May 23, 2005
Ninja Gaiden is a series which has always existed as the direct foil of games that let you think. Even when I was ten, I got the distinct feeling that Tecmo and its employees hated me, specifically me, and I suspected that I would eventually reach a cutscene in which Ryu showed me his ass, and suggest that I kiss it. And then be knocked off a cliff by an eagle, which is what happens a lot. Apparently, the series has not gotten any easier, which is comforting, in a way; I wouldn’t want a new generation of gamers to go around thinking Ryu was a mincing pansy who just palled around with copiously-attributed female warriors all day.
I’ve played a lot of games since I was ten. Growing older has, thankfully, only afforded me the opportunity to further indulge my gaming habit. But, honestly, I suspect that I’m rustier than I used to be. I used to, for example, regard the opposite sex as a confusing and enigmatic race, much as one might view a race of bipedal ants, and respecting their tendency to ignore me wholesale freed up countless hours which, nowadays, I spend on trivialities like dating, and washing myself. The question which spawned this article was this: Could I press myself to achieve heights I couldn’t scale when I was in my virtual prime? Could I do it on a game which drove me to throw my first controller across the room? Could I do it dressed like a ninja?
No, and here is why: Playing Ninja Gaiden is like play-acting Job. Your crops will wilt, your children and wife will perish, your riches will fade, and you will be stricken with sores. Whoever was responsible for the level design in this game is some sort of Marquis de Sade, obsessed with the slow torture of other humans. After the cloyingly easy first stage, there are scores of situations in which you will find the need to jump over a pit in the ground, only to find that mid-jump, the game is throwing a bird at you. Later in the game, the other side of the ledge may be inhabited by a man with a gun, or a knife. The timing required to execute jumps like this correctly — because if you are supposing to yourself that being hit will not knock you backwards into a fall towards endless oblivion, you are supposing up the wrong tree — is inhuman. The playtesters from this game must have been the subdivision of the Super Mario Club consisting entirely of angry, bitter robots, built with thin, filigreed fingers of acute precision.
There were sub-stages I ended up spending full hours on; multiple hours. At the end of 6-3, I could find no reliable way to progress past a certain point without exploiting a bug1 that made certain enemy sprites vanish. This would have been convenient in other places in the game, except that the exploit’s trigger is usually what makes extra enemies appear. I cannot shake the feeling that this reversal was placed into the game with specific care. I also cannot shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, Hideo Kojima helped script it2.
And then there is the final battle. The last boss is less like a trial for the skills you should have acquired on your way through the game, and more like an elaborate in-joke cooked up by the designers about how hard their game already was:
Designer A: Oh, man…wouldn’t it be hilarious if this unbelievably difficult game that we’re making —
Designer B: Fugghin right! (throws an empty bottle of scotch through a windowpane)
Designer A: — wouldn’t it just kill if the last boss was, like, nine or ten times as hard as the rest of the game?
Designer B (soberly): That would be the best joke of all time.
Designer A: Well, I…hmm. I can just make it so that when you die fighting the last boss, you get kicked back a few levels.
AND SO:
Continuing on levels 1-1 through 6-3 (excepting the first boss battle):
- You may start again at the beginning of the stage you were playing.
Continuing after fighting any incarnation of the last boss:
- You get to start again at the beginning of 6-1.
But my mission was not to review the game; it was to beat it. To scale the heights that had frustrated my younger self, and made him go outside and run around for awhile. To seriously fucking get past this ledge with the axe-throwing guy on it and WHERE DID THAT HAWK COME FROM GODDAMMIT THAT’S THE FIFTH TIME et al. And the last boss, despite his three incarnations, isn’t all that hard. The first is defeated by running up to his face and repeatedly hitting it with a sword3; the third by running up to his face, then tail, then pulsating, demonic heart, and doing the same. It is only the second incarnation that gave me any trouble, mostly because they reduced the amount of time you stay invincible after you are hit for no good reason. Does this not seem like a huge deal to you? Are you not, even now, leaping out of your chair, and perhaps even throwing it through your television, in response to this great injustice? You should be, because this is fucking ludicrous. Nowhere else in the game — on no other screen, ever — are you in danger of being juggled in midair with such frequency, because the boss floats, and also shoots homing projectiles at you. At one point I leapt to strike Jaquio, was instead hit by a fireball, bounced into Jaquio, and bounced into another fucking fireball. I consider it only an oversight that there were no pits for me to fall into, or maybe a peripheral which could use the NES’s lonely expansion port to kick me square in the nuts once in a while.
Despite all this, though, I finally managed to beat the stupid game in its stupid face. Ninja Gaiden’s inherently cinematic nature made the post-climactic wind-down fairly worthwhile, and I laid back, as though post-coitally4: Another entry had been crossed off of my lifelong “To-Do” list, putting “play Capture the Flag with paintball guns and ATVs” back in the top slot, where it belonged. Then, after thinking about it for awhile, I started up Dead or Alive 2 and just whaled on Ryu on training mode for like ten minutes. And then I felt better about the eagles.
1 This is achieved by letting the enemy appear on the screen, then dashing backwards so he dissapears, and running forward again. It also works in real life, so if you’re in danger of being mugged, you should duck into an alley and jump out again.
2 To the uninitiated: Hideo Kojima, the man behind Metal Gear Solid and Boktai, is an insane sadist who is purported to have said that he would like to create games which either erase themselves entirely if the player loses, or which can physically hurt the player. Given that the plot of Metal Gear Solid 2 gave me a huge headache for being so completely ludicrous, I’d say he’s already achieved one of those goals.
3 I might not have done so well at this, had I not already been trained by two of the world’s greatest masters, Revolver Ocelot and Gracie. My reistance to torture and snazzy wardrobe are but a few of the side benefits.
4 It is often the case that I have to slay an eons-old aberration of nature infused to its core with pure evil in order to achieve orgasm.
