It’s time for the long-awaited Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series here on IC2S! This series has been a long time coming, largely down to me being an obsessive psycho: it wasn’t enough to play nearly every version of the modern Ninja Gaiden games, I had to go back to play the originals for the first time too! As a result, we’re kicking this series off with the 1988 arcade game, Ninja Gaiden (which is going to get confusing fast, because this is not even the only game named “Ninja Gaiden” which released in 1988)! As a rural child of the 90s, the arcade boom completely passed me by, so I was completely unfamiliar with this game going in. How does it hold up, both as a game and as a part of the Ninja Gaiden franchise? Read on to find out…

Love

• Old-School Charm – Ninja Gaiden feels like a relic of the 80s, which gives it a lot of sincere charm that cannot be replicated. The game’s setup is pure 80s ninjasploitation B-movie cheese, with Ryu coming to America to beat up an assortment of weirdos dressed like Jason Voorhees and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The graphics are pretty rudimentary, but they would have looked pretty good in the arcades in 1988. While I didn’t experience that era myself, they still illicit some nostalgia from me, reminding me of the style and palette of MS-DOS games from the 90s. The end-level screens where you get an image of Ryu doing some comedic activity (ordering sushi in an extremely serious manner, gambling in a suit while still wearing his mask and flanked by a couple bunny girls, etc). Best of all though are some of its hilarious and memorable sequences, such as the infamous “CONTINUE?” screen which sees Ryu tied to a table as a buzzsaw lowers towards him (better put in those coins quickly!). For all its shortcomings, I can at least see how someone can enjoy the little hit of nostalgia this game brings with it.
• Homoeroticism – This is the most 80s-gay game I’ve ever played. The game’s opening cutscene has a lingering shot of Ryu Hayabusa’s lusciously-rendered pixel art ass. You’ve got a bunch of shirtless muscle-bound men, leather daddies, and bears beating you down for the entire game. There are muscle men sea serpents… which would be weird enough, but the fact that you encounter them in the fucking Grand Canyon makes it all so much more bizarre. The final boss has a painted mural showing off his goddamn ass in his boss room! I’m not gay myself, but I found it very funny once I noticed how unusually homoerotic this game was. Honestly, it’s kind of refreshing: this is the kind of representation that the video game industry took away from us in the 90s when it began catering only to teenage boys!

Mixed

• The Sword – When you have a sword, this game’s combat is actually fun. You can kill all enemies in 1-2 hits and you knock them back, which gives you some crowd control options. Unfortunately, this is short-lived, because the sword is a random weapon pickup that only lasts for ten hits before it breaks, what the actual hell!? Why would you develop fun gameplay and then intentionally limit it to a matter of seconds? It makes it feel worse than if it was not there at all!
  • Side-note: this is the one game outside of the Dead or Alive series where Ryu Hayabusa is using his martial arts primarily. Dude is literally choosing to save the world with a handicap.
• The Jump Throw – By jumping and then pressing the X button when landing near an enemy, Ryu will grab them and throw them across the screen. Not only does this damage them, but it also knocks them down and stops them from doing anything for a couple seconds. This kind of breathing room is crucial in this game’s combat, so you end up spamming the hell out of it for the entire game. By the way, I do mean the entire game, as every single boss can be jump-thrown as if they were a regular enemy. It’s to the point where it actively feels overpowered in a way that’s detrimental to the combat gameplay, since you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage unnecessarily by not using it.
  • Also: they literally recreated this move in the 3D games with the guillotine throw! I love those kinds of callbacks to the classics!

Hate

• Arcade Game Design – Arcade games are inherently flawed due to their business model requiring them to be frustrating and unfair. Ninja Gaiden is no exception. Sure, emulation and modern re-releases have given us unlimited credits and save states, but their design is still infected to the core to be bullshit. Ninja Gaiden will throw you into fights with so many enemies that you can get stun-locked to death. You end up surviving, not by skill, but by exploiting the enemy AI to get cheap kills (ie, standing in a corner and spamming the X button to hit them the second they step into your reach, jumping to a lower level and then attacking them while they’re stuck in their climb animation). This bullshit got to its absolute worst in the last level, where most of the enemies you encounter will take off 66% of your health in a single hit! How are you expected to beat this, even with unlimited credits!? I got to the last level, but it was such a piss-off that I said “fuck it” and quit.
• Hardware Limitations – Some of Ninja Gaiden‘s issues seem to stem from the very hardware it was forced to use:
  • There’s only three buttons and a d-pad for them to design the gameplay around, and one of those buttons ends up getting wasted on a “hold” move to grab onto platforms. It rarely gets used, and the cynic in me believes that it’s only here to make players forget about it and get some cheap deaths on the few occasions where it’s needed.
  • The 2.5D layout makes it hard to tell whether you will be able to hit an enemy who is right beside you or not. Judge wrong, and you will inevitably get hit instead.
  • There is very little variety to the enemies, and all the bosses are recycled wholesale multiple times (remember, this is a ~45 minute game with only six stages, so you’re going to notice how repetitive this is).
• The Combat – Combat in this game somehow manages to be slow and tedious, despite simultaneously swarming you with enemies. This is largely because landing a “hit” is done with a three-strike combo animation (this goes for your attacks and your enemies’). As a result, every single fight is taking three times longer to complete than it needed to. It also makes taking a hit feel even more punishing and demoralizing as you sit there for a couple seconds waiting for the animation to play out.
• FUCKING CLAW TRIO MOTHERFUCKERS – I WAS ABSOLUTELY RAGING WHILE FIGHTING THESE SONS OF BITCHES. This boss is what it sounds like: a trio of guys with claws. What makes them truly rage-inducing is that, when you hit them, they’ll usually dodge and then perform a counter-attack. The only way you can avoid damage is if you side-step immediately. This was bad enough the first time we fought them, but they show up again in the final stage and they now will one-shot you!!! It’s so overly-punishing and spiteful, I hate these bastards with the core of my being.

Ninja Gaiden arcade is a relic of its time. As far as side-scroller beat ’em ups go, it’s very basic and would be quickly eclipsed by much faster and more complex contemporaries. As a result, it just feels so slow, tedious, and repetitive. On its own merits, it does not hold up today at all and any enjoyment you’ll get out of the game will be more down to nostalgia and curiosity rather than any actual compelling design. That said, it only takes about an hour to beat and modern emulation stymies its most egregious design choices, so at least it’s a curiosity that won’t take up too much of your time.