Mega Mans from 2-6 as a pure gaming experience, but there is definitely something about this game that helps it to stand out from the crowd and presents a really fun time to the player. I'll give it an 8.8/10.
Up next is a quick jaunt through another game on the NES Classic, teased below.
-TRO
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