"I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." - Ash, Alien(1979)

Character action games tend to get a lot of mileage from their... well, characters. Dante and Bayonetta are both larger-than life flamboyant quipsters, styling on whatever bizarre monster dares stand in their path. But as for Ninja Gaiden's hero? According to instruction manuals and the occasional cutscene, Ryu Hayabusa is best described as a thoughtful young man, wise beyond his years. Though you'll never see any of that during gameplay.

In-game? He has specific animations for performing executions on people who have already been decapitated. Because this isn't about Ryu, not really. It's about how every single enemy in the game wants you dead more than they want to live. Cut off an arm, they'll stab with the arm they have left. Cut off a leg, they'll crawl your way with a knife between their teeth. Even the game itself will throw enemy after enemy at you until the engine starts to break under the strain. Self-preservation is for the weak.

If this game is about anything, it's about being a ninja, and being a ninja means murdering other ninja until the second you drop dead. It's no wonder that when Yosuke Hayashi took the reigns of the series for the third entry, he admitted to wanting to take a different approach to the violence. To explore the consequences of Ryu's taking of human life. Except, the second you try to step outside Ninja Gaiden's relentless kill-or-be-killed attitude, it falls apart. In a world focused on human consequence, Ryu's a maniac. But for the franchise's take on ninjas? He's the only kind of person who gets to stick around.

One more thing: a story that often gets passed around is how Itagaki got frustrated during development of the first game when he learned that ghost fish were being modeled for use as background decoration. He was quoted as saying "This is an action game. You can't just put something in there for atmosphere that is taking up memory and disc space. You either take it out or make it an enemy and do what I say because this is an action game." And that's Ninja Gaiden's attitude in a nutshell. If it doesn't want to kill you, what's the point?