Ninja Gaiden Black (Xbox)
The original Ninja Gaiden for NES became famous for its incredibly difficult 2D platforming gameplay, but admittedly, some of that difficulty came from designs features that feel unfair. However, when it came time to bring the Ninja Gaiden series into 3D, leaving behind that series legacy of high difficulty would feel inappropriate. Team Ninja’s design for the new Ninja Gaiden’s action-adventure gameplay did not disappoint though, managing to expertly make the game’s difficulty heavily focused on skill to suit more modern sensibilities, and with Ninja Gaiden Black, they managed to further fine tune 2004’s Ninja Gaiden into a satisfying and challenging action title.
Although Ninja Gaiden Black does put up a good fight, the early learning curve can be a bit daunting going in. It might be tempting to select the new “Ninja Dog” easy mode added as part of the game’s rerelease, but the early stages of the game are definitely built to get you accustomed to a fighting style that will become more fluid and natural once you’ve learned how to best use it. In Ninja Gaiden Black, even regular enemies are positioned to be legitimate threats, able to take huge chunks out of your health bar if they make contact with their strikes and knowing how to dodge and guard well enough to resist mindless hacking and slashing. Naturally, the player is more than equipped to deal with their foes, it’s a just a matter of figuring out how to best control the game’s main character, Ryu Hayabusa. A ninja gifted with many weapons and able to use special magical ninja arts, Ryu’s main attacks are executed through combos that can require timing your button presses correctly, executing attacks in a certain order, or pressing certain directions while executing them. Getting a feel for which skills are best for approaching foes safely, chaining together damage, or overcoming unique enemy types like flying foes or ones that won’t flinch when attacked is necessary to getting the most of your attack methods.
While you can pretty much play the whole of Ninja Gaiden Black with just your default sword, Ryu can also get new weapons along the way that have situational usefulness as well as their own sets of attacks, weapons like a staff having a reach advantage and the nunchaku giving you rapid attacks good for keeping swarms at bay. Weapons can be gradually upgraded to get new attack combos and become stronger by trading in Essences at weapon shops. While you’ll find many weapons and abilities just through the course of play, shops also offer a place to buy things like equipment to bolster your stats, special ninja arts, and ammo refills for your secondary powers. Besides his main weapon, Ryu can also mix in two other forms of attack to gain an edge in these difficult battles. The more situational one is certainly his Ninja Arts where you can use a magical attack that pulls on elements like ice and fire for safe and strong attacks that can only be used if you have a limited Essence meter filled up. Secondary weapons are a bit more flexible, Ryu able to them and use them freely in battle so long as he has ammo for them. These can include things like a bow with different arrow types for fighting foes from range, shurikens that are weak but infinite, and exploding kunais that can blast a foe back if they are hit by one. The player certainly has no shortage of attack options if they feel they need to try something different, and the defensive options aren’t lacking either. Ryu is quick, able to jump high, and has an effective guard and dodge to help him handle foes whether they be large, fast, or working together in great numbers.
As to why Ryu is fighting at all, the plot of Ninja Gaiden Black begins with Hayabusa village being attacked and one of the two Dragon blades the family protects being stolen. While Ryu retains his Dragon Sword, a faceless samurai named Doku has taken the Dark Dragon Blade, a fiendish weapon that grows stronger through death. Ryu must pursue Doku to try and stop it from growing too powerful, but while the early chapters of the game seem to be setting the game in a typical historical Japanese setting with old villages, ninjas, and samurai, he then takes off aboard a zeppelin to chase down Doku, only for that zeppelin to be attacked by gun-wielding SWAT-like foes and a giant man with a lightning cannon. From there, it’s pretty clear that Ninja Gaiden Black is just throwing in whatever ideas it feels would be awesome to fight against, Ryu just as likely to be fighting against horrible demons and fellow ninjas as he is military forces and their tanks and helicopters. The story doesn’t deviate from its course despite its willingness to throw in whatever it please, but the quest for the dark blade is complicated by Fiends, monstrous forms humans can take because of ancient taint in many people’s blood. Ryu’s mostly solitary journey is also interrupted by help from fellow ninja Ayane who seems an appropriate companion, but the leather-clad fiend hunter Rachel with her giant axe almost seems like she could be from a different game than the main character’s. Were it trying for any cohesiveness this could be a problem, but Ninja Gaiden Black aims to throw interesting areas and enemies at you more than anything, meaning it plays into its strengths rather than getting caught up on trying to make its world totally agree with itself.
While much of Ninja Gaiden Black does connect back to a main city that is fairly large, chapters tend to branch out from this central hub area into new locations, Ryu finding himself at different points swimming through city channels, exploring the sewers, and even finding himself in subterranean ice caves and volcanic tunnels. In one chapter you may be in a military base only to soon find yourself exploring mystical temples, and while these places do come with their own unique enemy types, they also come with some platforming and navigation challenges. Ryu’s movement seems to favor fighting first, but when it comes to platforming, there’s a bit of a learning curve as well. While it never gets quite as fluid and natural as the fighting does through continued practice, the platforming’s rough controls aren’t as necessary to succeed. The game doesn’t punish you too much for failing a wall run or wall jump, most of the jumps and climbing in the game easy enough to execute once you have a feel for the speed of movement and requirements to execute certain navigational techniques. Optional items might ask for you to be quite capable to grab them, but during the main course of the story, your movement does its job during navigation and serves the combat excellently. The game does include some puzzles and progression gates where you need to find keys or other items with similar purposes, meaning that environmental exploration still has more to it than just entering rooms to fight foes, so the deemphasized platforming doesn’t just make Ninja Gaiden Black a sequence of battles either, giving you the room to breath between some of the tougher stuff.
As you progress with Ninja Gaiden Black, the regular enemies grow in strength along with your own increases in power, new foes swapping in to replace the old ones to put up better fights. Even when you’re up against enemies with powerful attacks or ones who fire at you from afar, you are equipped to deal with them, although avoiding damage might not always be easy. Luckily, the game isn’t stingy when it comes to ways to heal while also not giving them out so often that things become too easy. Health refilling items are often found in treasure chests, enemies have small chances of dropping healing Essences, and you can constantly increase your health total over the course of the game by finding the right items. Save points are placed well to achieve the balance the game is going for as well, the player able to persist through tougher battles if they’re well-stocked and able to hop back in well enough if they fail, but things are still spaced enough and just scarce enough that there’s still pressure to choosing to use a healing item or pushing on after spending a while without saving. While regular enemies do put up a good fight, the bosses demand much more prowess and finesse to defeat, many of them having devastating attacks to catch you if you’re not moving right and often having only a few weak points or moments of vulnerability. Learning how the boss moves and when it’s safe to attack is key to defeating them, and while Ninja Gaiden Black does like to whip out its worm boss design a little too much and some fights like the tank aren’t too involved comparatively, many of your battles will be intense standoffs where you must respect your enemy. Waiting for your chance to strike, outmaneuvering them, or finding tricks to break through their defenses makes the boss battles in Ninja Gaiden Black thoughtful and skill-focused, and between all the demons, monsters, fellow warriors, and strange creatures, the game continues to throw new trials to overcome that are satisfying to solve.
Once you’ve completed the story of Ninja Gaiden Black, if you really want to push your developed expertise with the fighting style to its limits, there’s also a robust Mission Mode to complete afterwards that is packed with new enemy types and unique bosses. Despite reusing locations from the main game, these battles put together foes in new and challenging arrangements, change the ways you can approach them weaponwise, and mix in new ideas to keep things interesting for a player eager to test their skill after overcoming a difficult but rewarding story mode. There’s certainly not a lack of things to do even in the main game, with Ninja Gaiden Black’s approach of throwing whatever interesting ideas it has into the fray ensuring that the excellent combat continues to be fed with new situations as you push deeper and deeper into a game that hits a difficulty balancing sweetspot for those interested in a game that really pushes them to master its play.
THE VERDICT: Ninja Gaiden Black masterfully captures what can make a game incredibly difficult but still incredibly satisfying to overcome. With a deep combat system with many options backed up by well distributed healing and save systems that aren’t overly kind, Ninja Gaiden Black gives you the tools and means to face foes that require careful approaches and intelligent attacking to overcome while also allowing even regular enemies to serve as worthy adversaries. The platforming isn’t perfect, but the movement controls fill the role required of them and allow the main focus of fighting take center stage with its incredible bosses that come in a variety of different forms with many different styles of battle, all without sacrificing some moments of exploration that break up the intense and involved combat. Challenging but fair, winning in Ninja Gaiden Black truly feels like a victory, and mastery of the battle system is both rewarded in game and satisfying to engage with in general.
And so, I give Ninja Gaiden Black for Xbox…
A FANTASTIC rating. While the controls and powerful foes can seem intimidating at the start, once things begin to click and the true capabilities of Ryu become clear, Ninja Gaiden Black really comes together. The legendary movement and skill of the ninja are yours to use to overcome gargantuan monsters and gifted warriors, battles being hard fought without ever pushing into the realm of unfair frustration. You may certainly find a foe that takes some time to figure out or a fight might have some trickery to overcome, but Ninja Gaiden Black’s battles all push you to be better, and seeing the results of your improvement makes the following battles even more satisfying. Ninja Gaiden Black knows when to pull back and challenge you with small puzzles and when to give you ways to heal up or increase your strength, avoiding player fatigue and making the big battles the proper highlights they’re designed to be. By feeling free to throw whatever it pleased into the mix as well, Ninja Gaiden Black continues to change around its world and enemies so that there’s always something new and unusual waiting up ahead to learn and overcome.
Ninja Gaiden Black is definitely built for the kind of player willing to invest the time into learning its mechanics and becoming skilled at their quick and intelligent application, and it nails making that a rewarding experience as well. Tough battles push the player to be better, refusing to give up ground unless you’re going to put in the effort needed to take down foes who aren’t holding back. Ninja Gaiden Black honed its concept for a skill-based action game to a fine point, its small rough edges unable to dull its blade. If you can meet this game on its level and can keep up with it, Ninja Gaiden Black will continue to challenge you with new battles that combine the relief of completing a difficult task with the satisfaction of knowing you did so through your own abilities.