Ninja Gaiden (Arcade)

In the 1980s, being able to port an arcade game faithfully to a home console was a difficult affair but impressive when it went off well. Arcade machines could include the hardware to pull off more impressive visual and technical feats, but sometimes it was wiser to not even try and provide the same experience and instead provide something similar in spirit. Such was the case with Ninja Gaiden, the NES platformer that’s become a well-known part of the system’s library sharing a name with the arcade original but playing quite differently. In this case, making it so different was definitely the right choice, because if the arcade version of Ninja Gaiden had been faithfully adapted, it’s possible it would just end up some mostly forgotten beat ’em up instead of the start of a famous series.

 

Also known as Shadow Warriors in Europe, the first game in the Ninja Gaiden series makes pretty much no attempt to tell a story, its opening cutscene focused more on an impressive looking scene of a ninja in far too tight of a bodysuit pulling off a successful assassination. To learn the truth of what happens in this game involves consulting outside materials, this adventure supposedly about a ninja who heads to the United States to deal with a very unusual situation. Bladedamus, a descendant of the doomsday oracle Nostradamus, seeks to help the prophecies about the end times come to be. Establishing a cult and filling his rank with the prisoners he helps escape Alcatraz, Bladedamus surprisingly manages to kidnap the president and get a hold of missile launch codes. A lone ninja having to take down such a powerful cult leader is quite a task, even if you do play with another person who gets to control a red ninja, but despite the ninjas taking a trip across various places in America to take Bladedamus down, it seems he mostly just has street toughs on his side to enforce his regime.

The ninjas in this beat-’em-up will go up against some fairly large foes, be it burly men who carry logs around like they were baseball bats, sumo wrestlers, or a multitude of men who wear hockey masks or are ninjas themselves. Unfortunately, your attack options are remarkably basic. You have a pretty plain combo of kicks and strikes to dish out regular damage, it important you’re lined up just right to land your blows since this old brawler isn’t too lenient in how close you need to be on the titled battle plane to hit your opponent. In a helpful touch, if you have opponents on both sides, you can quickly swap between hitting them to keep them from striking you, but if you do get crowded it is fairly likely a foe can push through your simple stilted combo to land a hit.

 

Thankfully, you do have a few other attacks in your repertoire, although they are more conditional. The decapitation attack does not do what its extreme name promises, but it is perhaps your best attack option, the player able to leap over a foe and grab them by the head to flip them off and away. This does need to be lined up properly, but reasonably so, the decapitation attack not just powerful, but it will move your enemy away, momentarily disable them as they need to recover, and if you hurl them towards objects like signs or crates they’ll break them open, potentially revealing helpful items like health, extra lives, or even a sword within. The sword will slash out in front of you in single swift strikes and it can only be used ten times before it disappears, but it is at least strong despite being so ephemeral and despite its rarity it will still be nice to have a tool to quickly harm foes while you have it. The decapitation attack is still the star though, able to affect most bosses even and not becoming too powerful because you can’t do it too rapidly. It is well balanced for what it is, but other things are not, the standard fighting feeling sloppy and enemies usually feel like annoying busywork when you have to fight them with your fists and feet. At least you have one more trick, your ninja able to hang from bars and kick forward and back, most enemies obliviously approaching so having a bar can spare you some of the tedious standard fighting if you make good use of it.

This shallow fighting system is unfortunately the main focus of Ninja Gaiden and even when you’re in a boss encounter it’s mostly just going to be more of the same from the enemies. An agile trio of goons with bladed fingers do make for a tough boss as they can dodge you better than most foes and Bladedamus himself covers a great deal of the battle space with his swords and fire breath, but the action rarely finds its footing if you’re not using the decapitation attack or some temporary trick. The backgrounds can hold your attention though, the trip through the U.S.A. brought to life with some detailed backdrops like Las Vegas with a great casino theming and giant neon signs. The Grand Canyon almost feels present to give the artists a break with its plainer look, but cities will have plenty of elaborate signs and street art as well as things that have a more material effect on the action. There are a few points your ninja’s agility is necessary to cross bars, leap over traffic, or oddly enough leap over water where men with eight-pack abdominals leap out to try and snag you, but your movement isn’t too clean either, especially if there’s a wall nearby where it can be easy to accidentally do a backflip off one when just trying to move into position. You can at least hop onto and down from elevated ground to sometimes manage the packs of enemies, but usually movement tests feel like they’re there to make you slip up trying to get the jumps under control and lose a life.

 

Ninja Gaiden is an arcade game where the owner can set how many lives and how much hits you can take in each life per quarter, but the default encourages three of each. Losing them all does lead to a fairly brutal looking continue screen where the ninja is about to have his midsection carved open by a spinning saw as weird demonic creatures look on, but even if you don’t have the quarters to keep going you’ll be spared seeing the gory results and instead see a flash of red. Like much of the game, a good deal of care was put into the look of the continue screen over trying to refine the actual fighting elsewhere, but when the backgrounds are the best thing in the game it’s hard to get fussed since otherwise this experience would be far less interesting. It ends up a bit of a shame the game is only 6 levels long, because while the action isn’t pulling its weight, seeing where you are going next on your national ninja tour invites more curiosity than seeing you’ll often be refighting not just the same foes often but most of the bosses make repeat appearances too.

THE VERDICT: The original Ninja Gaiden from the arcade really impresses with the care put into the detailed backdrops that make up your battles across the U.S.A., but the actual fighting is a sorrier sight. Your ninja’s attacks lack impact and chain together into a combo that feels unsatisfying, and while enemies can sometimes bring new tools to a fight, it feels like you’re lacking interesting tricks to make the fighting even enjoyable. Thankfully, the decapitation attack and attacks while hanging can give you a sense of power while being conditional so they don’t rob the game of all its difficulty, although that might have been preferable over this game’s already repetitive regular combat.

 

And so, I give Ninja Gaiden for arcade machines…

A BAD rating. If the decapitation attack did not exist, this game would no doubt be a rating lower. Your regular string of punches and kicks feels surprisingly plain and is a poor fit for dealing with the crowds that surround you even with that bit of leniency in letting you swap between who you’re striking. This is no doubt partly because of the game expecting you to be right in front of the foe you’re facing, the tilted battle plane giving you freer movement but making it easier to slip up when trying to line up your strikes, leaving you vulnerable in a game where you can’t afford to take much punishment. The decapitation attack though is satisfying throughout, the flip attack requiring some timing and work to set up but not overcomplicated. It can be whipped out regularly but it is not the best choice in every situation, and perhaps more techniques like that would have given you a worthy repertoire for holding your own. The bar attack is another example of a good option that has smart limits, but when limits force you back to a form of play that almost feels ineffective, it ends up hard to enjoy the action since you’re often trying to find ways around its standard format. The background artists deserve an incredible amount of praise though for giving the game some life and character, even one run through the game not enough to appreciate all the detailed images that go beyond just giving you a sense of where in the United States our ninja hero finds himself. If only the fighting happening in front of it was enjoyable enough to make you want to return and see it all again.

 

In Ninja Gaiden’s defense, this arcade beat-’em-up came out a year too soon to learn important lessons from brawlers like Final Fight and Golden Axe that would come out the following year, still operating on some of the flawed fighting systems common in games like Double Dragon and Renegade. That doesn’t make the game better just because it didn’t have the knowledge on how to improve the action, and some things like the underwhelming basic combo shouldn’t have been present regardless. However, it is very fortunate that Tecmo knew it wouldn’t be able to bring Ninja Gaiden to home consoles and was already developing a different game by the same name before this arcade title released. This entry will always end up feeling like the weird start of the Ninja Gaiden series since it plays quite differently from the better known platformers, but without those other games that went their own way, this game would at best be remembered for its impressive look and providing co-op play when the concept was still not too common. We can say now it is a rough beat-’em-up knowing there are better games ahead, but Tecmo’s smartest decision was not putting all their eggs in this sloppy brawler basket.