Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Master System! Once again, this is an entirely new entry in the franchise, despite sharing a name with (by this point) three other games released in a four year timespan. I was not too keen on the previous Sega-exclusive Ninja Gaiden game, would this attempt on the Master System fair any better? Read on to find out…

Love

• Graphics – Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is, hands-down, the best-looking classic Ninja Gaiden game. In fact, the graphics are so crisp here that I was legitimately shocked when I found out that the Master System was an 8-bit console like the NES. The graphics here are so much better than any other Ninja Gaiden game of the era that I legitimately thought that this game was designed for a 16-bit console! I adore the art style of 16-bit consoles, so this game is all the more impressive to me for looking this good on such aged hardware! This praise for the graphics and pixel art also carries over to the cutscenes, which are easily the most detailed of the classic era of Ninja Gaiden.

Mixed

• Control Complexity – One of the most notable new additions in Ninja Gaiden on Master System is that you now have a bit more control over when you grab onto platforms and walls. This is actually kind of nice: in Ninja Gaiden III and Shadow, you would occasionally jump and unintentionally grab onto a platform above you, which could cause you to get hit by an enemy in the process. With that in mind, having some control over whether you want to grab onto a platform is a good idea and it allows the developers to design levels in more interesting ways. However, this decision lays bare the hardware limitations these games are operating under, and how they struggle to deal with additional complexity.
  • Like the NES games, you’ve got a d-pad and two buttons to work with, and the game controls pretty similarly, but now you have to hold the up button while jumping to grab onto a platform. This is a problem for two reasons: 1) It’s annoying to have to hold a button to do something that used to be automatic, even if I can understand why they’ve added this. But, more importantly, 2) It makes it way easier to accidentally activate your ninja arts if you need to attack an enemy mid-jump, which wastes your energy and can leave you without any later if you need it.
  • Similarly, jumping onto a wall has gotten more complicated, for better or worse. You used to just grab onto the wall automatically. Now you need to jump into the wall and continue holding the d-pad in the direction of the wall. This will cause Ryu to turn around, and then you need to press jump quickly while still holding the d-pad in the direction of the wall to jump in the opposite direction. In essence, you’re pressing the d-pad in the opposite direction you want to go in, which gets really confusing. On the plus side, this can allow you to leap back and forth off of walls, opening up new platforming opportunities, but my God is it confusing in execution. I honestly think that this game would have been better off on an actual 16-bit console with more buttons – having a dedicated “grab” button would have made this all so much simpler and with no drawbacks.
• Difficulty – The people who designed this game are fucking bastards. The NES games are brutal, but their difficulty feels reasonably fair most of the time and the spikes come when they want to test your limits. Meanwhile, the Master System Ninja Gaiden wants to kill you, full-stop. Many enemies move so quickly that you barely have a chance to react to them. The fucking birds are back, and this time they’re even faster and more erratic than ever before! WHY??? And that’s not even getting to the level designs. In the very first level, you complete one area and the next one immediately puts you on a tiny platform over a pit of spikes, so if you were still moving forward absent-mindedly, you would die instantly. It was at that point I went “oh, so that’s the kind of game you’re playing”. What sadistic bastard thought it would be a good idea to have four bird spawn in mid-jump over an instant-death pit? What idiot thought that what an ice level needed was platforms that send you careening forward if you move even a single pixel AND these icy platforms are covered with spikes? Oh, and then they spice things up even more by adding lightning-fast jumping ninjas and piranhas as an extra “fuck you”. Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is a bastard of a game, but I… kind of enjoyed it? Admittedly, most of this comes down to the modern conveniences of emulation mitigating a ton of frustration, but it was to a point where I was starting to predict the next dickheaded move the game would make, prepared myself for it ahead of time, and would have a laugh after each new development. On top of that, the game is pretty generous with its checkpoints and continues (no “oh, you lost to the final boss? Back to the start of the level” bullshit from the previous games). I actually managed to beat this game, which is more than I can say about any of the NES titles with their “fairer” levels of challenge!
  • Oh, and as a bonus regarding the difficulty, there’s a game-breaking bug that makes it significantly easier. If you can get your ninja arts stockpiled up to 999, then you will actually have unlimited uses of your art. Suffice to say, being able to create unlimited rings of fire to intercept every enemy and projectile (not to mention being able to walk on spikes without getting hurt!) was overpowered as fuck and is a pretty big reason why I was able to reach the end of the game in spite of all the bullshit it threw at me.
• The Story – I kind of view the Master System Ninja Gaiden as the apex of the classic era: sure, it’s got some design flaws that mar the experience, but it’s the flashiest and most refined version of the classic era’s gameplay. However, one notable area in which it falls short compared to the NES games is that its story is significantly less effective. It retains the cutscenes that made the trilogy so famous, but the actual narrative here is disappointing. The NES trilogy were simple, but a lot of effort was put into its characters and wringing drama out of their reactions to the games’ events. Here, they’ve taken a step back – it’s now just about Ryu doing cool shit until the bad guys are defeated. It’s too bad, you can see how this franchise’s emphasis on narrative just dropped off until Ninja Gaiden stories became… well, what we’d new expect out of a modern Ninja Gaiden game.
  • Also, the game has some questionable localization, so you’ll occasionally get a chuckle out of some badly translated line of dialogue.

Hate

• Multi-hit Enemies – This game introduces lots of basic enemies who require multiple hits in order to kill. Call me old-fashioned, but this feels like it goes against the fundamental design ethos of these games. Why does some mafioso in a suit take two hits to kill, while a nearly-identical one dies in one? I don’t get it, I don’t really like it, and it just feels like an unnecessary extra step to kill an enemy who is almost-certainly dead anyway when you landed that first hit; the second hit just feels like an unnecessary formality at that point.

In spite of itself, I actually quite enjoyed Ninja Gaiden on the Master System. I don’t think it’s quite as good as the first couple games on the NES, but it’s very close, and gives us a glimpse into a potential future where these games continued into the 16-bit era. As a close to the classic era of Ninja Gaiden, it’s a pretty great time and well worth checking out!