NES Games I Beat #38: Ninja Gaiden

    It’s a reality. After a straight week of staying up into the wee hours of the morning I’ve beaten the imfamously hard Ninja Gaiden, the critically acclaimed sidescrolling ninja action game from March 1989 by Tecmo. This game is impressive for its era and was a pioneer in the area of using some of the very first animated cut scenes in video games. In this regard it popularized the deeper stories games today strive for. The graphics are also really appealing and it has a blood pumping soundtrack which adds to the hot, fast paced game play to create the ultimate adrenaline charged ninja side scroller of the 8 Bit era.
    In terms of gameplay, this game has a very slick feeling of running. The best way to describe it is imagine the feel of Castlevania, memorization being key to beating the levels, and speed it up to ninja speed. The sword that is your basic attack has a speedier hit than Castlevania but still has a limit of sorts to a few slashes in a pattern even when you mash it fast to limit from being overpowered. The sub weapons, a basic throwing star, a bigger star that acts like a boomerang, and an upward fireball attack can all be found in candles which you hit like in Castlevania. You can also gain ammo in candles or even a fourth powerup, a spinning move that allows for an invincible jump that can slice through enemies. Very rarely there are also time stoppers in candles which are used for strategic level design to bypass a barrage of enemies. The stages are all set up nicely with a lot of bullshit pits and enemy placement but at the same time cool settings .
    The enemies are a mixed bag and are actually one of the more frusturating features in the game. While set in a set place, it can sort of be random to where they appear which can lead to some very cheap deaths especially since if they’re anywhere near the edge of the screen, they respawn infinitely. This coupled with the knockback you receive and you get a brutally harder game. The enemies are everywhere and it’s quite impressive how the NES only rarely lagged with all of them on screen and even projectiles sometimes. The eagles are bullshit because their pattern to ascend or descend and whip back and forth side to side which makes them a nightmare at points because the level design leaves a lot of open pits nearby for you to just die in. You have a lot of hits to your life bar though so it’s kind of balanced but only slightly so. Three lives and you go back to the beginning of the stage if you continue. This is a godsend given that most hard games are only so mostly due to limited continues. So the game is at least fair in that regard but it’s no cake walk.
    At this point I feel the need to address the difficulty. It’s a challenging game for sure but every level leading to the final boss I beat in one night so I can’t call it impossible though a few stages are rather difficult including the tower stage and ice stage. The rest is easy with lots of memorization. Well perhaps not easy but vastly doable. However, the last three stages in Ninja Gaiden are some of the most unforgiving levels in NES history. This game was one that coined the phrase “Nintendo Hard” and it’s deserving due to those levels alone. Even with vast amounts of practice (we’re talking a week straight) it is still so easy to slip up. I’ve got those level burned into my mind permanently but I’ll still fuck up on occasion. All the bosses of the other levels prior are hard but have ways to beat them if you can manage to not screw up but if you’re lucky enough to pass to the final boss, you’ll be pummeled to a pulp no doubt. Once you inevitably lose you don’t start at 6-3 like all the other levels, you go back to 6-1 and have to replay from there.
    This means you have to run through these levels every time you want a single shot at the final bosses and that’s right I said “bosses”. There are three. The first is easy enough once you get his pattern down and they even have the courtesy to refill your life but they don’t when you enter normally after dying. This means you really have to be good at the gauntlet that is the room before the boss room because you have to make it through everything unscathed. In a week of playing I believe I only ever accomplished this once. Anyway, the second boss is entirely the hardest part of the game. He hangs from the ceiling and moves back and forth shooting down fireballs that take a lot of health away and touching him hits you for three pegs. My method was the fireball power as it’s very effective due to its wide range and upward arc. Problem is it will run out eventually. If you played stages 2 and 3 perfectly and racked up over 70 ammo it would be a pretty easy fight but that’s next to impossible and the most I went in with is about 50 since your ammo is halved every time you die. After that, you have to get the timing of his fireballs down and jump onto the wall, jumping off at exactly the right moment before he’s too close and hitting a target of a single eye that is very small. This is the most brutal part of the game for sure and it makes the last few stages feel like it’s own game but once you do it man, oh is it satisfying.
    The final boss is a large demon that is guarded by two defenses: a head and a tail. My strategy here is to slash at the head and knock the tail out with a throwing boomerang star because it’s very effective in eliminating it fast. He spits a ton of fireballs that are much larger out of the top of his body sort of like a volcano and this is what you have to watch out for. At full health you have just 5 hits and let me tell you they go quick since the fireballs are everywhere and hard to dodge. If you manage to get o his heart, simply slashing it will do but the best method involves getting a few hits and backing out to avoid the fireballs. If you don’t, you’re done for guaranteed. It took me a few nights to conquer him but once I did, it was satisfaction beyond words. I was damn ecstatic to get this stress filled monkey off my back.
     You have to understand there is no password system, meaning if my NES got bumped or overheated it was all the way from the start again so I would live each day with an itch, wondering if such a fickle system would be fine when I got back. Every time it was and I really have to give props to my little toaster NES because it handled being on for a week straight and didn’t even get hot. Systems were built pretty sturdy back then. She’s held out through weeks of Castlevania 1 as well so I’m very proud it made it through without so much as a hiccup. So yeah, a complaint: have a damn password system or save functionality. I can forgive it because it’s NES.
    So overall where do I stand with this one? With the knockback, bullshit enemies, hard as shit bosses sprinkled with some unrelenting stages, a final set of stages where you go all the way back with some of the most ridiculous end bosses, and no save functionality you’d think this would bring down the game quite a bit. But through all the grinding for true skill in these levels, the cool world and setting, the intense cut scenes, the great story (for NES standards), the fast paced, adrenaline charged game play, the rocking powerups, the solid music, and the challenging but rewarding and fun style really makes this game stand out. The bottom line is this game is pretty difficult. Now if you like a challenge then great but I feel the average player might be turned off by this. Even though I nearly lost my mind with stress completing it, I really like this game a lot. It stands tall with Castlevania and Zelda II as hard games that still kick ass. It’s an NES classic for a reason and even though it was hard enough to give me Nintendo Thumb for a few days, I think this game is fantastic. The sense of speed and mastery once you’ve memorized a level to every last detail is a rewarding sort of game play and it feels super satisfying when you do it all perfectly and it’s very tense when you don’t. Ninja Gaiden gets an 8.2/10. It’s a good game but hard as fuck near the end. Glad to have it behind me finally.