Ninja Gaiden. Best thing ever? Not sure...definitely top five material. As a person who has painstakingly played and ultimately become victorious over every NG game since the first one on the NES, I am comfortable making that statement.
Let's get this out of the way - are the Gaiden games difficult? The answer is - and always has been - hell yes. These games have an immense learning curve and thus the difficulty is perceived to be ratcheted up pretty high (too high for most...but most people are pussies so it makes sense). In the early days, this learning curve was all about memorizing patterns; you had to know when the birds or bats would start flying at you in their erratic ways, because if they hit you you end up plummeting to your doom (for those not in the know, a good comparison here are the birds featured in some of the later sections of the original Castlevania game; they'd knock you right off the edge if you didn't watch your shit). You had to know to open the Malth battle with aggression, or you'd run out of HP before he did, simple toe-to-toe tactics. And, I'll say it - you had to have a little luck on your side. That's OK - it was an 8-bit 2D side-scroller, and it was brought up to the Gaiden standards of an extremely difficult game by allowing for circumstances that were simply unsurvivable to line up periodically.
With the series reboot in 2004 on the Xbox, consoles had evolved such that Team Ninja was able to serve up a difficult game, but a game where luck didn't factor into things at all: you simply had to a) learn your shit, b) know your shit, c) bring your shit, and d) bring your A++ game. No room for luck. This was proven over and over by the online videos showing players who had mastered the game to a degree where they were able to complete entire sections of the game while taking no damage: this was a learning curve in its purest form: you learn by your failures, you evolve, you develop, and you ultimately excel.
2007 brought us Ninja Gaiden Sigma on the PS3; this was an expansion of the 2004 version for the next generation of consoles. That I am aware of, NGS marked the first console Gaiden game where series guardian Tomonobu Itagaki handed the director reigns to Yosuke Hayashi. And it ended up being a let-down.
We should have learned from this. The new boss fights were massively out of character for the game; the Gamov battle would have been better suited to a Street Fighter-type game, and the twin sister ladies? WTF? Am I the only one who noticed that one of them (the one minus the tentacles) was identical to fighting Alma? And sure, we all dug seeing our favorite ninja in HD, but is it worth it when you have to play as Rachel for whole chapters at a time? Who gave that piece of shit decision the green light? Oh yeah, the director. Hayashi.
Moving on: 2008 brought about the reason I purchased an X360 (and the game I played in said 360 until I got E74ed) - Ninja Gaiden 2. NG2 for the X360 was and is - in my opinion - the greatest video game experience a person could hope for. Itagaki once again took the director reigns and delivered a visceral bloodbath of an experience; one that truly lives up to it's promise to cause your pulse to "pound." The Master Ninja (MN) difficulty setting in particular proved to be the single most difficult thing I've ever done. In LIFE, not just in a game. And if you know me at all, you know that impossible-sounding challenges in life are the only thing that get me off anymore, so...yeah. That's saying something.
...but then Itagaki quits. Yousuck (haha I'm rad) Hayashi is promoted to head of Team Ninja and, as expected, delivers us the piece of shit that is the Sigma version of Ninja Gaiden 2. The blood is removed (good idea, dickmouth, pull the blood out in a game where people still end up headless and legless all over the place...that's like McDonald's "updating" their Big Mac by removing the secret sauce). New enemies? You bet, you get to fight a giant stupid Buddha statue (twice) and the Statue of Liberty. Because that's what the game was missing, right? Lumbering statues, and for some reason a couple enemies that were unique to the last Gaiden game (unfortunately this back-stepping marked the beginning of a trend).
What else? Oh, I know what you're thinking: "Do we get to have our game momentum completely derailed by having to play as Rachel again? Probably not, right, as she's been replaced in story mode by Sonia the CIA operative, huh?" Don't bet on it, buddy, because - for reasons that still don't make complete sense to me - Rachel returned for Sigma 2!! Only this time, we will force you to play not just as Rachel, but two other chicks as well! F*ck yeah!!
I could literally carry on like this forever, so let me wrap this up and get to my main point: Itagaki always pushed the game forward, however, this is not about breaking new ground. The primary point here is the difficulty of the game. Itagaki developed the various difficulties for these games from the ground up and made sure that gamers of all skill levels were accounted for in the various difficulty settings. Most importantly, in creating the MN difficulty, Itagaki never resorted to artificial difficulty by forcing a player to get "lucky" in order to succeed. This effort is one of the primary reasons Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden 2 were so successful and so special.
In Hayashi's Sigma series? Different story. Master Ninja mode on Sigma 2 was an absolute abortion to any true fan of the series. Hayashi removed most of the enemies, dumbed-down their aggression levels and AI, EMPTIED entire sections of the game, sections where fans had come to expect extreme action (looking at chapter 11 here, which is actually chapter 14 in the Sigma Universe thanks to the three terrible aforementioned Chick Chapters), and attempted to make up for it by simply giving the enemies the ability to instant-kill your character at any time with an unblockable grab attack.
In Hayashi's Sigma series? Different story. Master Ninja mode on Sigma 2 was an absolute abortion to any true fan of the series. Hayashi removed most of the enemies, dumbed-down their aggression levels and AI, EMPTIED entire sections of the game, sections where fans had come to expect extreme action (looking at chapter 11 here, which is actually chapter 14 in the Sigma Universe thanks to the three terrible aforementioned Chick Chapters), and attempted to make up for it by simply giving the enemies the ability to instant-kill your character at any time with an unblockable grab attack.
That is not difficulty. That is luck, and it's something we as a gaming community of ninjas evolved well beyond in 2004 (almost a decade ago). Compare any MN-level battle with Alexei in NG2 and Sigma 2 and you'll realize that in NG2, it is possible for you to develop your skills such that you know, walking into the battle, that you will win. You could bet your paycheck on it. With Sigma 2? Not so. Alexei can snatch you up at any time and end you. You need to get a little bit lucky, sorry.
And that, fellow ninja, is my point - Hayashi has established himself as someone who is willing to take steps backwards, while Itagaki always drove us forward...most times, at a pace that challenged our comfort levels.
And that, fellow ninja, is my point - Hayashi has established himself as someone who is willing to take steps backwards, while Itagaki always drove us forward...most times, at a pace that challenged our comfort levels.
In less then two months, the much-anticipated Ninja Gaiden 3 will drop. With Hayashi in the director's chair, I'm putting the odds of me playing this game more than once at about fifty percent (as opposed to Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden 2, which I have logged thousands of hours on). I sincerely doubt this game will have a learning curve or enough of a technical element to keep me engaged for more than two weeks. People are up in arms about the DMC reboot; while I am amongst the many concerned DMC fans, I worry that we have much more to fear from Mr. Hayashi in terms of potential disappointment and overall disrespect for the series. I pray that I am wrong, and I will be the first to return here and admit it if I am. (Though I will not apologize for calling Hayashi a pussy, as Sigma 2 came out on my birthday, and it literally ruined my birthday by being such a pussified version of a Gaiden game. I took it out and put in NG2 after a couple chapters.)
(And sorry, but I have to say this just once, I know it's lame but I won't do it again, I promise...matter of fact, don't even bother scrolling down if you're not sure you want to see it...I'll give you the chance to just quit here, OK? It's immature, lame of me, I'll be talking shit to someone who will never be able to defend himself here, alright? He'll never even know it exists. Gotta do it though, punk rock roots preclude me from not saying it...)
Fuck you, Hayashi, you mammoth pussy, fuck you for ruining my favorite series with your "sigma" crap. Taking the windmill shuriken out of Sigma 2? What the fuck, man? Were you raised to believe your whims were more important than 20+ years of history (because yes, some incarnation of the windmill shuriken has been in every single Gaiden game since the NES version...because the fucking fans liked it, dipshit)? Who the fuck do you think you are? Who the fuck did your parents think they were to raise a son with such an over-inflated sense of self-regard? You're an ass and I hope you choke, mostly figuratively but I don't split hairs. Pussy.
PUSSY.
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