Far away from the city, atop the stone face of a lonely cliff, a man, clad in dark blue from head to toe sits and stares out at the temple in the valley below.

“….”, thinks Ryu Hayabusa, as he ponders his plan of attack, and how he will retrieve the statue of darkness from the evil Jaquio.

As he contemplates his next move, he notices the graceful motion of a single eagle, loping about in lazy circles, drawing closer and closer to the precipice.

“….”, thinks Ryu once more, as he readies himself for the climb down to the temple, not noticing the purposeful approach of the bird. And then, just as our hero is about to make his descent, the bird accelerates to the speed of sound, plunges into the young ninja’s chest, and bursts through the other side. Clutching the gaping wound in his chest, our hero falls to his apparent death.

Welcome to the world of Ninja Gaiden, a land of intrigue, action, and Birds. Deadly, deadly birds.

Whatever you do, don’t feed the birds….

Part the First: The Frustration

I was a mere 10 years old in 1989, when the first Ninja Gaiden game hit the NES. Even in the late 80s, the arcades in my area were all but dead, so this marked my first exposure to the series, as well as to this type of gameplay. Not only did Ninja Gaiden have standard “run, jump, hit things” gameplay, but it added an extra “ninja” dimension, one in which you could cling tenaciously to the side of any object that the programmers remembered had a vertical edge.

Therein lay the first issue with this game: While the game was entirely played in left-to-right 2D, the background and foreground objects were drawn – for some reason – in 3/4 perspective. Compound this with the fact that sometimes the bounding boxes for these objects encompassed the entire object, and sometimes only the “foreground edge” of it, and you get an incredibly infuriating platforming experience. Ryu would leap to the side of a sign, only to sink into the object until he hit the “clingable area,” or he would cling to the side immediately, making judging jumping distances nearly impossible. This was especially infuriating in the later areas such as levels 4 and 5, where you had to jump onto and climb 2.5-d cliff faces to proceed. Misjudging distance would often cause Ryu to fall to his death, which would start you all the way back at the beginning of the level. I can tell you with all certainty that while Ninja Gaiden did not teach me to swear, it helped me refine my swearing to the art form that it is today… fucking game.

Tell me what part of these walls that Ryu can cling to. I dare you.

The second major issue with the game was actually more of an overall issue with the NES-era games themselves, but seemed especially prevalent in Ninja Gaiden: “looping” enemies. Many games on the NES suffered from a severe rigidness of screen area – there was no such thing as “just off the screen.” You could proceed forward, and an enemy would appear. If you killed the enemy and doubled back to the point where the enemy would vanish off the edge of the screen and subsequently returned, the enemy would be there again. In most games, this would be an annoyance: In Ninja Gaiden, it was the mark of supreme frustration. In later levels, precision platform jumping is key, and that’s when the developers – clearly sadists of the highest order – brought out the birds. As Ryu would jump forward, these birds would rocket in from the right side of the screen and slam into Ryu, hitting him with the force of a bazooka. Seriously, it would take a fifth of your health bar away with one hit. If you managed to jump and avoid the bird, it would slam on the brakes behind you and come screaming back the other way. If you managed to kill the bird, but in doing so traveled at all back to the left, guess what? That’s right, you have to fight the bird again.

This level developed my current “ornithophobia” – fear of dudes with bazookas.

The final issue, I believe, is the one that most players will relate to, and stems from the game’s extreme difficulty. The last two levels in the game sport absolutely brutal difficulty, and without precision jumping, timing, and a heck of a lot of dumb luck during the last boss, you’re just not going to get through it. That in and of itself I’m fine with; the trouble, however, lies in the fact that if you lose all of your lives on any of the last two levels (which comprise 4 “areas”), the game punishes you for the audacity of using a “continue” by warping you back to the beginning of level 5! That’s right; it’s as if the game is saying, “Congratulations! I know you barely made it to the final boss, but surely now you know how to do it, so you won’t need all your lives next time! See you back at the bottom of the tower, sucker!” I understand that in arcade games this kind of practice was acceptable, as your amount of continues and time played usually translated to extra money, but my ten-year-old self already put down his 40 bucks for the game! Don’t punish me for wanting to continue playing it!

Part the Second: The Justification

So why keep playing this game? Why put myself through all the frustration? At the time, it was mostly driven by one word: Cutscenes. Now you’re probably thinking, “Cutscenes? Aren’t they the boring 20-minute cinemas that break up gameplay, and I can’t skip them, and they drive me absolutely insane?” Short answer: Yes, yes they are. Long answer: When this game came out, there really wasn’t such a thing as the cutscene. While Ninja Gaiden didn’t invent the concept, it was the first game I remember to use the cutscene effectively. Between each level, you would be treated to a brief (I think the longest was maybe 5 minutes long) cutscene wherein you would receive an explanation of why Ryu was, for example, going to the mountains to slice birds into tiny bits. It’s not that I necessarily needed the exposition – this was a hack ‘n’ slash action game, after all – but it was refreshing to play a game where my character actually had motivations, simple as they were. The cutscenes themselves were very movie-like, harnessing the limited abilities of the NES in ways that as yet hadn’t been seen: Characters were incredibly detailed for the time, and the scenes played out with actual intensity and direction, as opposed to just power-up sequences bookended by completely broken English. Note: This is not to say that the English wasn’t broken, it was just less broken than usual.

Deleted line: “Bitch”

The game’s challenge, while one of its biggest frustrations, was also one of its biggest merits. Ninja Gaiden was the first game that I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment for having finished, and to this day I’ve only done it once. Still, finding ways to beat earlier bosses in less than ten seconds without a hit, or trying to speedrun earlier levels is still amazing fun to this day.

Part the Third: The Evolution

So as we know, there wasn’t just one Ninja Gaiden game. The series spawned two sequels on the NES, as well as a remake on the 360. The NES sequels took the gameplay of the first game and evolved it a bit, making them much easier than the original. Gone was the need to have to wall-jump back and forth to ascend walls; on most vertical surfaces Ryu could just attach, then the player could press up and he would ascend to the top of the surface. While the developers removed the – as i called it – “jumping buzzsaw attack,” citing that it made the original too easy, they put in a “shadow” power-up which created two clones of Ryu that would mimic his every move. However, when facing bosses, if you wiggled the d-pad back and forth, they would follow Ryu’s path to the point where you were all standing in the same spot. Once that was done, you could attack the boss from that spot for 3 times the damage, making all of the boss fights a LOT easier. The cinematics remained, keeping the flair of the original, and even upping the epicness (note: not a word) of the original.

In the sequels, Ryu could gang-stomp you by himself.

On the 360, Ryu made his debut in 3D (not counting his appearances in the Dead or Alive franchise) to much critical success. I was trepidatious about this venture, as most 2-d games that I loved failed to translate well into 3-d, if at all (see: Sonic Adventure). However, the game kept much of the gameplay of the original, while losing a lot of the wall-jumping and brutal difficulty that made the originals so infuriating. This isn’t to say that the game wasn’t still incredibly difficult (especially in Ninja Gaiden Black’s highest difficulties), but unlimited continues and a save system mitigated a lot of the frustration that came with the difficulty. Ryu was, for the first time, given new weapons beside a sword to play with, as well as upgrades for those weapons to give him new combos and attacks, which kept the combat interesting. The grand scale of the cinematics was retained, as was the incredibly hollywood-esque “posturing” dialog. All in all, Ryu’s jump to the third dimension (not to be confused with the 4th dimension: ninjas in time) was a rousing success.

Seconds later, Ryu had given the entire room a new, totally disgusting paint-job.

So I put it to you, dear SpecRock readers, have you any fond memories of the original Ninja Gaiden games? Has anyone here beaten the original without the use of save states? Let us know in the comments!