Un reto interesante que require de cierta habilidad para superar segmentos con enemigos y plataformas, condimentado con un creativo sistema de combate y power ups.

El control del ninja es bastante bueno para su época. Hasta puedes valerte de su habilidad para trepar paredes como alternativa para crear tus propios atajos.

Por desgracia, es infumable en ciertas partes. A partir del stage 4, el juego se empieza a caer a pedazos, puesto que los niveles abusan demasiado del respawn infinito de enemigos vomitados por doquier, bichos mal posicionados o que de plano te salen fuera de cámara, saltos milimétricos, y esos malditos pájaros del demonio que siempren interfieren en saltos de vida o muerte.

Los jefes también en su mayoría tienen patrones estúpidamente simples.

Y cuando llegas al pedazo de mojón del stage 6, solo quieres que el juego acabe pronto xddd.

La penalización de regresarte al nivel 6-1 por perder en el jefe de 3 fases, es demasiado demandante para el jugador. No es un título injusto como todos dicen, pero si se siente que requiere algo más de ensayo y error que el plataformas promedio.

For my entire life, i've never fully gave Ninja Gaiden a try. One time, I got up to Act 4, said "nah" and stopped playing. Just a few months ago, I tried the Special edition on NSO, got destroyed by the masked devil, then tried 6-1 and ALSO got destroyed (for some reason, my dumbass was trying to outrun the enemies, so no shit I couldn't do it) then said "nah" and once again quit. Recently, i've been playing some games people would label 'NES hard' like Castlevania, Mega Man 1, Ghosts n Goblins etc. I always saw Ninja Gaiden mentioned when people talked about hard games, so I thought, why not just put an effort in? If it gets too hard and I lose motivation, I could just use save states (which I didn't end up needing to use).
Now, after finishing it a few minutes ago, I want to beat the shit out of my old self.

I ADORE this game. The controls, the music, the special weapons, the level design, its all nearly flawless. Alot of peoples main problem however, was the difficultly.

Now, i'm not gonna try to say this game isn't hard, since I would be disrespecting my 7 hours of playtime, but what I can say is that 5 of those hours were in Act 6, which is really where the complaints of difficulty come from.

The game does start showing signs of bullshit at Act 5, but really shows its insides at Act 6, which is ridiculously hard, on your first few tries atleast. If you don't know, dying on any of the last 3 bosses sends you back to the start of 6-1, and makes you do the whole act over. Its one of the most infamous fuck you's in all of gaming.

However, I don't hate that feature as much as others. The first time, it was soul crushing, but over time, I practiced Act 6, every-time i would note something new to do on a boss or enemy. Using that special weapon there, or jumping over an enemy instead of attacking, it became like nirvana.

Obviously, there are still bullshit like Jaquio, which is one of the hardest bosses on the entire system, but he can be by-passed with spin-slash, one more thing, if you killed one of the last three bosses, but die to the next, you don't have to re-fight it.

The game is extremely generous overall, when you game over, you're sent back to the start of the stage instead of the act, plus spin-slash can kill nearly all bosses with one use.

I just love this game, I even love the flaws.
One of the games that shows that the NES isn't just an outdated machine.

just a note, while searching up how to kill jaquio, i found a post on a forum saying "how do i kill myself painlessly?" and honestly bro? until i got the spin-slash, same.

An amazing game, but quite complicated. Tecmo's proposal to insert cutscenes makes the game's story very engaging. The villains have a very interesting look. The gameplay is fluid and fast-paced. You are Ryu Hayabusa and the game requires of you all the skill and speed that a ninja must have to overcome enemies that 'respawn' all the time if you move a millimeter the wrong way.

The last act of this game requires hours of practice to overcome. The game is punishing and throws you to the beginning of the act if you die in any of the final bosses. Despite the difficulty, it's a must-play because it teaches you how complicated it was to finish games back then.

For being made in 1988 the game plays amazingly, its kinda similar to castlevania with subweapons but the pace is way faster and flying through the stages is fun as hell
but man this game is pure evil, not only is the final world full of infinitely respawning and BS enemies, the game sends you back to the start of the world if you die to the bosses even if you have lives and to top it all off the 2nd time you fight a boss it doesn't fill your health up so you have to play perfectly just to get to the boss with the same amount of hp you had the first attempt crazy game but i still loved it

I tend to review games while being sensitive to what game design was in vogue at the time. Ninja Gaiden is absolutely brutal and holds no punches when it comes to punishing the player.

Ninja Gaiden itself is an adaptation of an arcade title, my general understanding is the arcade original is more beat ‘em up, while the FDS/NES version takes more cues from fast paced side scroller action of Super Mario Bros. and Castlevania - the latter even down to the general level structure and sub weapon systems. Also present is a new cross of Manga and Anime styled cutscenes to spell out a story between stages, the graphics are amazing for the NES and create a new dimension to a standard action platformer.

The downsides is almost definitely the difficulty, enemies spawn if you have not scrolled the screen far enough, and this seemingly occurs over second pitfall. You measure out your jump and take down an opponent just for it to constantly respawn over the pit you anticipate jumping, working backwards respawns the foes behind and the protagonist has a very short invincibility cycle, hence you die quickly from repeated hits or falling into a pit.

Most famously the final boss has three sections. Lose any and you will return to the beginning of the 6-1, expecting the player to replay 6-1, 6-2 and 6-3 before making another attempt at the boss.

I also found at times the controls were less responsive to moving left and right immediately after a jump to strike a foe.

But, hey it’s the standard level of Nintendo Hard the diehards live by. I’d recommend anyone play The Messenger which is a fantastic homage with much more responsive controls.

Just as every 11-year-old boy has a deeply felt TikTok-informed take on the long-term decline of Family Guy, every early 20s gamer has a peak-Channel-Awesome-era YouTube-approved opinion on the legacy of cult NES platformers. My experiences are universal.

It's funny to cite him as a vaunted academic of a past era (though with how few people treated video games as art worth genuine discussion ~15 years ago, he kind of is), especially with the dated comedy of the ninja character and their, uh, 'dubious' accent in the video, but AngryVideoGameNerd kinda nailed it on this one.

This IS glorious B-movie cheese. The nonsensical and poorly translated story IS spectacular in its embracing of film noir, samurai iconography and the most awesomest cutscenes ever to this point (look at those camera pans, Toby Fox eat your heart out). It IS one of the tightest platformers ever made, with a sick as fuck look and sound to match. And it IS nearly ruined by a late-game difficulty spike (in large part caused by a bug they intentionally left in, Dear Lord) so intense it feels impossible. The man was on the money!

I'm not here to nitpick my predecessors, but there is one major element of the game Rolfe didn't touch on enough (though you have to remember, he only had 15 minutes for the video and at least 20 of those were dedicated to quasi-racist ninja jokes so it's a miracle he crammed in as much analysis as he did really). The level design is super weird and constantly shooting itself in the foot. This game has a deeply compelling interplay between yourself and the edge of the screen. The speed enemies spawn in and out makes despawning them at the sides (and moving at maximum pace forward) far more effective than direct engagements. People (the Nerd included) complain about the rapid respawns this causes as an unfair or aggravating mistake in the game's design. For me, it's one of the best things about the game. It adds a unique layer to combat / movement and keeps the whole thing moving deliriously quickly. The devs, however, have a limited view of how this quirk can be weaponised as an obstacle. When this game turns into 'jumping over a pit onto an empty platform, oh wait an enemy spawned in while I was in mid-air and has knocked me into the pit' the movie, which it does frequently, I can't help but roll my eyes. This one note gets played billions of times, and my ears start getting sore. I struggle with artificial difficulty as a concept. What I do believe in is boring difficulty. It's the sole thing the game throws at you that I'd call actively uncompelling. It can't stop this from being dope as hell, but it does stop it from rising to the top of my favourites. Thems the breaks.

Just for posterity, I played with save states. Call me a poser, call it a skill issue, call it 'I live a human life in the real world and cannot spend the next 35 years of my existence trying to beat stage 6 legitimately.' I have no shame. I remember what happened at the end of the video. Even the ninja couldn't beat this shit. Save states are God's gift to gamers who enjoy beating 80s games with evil checkpoint systems during their natural lifespans.

No points if you beat this legit. I don't seek to reward evangelical ideologues on self-endangering moral quests. Go back to the Crusades.

For a game/series notorious for its difficulty, it's striking that the original Ninja Gaiden doesn't really get difficult until the tail end. Like it's never easy, but it doesn't get really hard until Stage 5-2/5-3 or so. Of course, the game then gets downright dickish with 6-2 and completely cruel with 6-4, so the game's reputation is well-earned. I just think it's neat that the player is most of the way into the game before the gloves come off. Gives the sense that you can do it, you've already come this far, you just have to rise to the occasion.

(For the record, the only time I called B.S. is having to restart a loop after botching a run on the final boss. Though, I think it's an interesting concession that the game remembers what phase you were on with the final boss between loops. My solution was to savestate at the end of 6-3, reload saves until I cleared a phase, then redo the loop, saving again at the end of 6-3. You can insist I did not beat the god damn game if you must, but that seemed the fairest compromise that still let me feel some of the intended effect.)

Nah, Ninja Gaiden represents probably the closest you could come to a spectacle platformer on the NES. In a lot of ways, Ninja Gaiden feels like a counterpart to the original Castlevania: same brutality, same subweapon system, same love of mean flying enemies, same way of encouraging the player to try again with endless continues. The main difference of course being that Ninja Gaiden is a FAST game, with Ryu Hayabusa being ridiculously agile in sharp contrast to Simon Belmont's plodding slowness.

But while Castlevania merely wears its love for movies on its sleeve, Ninja Gaiden is an early adopter of video game cutscenes. It's not the first - Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man predate it, of course. But you have to love how proud TECMO was of what they were doing, judging by the manual boasting of the game's unique "Cinema Display" system. Plus you gotta love stuff like Ryu dismissing Irene with "Just a girl. Get out of here!", only for Irene to immediately tranq him.

There's a lot of great tonality and presentation to Ninja Gaiden, too. A lot of it is genre work familiar to ninja movies - though, again, seeing any of that in this era is pretty cool - but there's a good amount baked into the cadence of the gameplay. The sheer focus on game world continuity through its level design - how every level starting with Stage 4-1 flows into the next, down to it all being visible in that one shot of Ryu looking at the far-off mountain - is cool.

Plus, there's the striking choice of the game's main theme - "Unbreakable Determination" - first appearing in Stage 4-2, long after most games introduce and iterate upon their leitmotifs. Really gives the sense that everything to that point was prelude, and the real adventure begins there. Considering that's also around when the game starts getting harder, it's justified.

Famously, the game is as hard as it is because the developers got too familiar with it, and kept spicing it up to keep themselves challenged. But I think that also goes to show the sheer confidence and respect the team had for what they were doing. Very much a game worth playing and studying, even today.

It's no secret to anybody who has even heard of this game, that Ninja Gaiden on the NES is a very tough game.

After playing it, I feel very conflicted on it.
The controls are solid, and I really like how fast-paced this game can be.

The story, while nothing too amazing, is nice to see unfold, and this was also one of the few NES games to have cutscenes, so that's also neat!

The music is really good! There are a lot of memorable tunes, and gets you excited for the action ahead.

The biggest sticking point, in my opinion, is the level design, more especifically, the enemy placement.
At first, it's rather simple and you won't really have much trouble, but the more you progress, the more punishing it gets, as the game just throws more and more enemies at you, nonstop!
And the enemies also constantly respawn, which makes matters even worse.

By the end of the game, I was just tired of all of the shit it threw at me, and combined with a final boss who throws projectiles at you that are very hard to dodge, this game drained me by the end.

It's not a bad game, but I really wish Ninja Gaiden's method of giving you a hard time wasn't by spamming enemies left and right.

This is one of those games I beat a couple years ago legitimately just to say I did it. The cutscenes hold up incredibly well, the music is outstanding, and the first couple of stages are fun. Even the movement is really good. It's just a shame that the level design completely breaks apart halfway through and completely sours the experience.

I'll die on the hill that most of the Shinobi games are better and that, if it weren't for the (at the time) groundbreaking presentation and notorious difficulty level, most wouldn't care about this game. Sue me and tell me I suck...but at least I beat the thing the way the sadists at Tecmo intended before sharing my opinion online.

+ Game teaches you to get good
+ Designed to be fast paced
+ Challenging, but fair
+ Music/sound complements gameplay
~ Cinematic NES story
~ Amazing NES Graphics
- Dying during boss sends you back to the beginning
- Wall clinging mechanics can ruin runs/ get annoying.

soul crushing at points, but one of the best 2d platformers ever made nonetheless. boasts some especially well-thought-out level design and enemy placement that does not get NEARLY the credit it deserves

i feel the respawning enemies (especially the priests) are ridiculously overhyped by people who fail to understand that this is ultimately a game about constantly moving forward. like, you aren't supposed to slash at them mindlessly and hope that they just stop appearing - you gotta jump INTO and slice THROUGH those motherfuckers

oh and just so we're clear: this is about the nes game. not the arcade one. no more funny business, aight, igdb?