Mini Review: Ninja Gaiden Black (XBLA)

Today (three months ago), I beat Ninja Gaiden Black, an improved version of the XBOX game Ninja Gaiden by Japanese developer Playboy Mag-I mean Team Ninja.

Ninja Gaiden Black is a 3rd person action game in which you play as Ryu Hayabusa, a ninja. For most of the game, you wear a black jump suit and kill everything except for an old man and two hot-sex ninja women who help you by giving you tips, coating themselves in liquids, and putting themselves in danger so you have to rescue them (the old man doesn't do some of these things; he does offer you services for a fee, if you know what I mean).

The game has a story, but it’s only an excuse for moving you to different fights in different environments. You're on a revenge quest against a bad person who something about a sword that something something end of the world must prevent. Romance avoided. Not enough porn.

The story mode offers you 10 melee weapons and 5 projectile weapons and a few magic attacks (assume I'm right). Assuming you decide to play this game no more than once because you don’t have brain damage, the only melee weapon you’ll use for most of the game is the dragon sword, i.e. a katana.

Bad things about the game. Many people claim that the game is too difficult: that the enemies do too much damage; that you have to memorize visual cues and react to them quickly (And there are different cues with every kind of enemy, and many save points are not placed close enough to the hardest battles). I agree that difficulty is a problem, but not for those reasons. The real difficulty problem is that you have to manage the camera a lot or die 2 billion times instead of just 1 billion times. If you don’t press the right trigger button more than all the other buttons combined, your view of your enemies won’t exist well. Another morally bad thing about NGB is falling to your death due to the camera moving a lot - and fingering the right stick in the right direction ALL THE TIME becomes impossible and unorgasmic. Another annoying thing about this game is that the writing and voice acting blow. But they don't suck in a laughter-inducing way; they just blow. A missed opportunity the story is; they should have made it a comedy. Also, enemies respawn. Maybe the developers put this in because an endless supply of enemies provides an endless supply of the-thingy-that-is-used-for-money-in-the-game, but because the average enemy will kill you if you finger the buttons wrongly, re-fighting enemies is tedious.

I found the puzzles tediously easy. Most of them make you go from one place to another collecting stuff and squirreling it to other places. They, like the story, are just an excuse for moving you to different fights in different environments.

Good things about the game: Many colors. Varied environments. You fight everything from tanks to dinosaurs to Arnold Schwarzenegger to the skeleton ghosts of fish. The challenges that stretch you to your limit, in which you just barely win or lose, are awesome (however, they don’t occur as often as the battles in which you may-most-certainly suffer 50% damage). And mission mode is arguably more fun than story mode. (Mission mode was introduced in the Black edition of the game.)

Conclusion: I'm not sure if this type of game is dying, games that are penis-mashingly hard. I say, skip it (unless playing a game that makes you feel like a super ninja who dies a lot is one of your childhood dreams). Prefer getting your master-difficult-game-for-increased-button-pressing-skills from completing achievements in games that do achievements right, like games by Valve Software.

Note: I read somewhere that you can activate easy mode (which is merely hard) by dying a lot on the first level. (Only in the Black and Sigma editions)