i am free
Christ, what a tough bitch.
Ninja Gaiden (NES) made me realize how much I really love any game involving ninjas. It's amazing how the entire human race knows ninjas are about
speed, as is reflected in the video game tributes to these mystical warriors. People ridicule Sonic for being a simple matter of holding down forwards to win, but that's only the case if you have honed your reflexes to ninja-like levels, as it is with Ninja Gaiden. And it really makes you feel like a ninja... but only if you learn how to become a
master ninja first.
It's like someone played Castlevania, looked back on how much he enjoyed hitting candles while mid-air without killing momentum, and made a game entirely around that feeling. Standard standing slashes are quick and briefly freeze you in place, but you can also immediately slash after jumping to kill the poor bastard in front of you without missing a beat. Relentless push-forward aggression guarantees a higher chance of survival here than tip-toeing forwards like some kind of ninny stealth game character. Enemies will always spawn if you move the screen edge over a certain point, because you have no business walking backwards, nor can you always take out an enemy and be done with it forever. Sometimes an enemy will spawn from a certain point over and over if you keep killing it and the screen is at the right position, forcing you avoid it entirely or take it out while moving. There are even special spawn points which are only triggered if you move backwards to rub it in even more.
The game is lethally high-precision, if you stray too far from your personal route you'll land in Trouble Land as you're trying to prevent some tricky spawns from overwhelming you, though that's what makes improvisation all the more exciting. It's incredibly challenging for newcomers, but once you figure out some strategies you can pull through. Each enemy type is anal in its own way, especially the RNG-reliant hammer brothers and the
fucking birds. That said, I'd be lying if I said the game was completely fair, which is not the case with some of the bats whose spawn point is placed right in the middle of the jumping trajectory between platforms of the average unaware player. Certain spawn points feel like they're just rubbing it in if you even dare to take a single step backwards.
There's the 'infamous' third screen of 6-2, but I figured out a surefire path which involves slashing the incoming bat from the first platform, jumping to the second one, jumping again over the incoming bird and football player, slowly inching to the right to get the hammer bro to despawn, jump forwards and then immediately duck on the end of the second platform to get the next bird to fly over my head, and then jump to the third and fourth while slashing the football player in mid-air. You could also use spinblade, though I find this way safer.
Sometimes it feels like the game expects you to exploit spawn points which feels rather meta and out of place, yet at the same time inevitable given that you're at a massive disadvantage if you don't. It rubs me the wrong way because you don't get the feeling the game is designed around exploiting spawns to begin with, but everyone who keeps playing the game does once they stop letting the spawns exploit them.
All of the subweapons manage to be useful in some way. The baby shuriken can hit targets from long distances with a cheaper ninpou cost, the boomerang shuriken can be used to dice everything in front and from your back if you know how to use it, the flame jutsu is excellent for turning birds and the ST3 boss into cooked meat, and the spinblade makes jumping to platforms with enemies on them much easier at the cost of sucking up your ninpou like mad.
The spinblade also practically insta-kills bosses since it deals damage every frame, which is why they're intentionally never placed near boss rooms. Even so, maintaining enough ninpou and not accidentally picking up other weapons is enough of a challenge to balance out the spinblade's ridiculous damage output, as most of the bosses aren't that hard to begin with if you know the right strategy. If you want to use the regular slash while in mid-air with the spinblade equipped, you need to press Down+B in order to slash cancel, though doing so cancels out horizontal momentum and is rather tricky to input.
Most of the bosses here aren't really worth talking about aside from Jaquio, who I brutally loathe but also appreciate at the same time as one of the best bosses on the platform. It's just a flying dorito throwing two fireballs at you, but these fireballs are semi-tracking curveballs which require some good foresight to anticipate and avoid, as you need to jump on top of the platforms to get a stab at its eye, though it hurts harder if you get rammed by him than if you get burned. Sometimes you can stand in-between them, sometimes you can sidestep them entirely. Newcomers will get brutally decimated here, but after enough tries, you develop a seventh sense just for this guy to get a
feeling for his attacks in a way which can not be put into words.
You can't really cheese Jaquio in any way unless you're going for some speedrun strat, since your spinblade will be taken away from you in this fight. It's purely about anticipation and improvisation, which is what makes it so good. Though the rebounding flames can piss the fuck right off. If they rebound once to get me from beneath because I stood at a pillar at the time, sure, but if they keep persisting afterwards while I have to deal with the other incoming fireballs it's just trolling on the developer's part.
The fight against your dad at least has some kind of emotional value to it where you're trying to stay away from him as much as possible while one of the best tracks in the game plays in the background. It's barely challenging at all once you realize the trick involved. The demon fight is alright I suppose, though the sequence for the spark trajectories seems to be fixed and is otherwise more about paying attention for any sparks which might be heading your way while you're slashing the boss without really looking at him. The detached demon's head doing inevitable damage is just stupid.
Frustratingly, dying at any of the three final bosses throws you back to 6-1 instead of at the previous scene, probably to prevent people playing with continues to have an easy win. Otherwise it's pure sadism at display because you don't even get a health refill once you do make it all the way back to the final boss. For some reason you only get one after each cutscene, regardless of whether it makes sense. I get a full health refill at the start 4-2, just because? Thanks, I guess.
Ninja Gaiden is also one of the first games to feature cutscenes which are
very well done, especially for a NES game... because you can skip them with no fuss. Just press START and you're off. A fucking NES game manages to do what many modern games can't -- skipping the fat. I'm truly amazed.
Ninja Gaiden is the kind of game which feels like total anal annihilation at first, but then you figure out some routes and solutions to some of the tricky situations you are faced with, after which it becomes a challenge of maintaining a level head and not panicking once you deviate from your route. The challenge is largely real, and I'll be damned if you don't walk away feeling like a ninja after having cleared the game.
