NES #29: Ninja Gaiden

Developer: Tecmo

Publisher: Tecmo

Release Date: 12-9-88

 Ninja Gaiden is truly a landmark game. It is the game that introduced gamers of my generation to integrated storytelling. It was not the first game to tell a story of course. Games had at least had a token storyline for almost as long as games had existed. However, there had never been a console game to tell a story quite the way Ninja Gaiden did. Complex stories were mostly confined to more complicated genres that didn’t appeal to kids as much like RPGs and adventure games. Even more complicated NES games like The Legend of Zelda kept most of the lore in the instruction manual and did very little storytelling in the game itself. Ninja Gaiden is an action game. At the time action games had very little story at all. You might get a text heavy intro if you were lucky. Ninja Gaiden sneaks great comic-esque cutscenes in between every chapter. In 1989 I had never seen anything like it. Who can forget the classic opening featuring two dueling ninjas? Ninja Gaiden sets itself up right away as something more grown up than the typical NES game. I was instantly hooked. Of course Ninja Gaiden also illustrates the danger of narrative gaming, especially in the early days. If you were a typical kid you might’ve been wowed by the intro, but never had the chance to find out how it all ended.  

 

Ninja Gaiden is difficult. I feel that the internet exaggerates the difficulty of many old games, but Ninja Gaiden is the real deal. I’ve been playing this game for thirty years and have it just about memorized, but I still have trouble as the game rolls along. I did legitimately beat this one many years ago, but I’ve never been able to repeat that achievement. Like so many NES games the difficulty comes both from design and flawed execution. The developers loved putting enemies in weird places like tiny unavoidable ledges and high platforms where they can get you but you can’t get them. Sometimes they are almost impossible to defeat without a special weapon, so you’d better hope you have the right one and enough points saved up to use it. Everyone knows about the infamous swooping birds, but luckily they are fairly rare. Still, they are so annoying that they have been written about to death. Enemies also respawn almost instantly if you move the wrong direction. Moving backward is needed because of all the platform jumping, so expect to see plenty of respawning. Thankfully the game has unlimited continues, but it does not have a password. If you are playing on original hardware make sure you clear out you afternoon if you actually plan on finishing it. Oddly most of the bosses are fairly easy. They have very easy to memorize patterns and receive a lot of damage from your attacks. Of course this all goes out the window in the game’s final chapters. The last two bosses are brutal even if you know what you are doing. Ninja Gaiden defines Nintendo Hard.

 Luckily the levels are fun to play through in spite of the difficulty. It has that wonderful NES mix of unique level designs with bizarre enemies. I get fighting other ninjas, but why are there boxers and witches scattered about? And why do they want to kill me?  I love old games for their bold unreality. You can have strange ruins filled with physically impossible platforms and out-of-place enemies who patrol the same five inch ledge for infinity without anything feeling like it doesn’t belong. It also has great visuals and music. Every different level is distinct and they move in different directions. It’s not just left to right, so you never know what the next level is going to be like. The music is some of the most iconic on the system, and the developers did a great job of making sure the songs fit the mood. I can tell this game was made with great care.

So Ninja Gaiden is a fun game to play even if you don’t plan on finishing it. It’s great for that nostalgia fix. However, it does illustrate the difficulty of telling a story while making a fun, engaging game. It’s a debate that rages on to this day. In 2023 of course you can go on Youtube and watch the ending to almost any game you want. That was not the case in 1990. You might get some screenshots in a magazine, but if you weren’t good enough than you’d never know what happened. This became especially troubling when Ninja Gaiden II came out and continued the story. If you never finished the first game should you even play the second one? The third game is much rarer, so I guess not as many people made it through the gauntlet and saw the story wrapped up. I know I haven’t. I should work on that.

 

Ninja Gaiden is still a personal favorite of mine, so like most of the classic NES games it is going up high on my list. I know I”m already a bit Nintendo heavy, but NInja Gaiden is going in at #10 knocking out 8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog. My goal at this point is to find 101 good NES games, and this gets me one step closer.

 

NES quality percentage: 15/29 or 51.72%