This Week In Retro: Ninja Gaiden (2004) (Patreon)

March 2, 2004: How do you get to the ninja fortress? Practice, practice, practice

by Diamond Feit

I wasn't there to witness it, but I'd wager that within minutes of Spacewar!'s release into the world, someone tried to play the landmark computer game and gave up after declaring it "too hard." Six decades of technological evolution later, video games continue to struggle with this eternal problem, one that can never be solved as the entire appeal of the medium relies upon offering the audience an interactive experience. People want a challenge to some degree when they play a video game, or else they might as well just watch television.

Even if the problem has persisted to this day, the nature of what makes a game difficult has always changed. Arcade titles restricted the number of tries per coin, banking on players' persistence to turn a profit. Early home console games used similar tricks to ensure customers wouldn't finish too quickly. In Metroid, Samus never abandoned her mission no matter how many times she died, but each attempt sent her back to a predetermined checkpoint, forcing her to retrace her steps.

Today, video games cost a fortune to produce, so developers must walk the razor's edge when it comes to balancing their vision against the public's expectations. Offering a choice of difficulty levels can help players determine the boundaries of their own virtual journey, but without maintaining a baseline of friction, devs run the risk of neutering the fun of it all.

20 years ago, Tecmo released a most unusual game exclusively for the Xbox. A Japanese company designing a product solely for a console that flopped in their home country is itself noteworthy, but this game also made extraordinary demands of the audience's patience. The gamble paid off, as Ninja Gaiden drove critics and fans wild, even as they decried its brutal difficulty.

If you've never owned an Xbox and do not speak Japanese, you've still likely heard the words Ninja Gaiden before. Anyone who played video games in the late 80s would remember the original arcade beat-em-up or the NES side-scrolling action platformer, both starring a young ninja named Ryu Hayabusa. Despite sharing a title and a protagonist, the two games have little else in common, but their overall popularity helped teach millions of kids outside Japan the proper way to pronounce gaiden (meaning "side story").

After three successful NES games and a handful of handheld releases, the Ninja Gaiden series went into hibernation for about ten years, sitting out the 16 and 32-bit console generations. Around the turn of the millennium, as more publishers looked to their back catalog for brands to reinvision in three dimensions, Ninja Gaiden represented an ideal candidate. After all, regardless of how many cultural and social changes the US and Japan experienced in the 1990s, ninjas remained just as cool in the 21st century as they had in the 20th.

Yet the road back to relevancy proved to be a rocky one for Ryu Hayabusa. Development duties for an all-new Ninja Gaiden fell to the aptly-named Team Ninja, a division of Tecmo responsible for the Dead or Alive fighting game series which had included Ryu in its roster since its inception. His new game began as an arcade project, then shifted to the Dreamcast, then the PlayStation 2, before landing on Xbox. The decision to exclusively release Ninja Gaiden on Microsoft's debut console came after at least two full years of development, and it would be another two years until the game would see the light of day.

In bringing back Ninja Gaiden, Team Ninja kept only the barest of essentials. The NES trilogy had focused almost as much energy on storytelling as gameplay, giving Ryu Hayabusa a father to mourn, government allies to protect, and a monstrous villain named Jaquio to topple. None of that made the cut for his 2004 reboot; instead Ryu informs us that his father is away on a training mission, leaving the Dragon Sword—a family heirloom—in Ryu's care.

The game opens with Ryu infiltrating a ninja fortress all by himself, though an unseen ally tosses helpful darts with notes attached into walls throughout the stage to offer basic gameplay tips. After slaying dozens of masked warriors and reaching the inner sanctum, Ryu faces off against Murai, a white-haired nunchuck-wielding martial arts master. Their battle ends in a draw, however, for Murai is actually a Hayabusa himself and this entire endeavor was simply part of Ryu's training.

Ninja Gaiden allows little time for family get-togethers as word arrives that enemy forces have laid siege to the nearby Hayabusa village. Ryu rushes to the scene only to find dead compatriots scattered around his homestead and an entire army of hostiles targeting him to finish what they started. Ayane, the young kunai-throwing woman from the first stage, has also fallen in battle; she survives but cannot aid Ryu any further. Amidst the burning rubble, Ryu meets a massive armored samurai carrying the Dark Dragon Blade, a weapon that transforms its user into "the Devil incarnate" according to the game's opening narration. Clearly, Ryu's days of practice have ended, as he must risk his life to reclaim and seal away this horrible instrument of death.

Ryu begins his adventure as a ninja understudy of sorts but even with his training wheels on, he still brings a lot to the table. Ryu carries the Dragon Sword, an all-around competent weapon for melee combat, plus an infinite supply of shuriken. Judging by his ability to pounce on foes' shoulders, run along walls, and somersault around the battlefield, Ryu must never skip a single leg day.

With its initial chapter doubling as a test of Ryu's studies and a tutorial for the player, Ninja Gaiden does its best to gradually introduce the dangers that lie ahead. Early encounters limit the opposing ninja to just two brown-clad novices at a time who attack slowly and offer ample openings for Ryu to respond. Once inside their fortress, the brown ninjas increase their numbers, forcing players to block and wait for the right moment to counter-attack.

The next hurdle to clear are white ninjas, far more active sparring partners. They like to leap around, string their sword strikes together, and even throw shuriken if Ryu tries to keep his distance. Again, Ninja Gaiden dishes out these threats incrementally, but in order to reach Murai, Ryu must survive an all-white assault inside a locked room.

It is Murai who stands as the true gatekeeper of Ninja Gaiden, outclassing all of his minions and testing players to see if they are ready to proceed. While only armed with a set of nunchucks, Murai can instantly reflect Ryu's shurikens back at him and lash out with multi-hit combos that will wear down Ryu's health in a hurry. Attack too aggressively, and Murai will block until Ryu's moves afford him a window to punish the ninja. Play too defensively, and Murai will grab Ryu, throw him to the ground, and kick him into the wall for major damage. Even when Murai leaves himself open, Ryu can only score a couple of hits before Murai recovers, forcing players to carefully read and react instead of button-mashing.

As preliminary chapters go, Ninja Gaiden's fortress doesn't pull many punches. While enemies rarely gather in overwhelming numbers, their persistence and tendency to team up can corner Ryu and pin him down. Yet these ninja students lack any means to harm Ryu so long as players remember to block. Instructing the player of this basic fundamental is the true purpose of these bottom-rung ninjas; anyone expecting to hammer the attack button and finish even this first stage will find Ninja Gaiden disappointing.

Meanwhile, Murai represents an intermediate-level threat with his unblockable grabs and his stubborn refusal to let Ryu knock him down. Even players capable of reaching Murai's chamber without taking a single hit will have to learn to adapt to his techniques. For all his advantages, Murai operates using predictable patterns that leave him periodically vulnerable. The sooner players can identify and exploit these behaviors, the sooner they can advance the story.

I hope the preceding paragraphs have made it clear just how difficult Ninja Gaiden is compared to its contemporaries, let alone modern big-budget releases. Every human opponent can block and has enough health to survive multiple blows; not even the cannon fodder brown ninjas will go down after just one hit. Should Ryu fall, players must resume from their last save file, as Ninja Gaiden offers absolutely no automatic checkpoints. The first time I beat Murai and saw the title card for Chapter 2, I quit to take a break. When I returned, I had to fight him again because I had saved before, not after, my victory.

Yet I also hope these points don't come across as whining, because in playing the game to prepare for this anniversary, I came away with a tremendous amount of respect for Team Ninja's approach. Ninja Gaiden wants players to feel like a ninja when you control Ryu but it also wants players to earn that feeling.

Lest anyone forget, Ninja Gaiden has always presented a significant challenge, even by NES standards. 8-bit Ryu had to overcome constantly-respawning enemies while also making precision jumps over bottomless pits. His limited-use ninja magic gave him a variety of offensive options beyond his simple sword, but the designers stripped that away for the finale, forcing Ryu to slay a massive beast with nothing more than his wits and his katana. Any slip-ups sent players all the way back to the beginning of stage 6-1, forcing them to fight through three entire stages to face the boss again.

Ninja Gaiden 2004 hinges its difficulty entirely upon its deep combat system, requiring players to learn the ropes or die trying. To that end, the game offers an assortment of healing items, sub-weapons, an upgrade system, and a shop for stocking up on supplies. All of these options exist to supplement player experimentation and growth—particularly the shop since performing better in battle earns Ryu more in-game currency.

If I have a complaint about Ninja Gaiden, it concerns the game's inability to properly communicate its secrets to the player. Ayane's diegetic tutorial messages offer haphazard instruction at best; she doesn't mention the block button until the player has already faced at least eight hostile ninjas. She never offers even a hint at how combos work or how Ryu can charge heavy attacks into powerful Ultimate Techniques. The instruction manual does cover this material but buries it in-between paragraphs of lore and lists of every single item and weapon in the game.

In this sense, Ninja Gaiden 2004 reminds of a fighting game more than a 3D action-adventure. Even with only two melee attack buttons, players can produce explosive results, linking Ryu's slashes and kicks into lengthy sequences that stain the walls with his enemies' blood. The in-game menus do offer a rundown of available moves, but I never found this information until after I started searching YouTube for combat pointers. Even then, the nature of Ninja Gaiden rewards learning-by-doing over reading printed commands. A training mode would have made a huge difference in welcoming new players to Ryu's world.

Team Ninja's restoration of Ryu Hayabusa to leading man status proved extremely popular, so much so that Tecmo would release an expanded edition called Ninja Gaiden Black in 2005 before reworking the game again as Ninja Gaiden Sigma for the PlayStation 3. Sigma has become the default experience as part of the Master Collection, a bundle of all three Team Ninja Ninja Gaiden games for Steam and modern consoles.

Of course, the lack of paper manuals these days only exacerbates Ninja Gaiden's inscrutability issues. I spent hours fumbling with Ryu this week and never made it past Chapter 2, but by the end I felt far more comfortable handling the Dragon Sword. It helps that, as of this writing, PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass include the entire Master Collection for subscribers, so I could try my hand at multiple versions with different controllers without spending a single yen.

To anyone looking to dive into Ninja Gaiden today, whether it's your first time or not, I recommend you temper your expectations and definitely check your ego. Even on Hero Mode, the game's lowest difficulty, there will be a steep learning curve. Try not to play with visions of Dante, Kratos, or any other action hero in your head. Ryu Hayabusa's not half-demon or half-god, he's a ninja. Help him reach his full potential and you just might learn a thing or two about your own capabilities before you know it.

However, for legal purposes I must warn all readers: Do not attempt anything you see in Ninja Gaiden in real life. No amount of lunges will allow you to wall jump or run along vertical surfaces, and carrying swords or throwing stars in public will only invite unwanted attention from law enforcement. Leave ninjutsu to the trained professionals, please.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.