My Experience With Ninja Gaiden Black (Spoilers)
I've played quite a lot of Devil May Cry, well over 300+ hours as of writing, my time was spread out between hd collection, dmc4 vanilla, and dmc 5. I think I had my fair share of freestyling in the games (just casual play) but I was definitely yearning for a strong combat experience that would try to pull me apart. Enter Ninja Gaiden. I heard about from time to time from DMC players so my curiousity piqued. This review is on Ninja Gaiden Black played on the Xemu emulator. I must say that the emulation experience is quite rough. The pre-rendered cutscenes on Xemu are just broken as of writing. Audio delay/stuttering and video stuttering, how fun. Additionally, it may be my PC but when I am in a combat encounter, my game would slow down by maybe 10%. Somehow a program manages to run worse than a game like Minecraft. (this is a backhand at Minecraft) With all those issues acknowledged, I will get into this review.
When the game started out, it definitely seemed kind of average. Well of course you're playing as a badass ninja but like, you're a ninja at a ninja village. Will this just be a cliche ninja story? Also, I had definitely scoffed at the existance of a block button. It definitely does seem cheap to negate enemy attacks by holding a button. After all those thoughts, I later actually started doing my own research and started trying to put the pieces together on how to play this game. Ninja Gaiden is way out of element for a dmc player like myself. Combat is grounded and you have to deal with memorizing string combinations unlike DMC where the player can essentially dish out tons of air combat and only have to worry about directional inputs instead of counting how many times they press X. So of course, moving from DMC to NG creates tons of dissonance. Enemies in this game also are really aggressive, you don't need to move to a higher difficulty like DMC to encounter some tough challenges. After doing all of that extensive research which is essentially watching JayTB videos, I found myself in a very fun game. Your enemies ranged from Ninjas of various types to tanks and demon-like creatures called Fiends. The enemies put the aggression on the player and frequently have abilities to bypass the block previously mentioned. Moves like grabs, guard-breaks, and guard-crushes keep the block action balanced. And of course, enemies may have their own attack strings themselves for the player to adapt to and they maybe not have all those aforementioned moves so enemy knowledge is important. Now, I really don't see a difference in enemy movement behaviors (except those samurai on horseback and flyers, urghh-) but I don't see that a problem for an action game. If enemies could find a way to have different movement, it could be nice for the game but I won't cry over it. Now the environments didn't just turn out having only ninja environments, we actually get some areas like the Vigoorian airship and the city of Vigoor itself where we travel through a Monastery, Underground Area, Aquaduct, Military base, weird depiction of Hell, and etc. I also really like how we don't just see these locations just once then never again, we actually go through some of these areas more than a few times and we can always reach any area except for the airship. It makes for an interconnected experience like we're actually exploring an area and opening things up. I assume future games will continue to expand on this experience. Another thing which stood out to me are the weapons. I honestly like the feel of the Dragon Sword, Lunar, Vigoorian Flail (XXX -> XXXXXX is king), and the dabilahro. They're just very cool weapons which feel good to use. I would love a weapon like the Lunar in Devil May Cry instead of that staff mode in the fifth game. A cool thing with these weapons is a mechanic called "Ultimate Techniques" where you can charge heavy attacks to do a powerful attack with a cool animation, it's very nice to pull off but also quite overpowered. In addition to the game focusing on the block mechanic, we also have movement abilities that succeed very well in making you feel like a ninja. We have wall-run, wall-jump, we get a roll which chains nicely to a jump, and a jumping on enemy head action. Once you get the hang of these actions, the game could never do without. All these parts just make a really good game loop where you block and dodge attacks to then respond to them and control and dwindle crowds.
Now on to some problems with the game. First off are the bosses. Wow they suck. Probably said a million times. You can hit an enemy or your weapon could just clang and not do damage. You fight numerous enemies at once but now you fight one guy. I really did not fight the worm bosses ... 3 times. I also didn't want to fight a weird Fiend tower thing that you have to cut tentacles off of to then do real damage. Yada yada, they're bad. Next there are some questionable enemies:
- zombie-looking enemies that have tons of health and are slow, had to spam ultimate techniques;
- ghost fish looking enemies, real punishing from one grab and are spammed;
- little bug enemies that crawl at you and those flying wasps.
We do not want these guys. Next, we could use seperate button for interacting with doors. Sometimes I want to skip a fight but my ninja just attacks instead; dumb. Oh and there's also a water level. Finally, I do get lost on where I need to go and sometimes I miss an item like how I missed the guilotine throw move or a key item for progression, it's just a thing that comes naturally in old school gaming. Now modern games make sure no one misses anything. :D
In conclusion, it's a good game. If you want to conquer crowds of enemies and be a very very cool ninja, this is a game. Some dumb things are in the game but dumb things always exist in games, you just need to know the dumb to good ratio and what you are willing to tolerate. Good game please a 1:1 faithful pc port no changes.