the simultaneous success of dmc1 and failure of dmc2 put a variety of studios in an interesting position of "who could develop the next essential character action title," and team ninja really capitalized on the opportunity to try to take the crown. this became apparent to me during the game's beefy runtime considering just how different it is than today's CAGs in terms of structure and focus. in many ways ninja gaiden '04 (and by extension black) is a bold attempt at the 3D action-adventure game that sits as a bit of an evolutionary dead-end as CAGs have become increasingly combat-focused.
much of this can be seen in parallels between ninja gaiden and devil may cry 3, which released just a year after the former. dmc3 still retains some of the resident evil-derived exploration and interconnected world of its predecessors, but really pushes towards a focus on flashy and dynamic combat at every turn. ninja gaiden instead truly leaned into the scenario design that dmc1 played around with. instead of focusing on a single castle awkwardly chopped up into different missions, ninja gaiden generally focuses each chapter on a completely different area of the map, serving as mini-dungeons with their own puzzles, unique hazards, enemy types. as the game comes to a close these areas become more and more entwined, but the level segmentation is tremendously well-planned, and it clears up much ambiguity over what key items work where and how to progress the story. thanks to helpful notes from ayane, objectives are explained to the player, and if you pay any attention to the various locks around the game world it's easy to keep track of where to go. this kind of simple exploration really does wonders to vary the pace and avoid the trap of "I just did combat arenas for an hour straight and it's all memory-sludge in my head."
on the contrary, each scenario sticks out so precisely in my head that it's a wonder they came up with so many excellent ideas. taking down the airship by destroying the main generators and slaughtering a cyborg on the roof while flying through a storm, descending into the crypt and rising back up to place the chalice at the altar only to fight a giant skeleton monster and watch it crash to the bottom, where the floor has collapsed into a egyptian-tinged den of traps, the half-ice half-magma section where you switch between sides in order to eventually relight a furnace; hell, they nailed a 40-minute underwater section that serves as a great breather between non-stop action otherwise. unlike devil may cry, ninja gaiden manages to entirely switch its mood and playstyle on a dime when it wants to and surprise the player with some new idea at every turn. the variety kept me going "one more save point" over and over again where most CAGs generally lose me at 60/90 minute sessions, which is a credit to how itagaki and the team understood how to perfectly scale the intensity of an adventure over a 16 hour runtime.
of course, with so many great ideas thrown into the mix, there's bound to be some bad ones, and unfortunately there are some major clunkers to be found here. the entire military base raid for one is suffocating both in how the enemy forces exclusively use firearms which stagger the battle pacing and how there are not one but three different vehicular bosses in this section, all of which necessitate use of the clunky OOT-style first-person bow aiming controls. another particular sore point for me near the end of the game was the dreadful phantom pirahna labyrinth, where the game explicitly tells you to spam your flail light attack to avoid needing to mash out of their bite grab that bleeds your health as more and more leech onto you. the fact that these fish will blip into existence as others die really ratchets up the frustration during these sections, which frankly I died to the most during the last two chapters of the game (and ghost doku lmao). smaller puzzles and platforming sections will likely jolt you as the game wears on much as they did me, and it occasionally requires taking a break and coming back to it another time when the brutality of failure in one of these less-than-fair sections becomes too heavy.
thankfully overall I found the rest of the game surprisingly fair. given that ryu's powerful ultimate technique attack harnesses "essence" drops from enemies (colored orb drops shamelessly cribbed from dmc), currency and health drops are exceedingly frequent, and you will have an abundance of currency and health at any point in the game so long as you balance your UT usage. health consumables are also in fair supply, and the smaller variety are rather cheap at the in-game store; I virtually always bought a full set without significantly denting my essence reserves. save points are smartly placed in high foot-traffic locations and replaying sections will rarely take more than a few minutes as long as you diligently save. this latter point is frequently harped upon as a major problem with the game, and I have to assume people bothered by it are simply not used to having to replay sections of games at all; the devs thankfully didn't force us to restart the mission entirely as in dmc1 or pre-SE dmc3, and the backtracking necessary in most levels makes frequently passing by save points common. on that note: I never found the lack of lock-on frustrating given that ryu's soft lock-on is intelligent and don't really see a need for it in a game without firearms anyway. rarely did I whiff without it being completely my fault, and if you're blocking and countering frequently you should already be lined up with your foe.
I've neglected to discuss the combat given that I wanted to highlight less-discussed elements of the game, but yes, the combat is phenomenal. another aspect of this game's odd branch off of dmc1 is its more traditional and less combo-focused combat that instead favors rapid decision-making and opponent reads. it's not surprising to me that this was developed by a fighting game studio, because the combat first-and-foremost reminded me of something like tekken. in those games I am frequently weaving around opponents, waiting for openings, and then seizing on split-second encounters to score a juicy launcher and deal the bulk of my damage. here it's the same, removed from the one-to-one paradigm to instead wider groups of enemies all vying to attack you at once. izuna drop was my bread-and-butter and securing that light attack (or simply whiffing and catching them with the launcher) was my prize. much like a fighting game enemies will punish you for repetition of simple maneuvers or grab you out of a block frequently, and thus staying instinctual and reactive during combat is a must. it's free-flowing and easy to come up with new links or surprise enders given ryu's strong moveset and stable of weaponry, and while I primarily stuck to dragon sword during my playthrough, I still felt like I was discovering new things and improving the more I played.
a few minor quibbles about the combat (mainly controls) that I would like to bring up however: for one, the density of different button combinations and the amount of contextual ones meant that it occasionally felt like a crapshoot on what would actually come out at any given time. flying swallow was a particularly noticeable one for me, as I didn't really nail down its use until I started incorporating the homing jump into my play, and even afterwards it was a bit dodgy even when I was clearly pointing towards an opponent. incorporating the platforming moves in also never came naturally to me, especially since ryu's wall-run can be spotty on whether it will go vertical or horizontal, and the battle camera further aggravates that. in general I would say ryu's platforming is a little slippery: for 2004/5 it's excellent and an improvement on dmc1's stiff movement and a contemporary like sands of time's rigid traversal system, but it definitely shows its age and results in some unneeded frustration.
bosses are also mostly good, but not particularly ambitious in terms of movesets of fight setup. larger bosses mostly boil down to typical [look to the windup -> dodge the move -> spam an attack for a bit] flowcharts that leave a bit to be desired, especially for bosses like the dragon where I felt like I was mainly just chipping away with the windmill shuriken. humanoid bosses tend to suffer from ryu being too fast and dynamic and the boss needing to stay somewhat calm in order to be fair and predictable, and thus to balance it away from ryu's favor there's a lot of indeterminate blocking that I found annoying and perplexing. using two flying swallows back to back with one clinking off and one hitting makes little sense, and it ruins some of the immersion of trying to figure out the fight when it feels like random chance and not taking advantage of openings. none of them are particularly bad though (except the tanks/copters), and all of them are absolutely manageable or even a little easier than you would expect given the notorious difficulty of the game. the endgame fight where you float on a chunk of rock was also way better than the space harrier section of dmc1, so major props to team ninja there.
there's so much to discuss with this game, and I'm not sure I can even accurately give an opinion given that I've only done a normal playthrough and will likely not go for a hard run anytime in the near future (that's just not how I play games unfortunately). there's so much more content waiting for me when I get back, and hopefully I will given how much this game has imprinted on my brain. equally invigorating, anxiety-inducing, thrilling, and frustrating in all the best of ways.
much of this can be seen in parallels between ninja gaiden and devil may cry 3, which released just a year after the former. dmc3 still retains some of the resident evil-derived exploration and interconnected world of its predecessors, but really pushes towards a focus on flashy and dynamic combat at every turn. ninja gaiden instead truly leaned into the scenario design that dmc1 played around with. instead of focusing on a single castle awkwardly chopped up into different missions, ninja gaiden generally focuses each chapter on a completely different area of the map, serving as mini-dungeons with their own puzzles, unique hazards, enemy types. as the game comes to a close these areas become more and more entwined, but the level segmentation is tremendously well-planned, and it clears up much ambiguity over what key items work where and how to progress the story. thanks to helpful notes from ayane, objectives are explained to the player, and if you pay any attention to the various locks around the game world it's easy to keep track of where to go. this kind of simple exploration really does wonders to vary the pace and avoid the trap of "I just did combat arenas for an hour straight and it's all memory-sludge in my head."
on the contrary, each scenario sticks out so precisely in my head that it's a wonder they came up with so many excellent ideas. taking down the airship by destroying the main generators and slaughtering a cyborg on the roof while flying through a storm, descending into the crypt and rising back up to place the chalice at the altar only to fight a giant skeleton monster and watch it crash to the bottom, where the floor has collapsed into a egyptian-tinged den of traps, the half-ice half-magma section where you switch between sides in order to eventually relight a furnace; hell, they nailed a 40-minute underwater section that serves as a great breather between non-stop action otherwise. unlike devil may cry, ninja gaiden manages to entirely switch its mood and playstyle on a dime when it wants to and surprise the player with some new idea at every turn. the variety kept me going "one more save point" over and over again where most CAGs generally lose me at 60/90 minute sessions, which is a credit to how itagaki and the team understood how to perfectly scale the intensity of an adventure over a 16 hour runtime.
of course, with so many great ideas thrown into the mix, there's bound to be some bad ones, and unfortunately there are some major clunkers to be found here. the entire military base raid for one is suffocating both in how the enemy forces exclusively use firearms which stagger the battle pacing and how there are not one but three different vehicular bosses in this section, all of which necessitate use of the clunky OOT-style first-person bow aiming controls. another particular sore point for me near the end of the game was the dreadful phantom pirahna labyrinth, where the game explicitly tells you to spam your flail light attack to avoid needing to mash out of their bite grab that bleeds your health as more and more leech onto you. the fact that these fish will blip into existence as others die really ratchets up the frustration during these sections, which frankly I died to the most during the last two chapters of the game (and ghost doku lmao). smaller puzzles and platforming sections will likely jolt you as the game wears on much as they did me, and it occasionally requires taking a break and coming back to it another time when the brutality of failure in one of these less-than-fair sections becomes too heavy.
thankfully overall I found the rest of the game surprisingly fair. given that ryu's powerful ultimate technique attack harnesses "essence" drops from enemies (colored orb drops shamelessly cribbed from dmc), currency and health drops are exceedingly frequent, and you will have an abundance of currency and health at any point in the game so long as you balance your UT usage. health consumables are also in fair supply, and the smaller variety are rather cheap at the in-game store; I virtually always bought a full set without significantly denting my essence reserves. save points are smartly placed in high foot-traffic locations and replaying sections will rarely take more than a few minutes as long as you diligently save. this latter point is frequently harped upon as a major problem with the game, and I have to assume people bothered by it are simply not used to having to replay sections of games at all; the devs thankfully didn't force us to restart the mission entirely as in dmc1 or pre-SE dmc3, and the backtracking necessary in most levels makes frequently passing by save points common. on that note: I never found the lack of lock-on frustrating given that ryu's soft lock-on is intelligent and don't really see a need for it in a game without firearms anyway. rarely did I whiff without it being completely my fault, and if you're blocking and countering frequently you should already be lined up with your foe.
I've neglected to discuss the combat given that I wanted to highlight less-discussed elements of the game, but yes, the combat is phenomenal. another aspect of this game's odd branch off of dmc1 is its more traditional and less combo-focused combat that instead favors rapid decision-making and opponent reads. it's not surprising to me that this was developed by a fighting game studio, because the combat first-and-foremost reminded me of something like tekken. in those games I am frequently weaving around opponents, waiting for openings, and then seizing on split-second encounters to score a juicy launcher and deal the bulk of my damage. here it's the same, removed from the one-to-one paradigm to instead wider groups of enemies all vying to attack you at once. izuna drop was my bread-and-butter and securing that light attack (or simply whiffing and catching them with the launcher) was my prize. much like a fighting game enemies will punish you for repetition of simple maneuvers or grab you out of a block frequently, and thus staying instinctual and reactive during combat is a must. it's free-flowing and easy to come up with new links or surprise enders given ryu's strong moveset and stable of weaponry, and while I primarily stuck to dragon sword during my playthrough, I still felt like I was discovering new things and improving the more I played.
a few minor quibbles about the combat (mainly controls) that I would like to bring up however: for one, the density of different button combinations and the amount of contextual ones meant that it occasionally felt like a crapshoot on what would actually come out at any given time. flying swallow was a particularly noticeable one for me, as I didn't really nail down its use until I started incorporating the homing jump into my play, and even afterwards it was a bit dodgy even when I was clearly pointing towards an opponent. incorporating the platforming moves in also never came naturally to me, especially since ryu's wall-run can be spotty on whether it will go vertical or horizontal, and the battle camera further aggravates that. in general I would say ryu's platforming is a little slippery: for 2004/5 it's excellent and an improvement on dmc1's stiff movement and a contemporary like sands of time's rigid traversal system, but it definitely shows its age and results in some unneeded frustration.
bosses are also mostly good, but not particularly ambitious in terms of movesets of fight setup. larger bosses mostly boil down to typical [look to the windup -> dodge the move -> spam an attack for a bit] flowcharts that leave a bit to be desired, especially for bosses like the dragon where I felt like I was mainly just chipping away with the windmill shuriken. humanoid bosses tend to suffer from ryu being too fast and dynamic and the boss needing to stay somewhat calm in order to be fair and predictable, and thus to balance it away from ryu's favor there's a lot of indeterminate blocking that I found annoying and perplexing. using two flying swallows back to back with one clinking off and one hitting makes little sense, and it ruins some of the immersion of trying to figure out the fight when it feels like random chance and not taking advantage of openings. none of them are particularly bad though (except the tanks/copters), and all of them are absolutely manageable or even a little easier than you would expect given the notorious difficulty of the game. the endgame fight where you float on a chunk of rock was also way better than the space harrier section of dmc1, so major props to team ninja there.
there's so much to discuss with this game, and I'm not sure I can even accurately give an opinion given that I've only done a normal playthrough and will likely not go for a hard run anytime in the near future (that's just not how I play games unfortunately). there's so much more content waiting for me when I get back, and hopefully I will given how much this game has imprinted on my brain. equally invigorating, anxiety-inducing, thrilling, and frustrating in all the best of ways.
HylianBran
1 year ago