Reviews from

in the past


Me lo pase un montón de veces sin darme cuenta que me lo pasaba en fácil... talvez por eso no me era tan difícil

One of the best action games ever created. Ridiculously satisfying weapons and combat with a mostly fair high difficulty. I really appreciate how quickly you can die while having enemies be very squishy themselves, keeping it tense but satisfying. There is the occasional bullshit thrown in that at least keeps you on your toes well after getting used to the mechanics and it can usually be avoided by playing carefully.

Rarely was I genuinely fucking annoyed, namely at having shoot arrows at the radio tower, spending a million years spamming the flail at ghost fish, or screaming at Alma's fucking projectiles that hit me every single time!! FUCK!!!!!!!

A lot of the levels outside of the city are not as fun since this game is best when it's more explorative but there are still plenty of varied challenges to keep each area feeling distinct, a huge plus that makes for a hugely replayable game when combined with the multitude of differences between difficulty levels. A fair bit to unlock too!

So good, so smooth, so fun, I love this game to pieces.

Brutal in every sense, one of the most unique takes of the action genre. Nothing feels quite like this one, a game that shines when you fight multiple enemies at once. You are forced to learn how to use your tools properly and the enviroment in your favor, otherwise you will be severely punished for every mistake you make and yet, for the most part, it feels kinda fair. There is a sense of thrill after you come victorious in any battle you fight that most of these type of games wish to replicate.

Its a shame they put the hall of fame of shittiest bosses, you'll find yourself running around and dodging their attacks until you find an opening to attack, it is just boring and doesn't suits well the combat system, they try to solve it in higher difficulties by putting some extra enemies but I find it a cheap patch instead of a real solution, to be honest I would rather not have this many bosses and even any boss. Aside from that, there is not any other big flaw that I can think of, couldnt recomend it enough.

esse jogo exala um certo tipo de sexualidade que não é comumente explorada: ela exige certos rituais, atenção, até beleza, mas é completamente desprovida de ego. nada é performativo. percebi que eu não tenho muita afinidade com os grandes jogos de ação dos nossos tempos (bayonetta, dmc) em partes justamente porque eles são extremamente performáticos, os personagens se comportam de forma titilante, confiante, e sabem que há uma câmera ali os assistindo — suas frases são ditas para alguém ler, seus movimentos são feitos para alguém assistir, e até mais: para alguém controlar. é nossa responsabilidade ou afirmar o dante ou fazer ele ser um mentiroso, mas todos os comandos são expressões de ideias dos personagens, toda virada é auto-consciente; um espelho de teto no motel, a gravação de celular, o culto à própria performance.

o ryu não atribui uma moral aos seus movimentos: se você não fizer o que o jogo quer, você não passa, e se você passou, é porque fez o que o jogo quer. não importa quantos itens de cura usou, quantas flechas de fogo, quantas vezes a Alma te matou com uma coluna de mármore (e a igreja ainda se manteve em pé): se foi, foi. ele te tranquiliza mostrando que nem toda vez vai ser tão boa assim, mas que o ato de se despir já é coragem o suficiente e comunica infinitas passagens. não acredito que seja uma eficiência clínica, mas confiante. é impressionante intrínsecamente conseguir jogar, sem a parte extrínseca do rank e dos combos; seja greater ninja ou ninja dog, a parte importante é ninja.

aquela citação da phillys diller do "never go to bed angry; stay up and fight" alcança outros significados aqui, demonstrando certa intimidade com o processo que permite tornar o que é sexy em algo rotineiro, menos preocupado em impressionar e mais preocupado em comunicar que mesmo que dessa vez não dê certo é só tentar de novo.

em 2015 eu argumentei que o ninja gaiden original era o primeiro jogo que poderíamos usar para impressionar um interesse amoroso, e agora consigo dizer que o ninja gaiden black é casar com ela.


El peor mejor juego que he jugado jamás

I hope you understand how much I genuinely adore punishingly hard character action games, but this is just annoying as shit to me.

The worm boss was bad enough, but when they did it again but added another I rolled my eyes so hard that I wanted to izuna drop myself.

And yeah, "skill issue" or whatever. But the design felt deliberately made to be the most cheap, bullshit thing imaginable. I still prefer it over Razor's edge because it is far more accomplished at what it set out to be, but NG2 is the only entry that I'll consistently be coming back to.

I am happy that it's a classic within the character action community though, it's not terrible I just don't get much out of it is all.

Izuna dropping the underground monastery level and the phantom fishes

One of the best of its kind and easily the best in the series. This game is brutal, unfair, frustrating and magnificent. The satisfaction this game brings you from pulling off a combo with a new weapon, or killing a new boss or taking on dozens of enemies in style as a ninja is unmatched. Even to this day, the graphics and controls still hold up. Sadly this version has yet to have been rereleased and we have the inferior Sigma versions instead. Nevertheless, I still recommend anyone who enjoys Devil May Cry or the classic God of War games to check this series out, especially this version of the first game. An absolute must play.

Uma coisa que sempre tive interesse era em me aprofundar mais em jogos de ação, especialmente em sua estrutura e sistema de combate, e sinto que Ninja Gaiden foi a escolha perfeita para isso. É um jogo que faz o básico com perfeição, cada encontro exige um uso inteligente de seu kit e são preenchidos por micro-decisões interessantes de se fazer durante a gameplay, desde o uso de outros inimigos a seu favor, pela administração do sistema de essência, até aproveitar dos iframes, que boa parte do jogo vão ser seu maior recurso defensivo, já que os inimigos são ágeis e agarram o Ryu constantemente. Além disso, o jogo é bem conciso e bem cadenciado e que consegue mesclar muito bem sua parte aventura com sua parte ação - até certo ponto. Ironicamente por mais que o jogo tenha uma base muito sólida e se segure muito bem boa parte do tempo, quando ele decai, a queda é abismal, ele nunca fica no medíocre; ou é muito bom, ou é muito ruim. Sério, tem partes nesse jogo que são insuportáveis, são corredores com alguns dos piores inimigos que já vi em um videogame e que parecem que vão ativamente contra todos os sistemas do jogo, além das próprias boss fights, que por mais que sejam boas no começo, quase todas as outras são péssimas e são quase uma antítese ao design dos inimigos comuns do jogo. Mesmo assim, o brilho do jogo não é apagado por isso, e continua sendo uma experiência extremamente gratificante e memorável, já que mesmo em seus piores momentos, ainda há algo a se extrair daquilo, e traz uma perspectiva interessante sobre os próprios sistemas do jogo.

with this game i found out i can cum with my hands

The best version of this fantastic game

What we have here is an incredible action game with a high skill ceiling. Would be a shame if someone added worms to it...

First things first: Ninja Gaiden Black looks incredible running on a Series X. There is a level of clarity and sharpness here that you just won't see in most other backwards compatible Xbox games - not unless it's also developed by Team Ninja - and even some 360 games upscaled to 4k don't look nearly as good. You can see every pixel on Rachel, and I know because I've spent hours in the lab analyzing her model. I have access to high-end Digital Foundry tools, and you will not believe the frame graph I've generated for Ryu's crotch-- this technology was NOT intended for these purposes!

Now this is where I out myself as a hack, because I did not beat this game on Ultra Lord-God Ninja mode or whatever the hell Ninja Gaiden Black's most powerful warriors insist is the one true way to enjoy the game. I'm a Centrist Ninja, I think any way you enjoy a game is the best way to enjoy it, even if you're a dog. A ninja dog, as some might be.

Even though I lack the requisite amount of skill to play Black on its highest difficulty, I'm more than capable of seeing what the game is going for and respect how technical it is. Look up any boss tutorial and you'll get a sense for how layered and complex Ninja Gaiden's combat can be. It's worth noting that none of the strategies therein actually helped me overcome some of Black's nastiest bosses when applied directly, but they did give me insight into the game's underlying mechanics which allowed me to develop tactics that worked for me. Brute force is seldom the answer, and Black rewards experimentation and thoughtful play, which is appreciable on any level of difficulty.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can jump onboard with the sentiment that this is the best action game ever. The rote reuse of certain bosses on normal difficulties and below can get tiresome, and though you can mitigate this by playing at higher levels, the trade comes at the cost of adding more mobs to boss battles. The few tastes I had of this during my playthrough didn't leave a positive impression, as the increased number of enemies didn't pay nice with the camera. An egregious case of this comes early with the second boss fight, where you have to manage an enemy on horseback running between the two edges of the arena while contending with wizards sniping at you and vanishing.

As the game crept on and abandoned interesting traversal for intense combat challenges in its last two levels, I found my investment waning. In a way, this is true to Ninja Gaiden's NES lineage, because like those games I found myself nearing the end and thinking "yeah I've had enough, I'm good." I understand clawing your way through several small rooms of meaty and tenacious enemies and rolling right into a boss rush is meant to be a true test of your skills, but I personally didn't find the attrition nearly as enjoyable as others. This shouldn't be taken as a full-throated dismissal of the game's combat, which I do like overall, but I did find myself waxing between disengagement and frustration towards the end.

Maybe some of my issues stem from a real bad case of Resident Evil brain for which I'm entering the terminal stages, because I found the parts of Black where you're roaming around and solving puzzles to be the most enjoyable. Yeah, I know, I'm a freak for thinking the combat is secondary to platforming and picking up weird totems to trek back to locked doors a level-and-a-half away. I have to live with myself every day of my life.

It's easy to get lost in the minutia of Ninja Gaiden Black's combat and difficulties, and if you really want to trip headfirst down the rabbit hole, you should check out all the subtle and big differences in Ninja Gaiden's many releases. I actually own a copy of 2004's Ninja Gaiden, which I mistakenly bought thinking it was a totally different game. It was only when I was a breath away from grabbing Sigma under the same assumption that I realized what I'd done, so I just have a spare lying around if anyone wants it. Just post your full address in the comments (DO NOT DO THIS, I WILL DELETE YOUR COMMENT AND SEND YOU A COPY OF AMERICA'S AMY INSTEAD AND IT WILL BE ON YOU FOR TRUSTING ME.)

Some problems inherent to the game and more still that amount to personal taste keep Ninja Gaiden Black from leaving the same impression on me that it does others, but I certainly see why people feel so passionately about it. I eagerly await them telling me how I played the game wrong and am a bastard for it, which is always the best way to get people to enjoy things the same way you do.

I don't mean to come off like a hater, but for The Greatest Action Game of All Time there sure is a lot of shit that sucks in here lmao. I know you're already fuming so keep in mind, I didn't play on Master Ninja and my opinion is not valid. Okay? Cool.

So what do I mean? The occasionally finicky platforming, the tedious (but graciously easy) water level, and especially the part where the game goes DMC2 mode and makes you fight tanks and a helicopter with ranged weapons. C'mon man, how can you directly invite that kind of comparison and not think "what are we doing here?" If the idea was "we can do it better," well sure, you did, but not by much.

Frankly most of the bosses weren't great; the first fight with Murai sets you up to expect a bunch of sick duels and then most of the fights are just giant stationary creatures with three attacks and a nasty grab. I mean you fight four of those worms, man. Is that really making the most of the killer combat system? I understand that higher difficulties mix things up with adds, etc. but to me that kinda illustrates how weak the boss designs were in the first place...

As negative as that came off, when the game is cooking, it is absolutely sick and overall, I had a very good time with it. But given its monstrous reputation I was really surprised how just much of the mid-game felt like a slog.

sentimentos conflitantes nesse aq, eu legitimamente adoro o combate e gosto do design de (alguns) inimigos mas deus do céu eu odeio os chefes e os níveis desse jogo, especialmente da metade pra frente, em especial o cap 15 e 14, pqp espancamento games.

faz bem o bastante pra eu não conseguir desgostar e ainda tenho expectativas pro 2, mas ainda assim saí com um gosto amargo na boca

realidad máxima, juego de ninjas para putos crackheads

shoutout to my buddy Chico for letting me borrow his xbox one so I could play this version of the game, Your a real one.

Talk about tough. But I loved this game. One of the funnest games I owned for my OG Xbox.
The graphics were beautiful, the action intense, secrets to find. The combo system was fun. You could just go ham.

The greatest action game ever made. This game has a certain atmosphere and charm that is so of its time that I can't help but love.

it's just the best action game ever made really, totally different from anything else out there even its own followups

if you have not played this game you are not legally allowed to slop me off

Xemu devs making the most stable emulator challenge (impossible)
Thanks to devs, only left choice to me playing this game is shitty ass sigma version of it


Schizophrenic ninja going on a rampage to murder a godly emperor.
Gaming in its rawest form.

this games combat is utterly incredible. not enough attention is given to how good it feels to kill enemies in this game, theres an amazing ebb and flow with combat i have yet to see anywhere else

I desperately want to be able to love this game, I think the fundamentals of combat are excellent and I deeply respect what it’s doing on that front. There’s a tendency in character action games, even ones I love (thinking of DMC primarily) for enemies to be relegated to being a punching-bag, whether they’re too passive or not really able to keep up with the protagonist's superior mobility. Ryu is one of the most mobile (and well animated) of them all - being able to wall run and flip over the heads of enemies while air-slashing through them, but it's cleverly counterbalanced by enemies having very quick attacks and especially grabs which can go through blocks without it being possible to react, which necessitates the constant use of that mobility to avoid being pinned down. In that sense it has a fighting game feel to it, simultaneously promoting good aggressive and defensive play. Those prone to getting frustrated would call untelegraphed, unblockable attacks “bad game design”, but its constructed in accordance with Ryu’s toolkit and gives the combat incredible stakes, often focused around who lands the first hit, and lends a very distinct thematic character to Ryu as a human at the height of training rather than someone with supernatural power, which is felt because the player has to approach combat in a similarly disciplined way. Other ideas like the essence mechanic, despite being poorly conveyed, are also very good and make charge moves actually useful when even in the best action games they’re mostly useless due to being so slow.

So why don’t I love it? I think as early as chapter 6, the game plummets in the quality of its level and boss ideas and never really climbs back up. Every platforming section feels finicky and frustrating, the ones where you have to platform while ranged enemies shoot at you feel particularly sadistic, the military base infinitely spawning laser drones that send you flying if they hit you takes my nomination for the worst of all. I don’t mind the general difficulty of the game but these sections are difficult in a way which is not interesting or enjoyable to engage with. The swimming chapter is another example of an idea so disconnected from what makes the core mechanics good that it's difficult to imagine anyone finding it fun. Bosses were also mostly pretty terrible. Bland and simplistic movesets aside, I feel this combat is very obviously complimented by opponents similarly sized to Ryu who will react to being hit, whereas the game is content to throw these massive boss monsters at you over and over again, even having the gall to recycle a very bad worm miniboss four times in quick succession. There seemed to be a commitment to having diverse scenarios but some of its ideas are awful: infinitely spawning phantom fish that lock you into a grab animation, fights vs tanks and helicopters with awful ranged combat, grab attacks in the final tower that pull you through the floor and make you slog through the same section again, and so on.

It's fashionable to bemoan the shift of action games away from exploration and worldbuilding and towards an endless stream of combat arenas but I'll be honest and say that I found the attempt at an interconnected world here pretty underwhelming, at no point did any of its lame lock-and-key puzzles or frictionless backtracking impress me. While I agree with the overall sentiment about CAG's neglecting the importance of their worlds, I would rather not return to this particular incarnation of it.

It feels pointless to complain about the story given that nobody cares but it’s kind of impressively bad and incoherent, Rachel is a particularly trashfire character design that feels like what outsiders to gaming have in mind when they deride the gaming sphere as juvenile and unserious and every cutscene that with her in it had me looking over my shoulder to quickly get the game off the monitor if someone walked in.

The camera is a common point of complaint with a lot of players. Its permanent inverted controls (+ a very awkward activation which I didn’t figure out for quite a while) already make it inherently weak but the game seems determined to construct environments that make the camera freak out in its winding, claustrophobic tunnels. There are frequent combat arenas where enemies will just spawn behind you, requiring you to either reposition or just try to guess what the enemy is doing, which feels like playing around a bad camera rather than actually engaging with the mechanics. Context sensitivity is another issue revolving around this. Interact and attack being the same button was particularly frustrating but in terms of the most frequent fuck-ups flying swallow is inconsistent both in activation and damage and will just sometimes hit an armored part of the enemy and do nothing.

My laundry list of gripes I can only lay out in a boring manner because it's not a unified problem but a sort of consistent stream of ancillary issues that stick themselves onto a very fundamentally sound core, and so I do come out the other end still favourable towards Ninja Gaiden Black, but I am disappointed that unlike a lot of people I respect on this platform I can’t really call it one of my favourites. I will say that I think the visuals of the game are generally very good and I could easily see myself appreciating it more on a second playthrough, but for now it can sit at a strong 7.