Ninja Gaiden (Sega Master System Review)

Ninja Gaiden
Platform: Sega Master System
Released July, 1992
Directed by Kouji Inokuchi and Kanako Koyama
Developed by SIMS
Published by Sega
Only Released in Europe
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

This is completely different from the NES series, except both games use unimaginative cheap shots instead of actual challenge.

Okay, so my plans for a Sega Master System themed month sort of blew up in my face. SMS fans, like nearly every classic gaming community, are f’n awesome and I wanted to reward them with a month dedicated to their platform since, for whatever reason, Sega ignores the SMS outside of endless Sonic collections. The problem is my choices of games have not been on point. After I gave the first two games, Asterix and Master of Darkness, a NO!, I was determined to find a YES! game. Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is one of the most critically acclaimed games on the platform, so I ignored the little voice in my head that said “yea? Didn’t critics say that Chariots of Fire was a better movie than Raiders of the Lost Ark?” and fired it up. It doesn’t really play all that much like the NES game that I recently reviewed a ROM hack of, Deadpool. It controls much better, for one thing, and it has a proper wall jump. A pretty good wall jump, too. One of the better 8-bit versions of that maneuver. The sword is slightly better. There’s also an absurd glitch that allows you to have unlimited sub-weapon points. Once you reach the max 999 sub-weapon points, it never again takes a point from you. It makes it much easier to fight the pregnant skeletons. Yes, you read that right: pregnant skeletons. This game is weird, yo.

Just try to imagine their baby showers.

There’s no doubt about it: Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is superior to the NES game. And it’s still not good, because by the halfway point of the game, its designers gave up on creating fun levels and thrilling platforming sequences and instead lowered themselves to the level of the world’s most unimaginative 12 year old playing Mario Maker. The first three or four levels are really good, and while they’re not devoid of cheap moments, there’s plenty of solid action and well-placed enemies. Then Ninja Gaiden completely changes its tone and instead becomes one GOTCHA after another designed to use the knock-back to one shot the player. Any idiot can design their platform game as a series of digital mousetraps. It takes no talent at all because all you have to do is create one specific path the player MUST traverse, then put the lethal element along that path in a way that nobody can possibly anticipate or react to fast enough the first go around. Something you have to already know is there and be in the process of defending against as you make your move towards the part of the screen that has it. Literal trial and error based around memorizing the timing on each element. When you think about it, doesn’t that type of design make your game, regardless of the genre or theme, nothing more than a fancy version of Simon?

On this part, you’re being blown backwards by a wind generator, and that fire wall damages you. It took me quite a while to get up onto the platform in the upper-left corner. As soon as I did, the game fired two projectiles, one high and one low, that knocked me back to where I was to do it over again. F*ck this game.

What started as a fun game becomes pretty terrible by the end. Very limited creativity. No finesse. Just one gotcha after another. Like, it does the rising/lowering lava trope, which became a clichéd gaming staple for a reason: it always works. Well, unless you lull players into thinking the timing is consistent, and then GOTCHA, THE TIMING JUST CHANGED! Ninja Gaiden pulls that trick a few times in its lava section. There’s even a point where I’m pretty sure it’s not even a true rising/lowering timing challenge and instead it’s a last-pixel jump, because the lava will always rise and knock you back into a pit unless you leap off the edge of one platform and land on another. The one annoying platforming trope Ninja Gaiden hadn’t used up to this point was last-pixel jumps. On one hand, hey, at least it’s an original GOTCHA that plays on player’s expectations, but it’s still a GOTCHA and I’ve never enjoyed that type of game design, even with perks like rewinding and save states to ease the pain.

I’m so frustrated, because those early levels had excellent level design, even if the combat still isn’t that amazing.

I should also note that the combat was no longer fun by this point, either. My immersion was already broken by having birds be significantly more threatening than the ninjas themselves, but it gets worse. There’s these sentient fireballs that chase you, and their attack pattern is simply to heat-seek you and stay on top of your sprite. Sure, they can be killed, but they always come in threes, and eventually in fours from multiple directions. When one inevitably gets through, it will knock you back, and while you’re blinking it’s already back on top of you and ready to hit you a second time. These enemies are always by pits, too. They’re not designed or placed to drain your health. They’re there to kill you via a knock-back into a pit. Okay, so kill them before they get to you, right? Yea, did I mention they take two hits to kill and enemies get almost as much blinking as you do? There’s no way you can kill all three or four because they move fast and have too much invulnerability after the first hit. To put it in perspective: I had a sub-weapon that shot four heat-seeking bullets out at once, and even with this AND anticipating they would appear, at least one, and usually multiple, will have enough time to reach me.

If not for the aforementioned infinite sub-weapon glitch, I don’t think I’d have bothered finishing this even with rewind/save states. It’s such a chore to get through.

For whatever reason, Tecmo was especially bad about difficulty scaling during this era. I like Solomon’s Key, or at least the core gameplay concept, but it becomes ridiculous by the end. Rygar on the NES seems like a great adventure game, but it heavily relies on cheap shots too. No studio from this era that made more fun engines and concepts only to then wreck the overall experience by upping the difficulty to ruinous levels as much as Tecmo. I can’t help but wonder if they fell prey to the same thing that plagues a lot of indie developers. There’s this phenomenon where devs play-testing their games forget that they’re the best player in the entire world at their own game because, you know, nobody else has played it.  So they keep upping the difficulty because they know what to do, forgetting that they’re creating a product for people who don’t know and haven’t invested their entire lives into its creation and thus know every tiny idiosyncrasy. I don’t know for sure that’s what happened at Tecmo, but clearly something was wrong with their play testing because, outside of their sports games, I don’t think I’ve played an 8-bit Tecmo game scaled right. They always end up more maddening than fun.

I thought the bosses were all bad. Repetitive, spongy, they blink too much, and they have very limited and basic attack patterns. They’re ALL a slog, and one of them has a near-instakill by turning the entire platform into a bottomless pit if you’re not standing in the right spot to fight it.

Going back to the Simon comparison, some people like Simon. I’m guessing the people who enjoy it are the people who like games where the words “trial and error” dominate the discussion as much as they do. I don’t like Simon at all. I think it’s boring, and I think games that devolve into pure trial and error are boring. Where it’s very unlikely you can reasonably be expected to overcome challenges on your first attempt. That’s just not fun to me. It stops being frustrating after a while and just becomes busy work. I could see how someone in 1991 who is starved for content on the Master System could shower Ninja Gaiden with praise. It’s one of the most celebrated European-exclusives on the console, and for the first few levels, it lives up to that. But it doesn’t last. Had it stayed the course with a game that was focused on platforming acrobatics and using enemies as something you think about and react to rather than just booby traps, I think Ninja Gaiden had a chance at being one of the best retro platforms I’ve reviewed. Instead, it’s just another game where I read the contemporary reviews and ask “did they even play past the first stage?”
Verdict: NO!

Contra had you fighting a heart. Life Force had you fighting an eyeball. Metroid had you fighting a brain. Ninja Gaiden has demonic uvulas. Nice.