 Review By: Cameron Morris |
Developer: | Team Ninja |
| Publisher: | Tecmo | |
| Genre: | Action | |
| ESRB: | Mature | |
| # Of Players: | 1 | |
| Online Play: | No | |
| Accessories: | Memory Unit, In-game Dolby Digital, HDTV 480p support, Xbox Live Scoreboards | |
| Buy Now: |   |
The sound in the game isn’t as great as the graphics but is still very good and more than gets the job done in every area. The music is appropriate according to your setting and situation: whether you’re in a medieval ninja village, a deep underground temple, or a futuristic city full of highly advanced military personnel, the music is always fitting. The sound effects are great and often visceral, with the contact of every weapon bringing its own satisfactory little ching or splat. The voice acting isn’t exactly top-notch in either English or Japanese, but the in-battle voices are all pretty good, with screams and battle cries that are about like what you would expect.
I should mention this: Ninja Gaiden Black is hard. In fact, it can be very, very, very, very hard. The game sports five difficulties, the easiest of which is unlocked by dying three times in the first level before you make it to a save point in Normal mode. As you progress the game’s difficulty seriously starts ramping up, and by the end of the game on any difficulty you are either a serious killing machine or being turned into hamburger. There is no other way it’s going to be. For action fans that crave difficulty dependent solely on your own skill, this is where you should look, because no matter how mind-blowing and frustrating Ninja Gaiden Black might be, it’s also fair, and there is no situation in which you cannot win. The boss fights in particular are almost notorious for stomping the crap out of every other confrontation in modern gaming in terms of difficulty, but it’s never really so bad that you’ll want to break your controller because you can always just say, “It’s okay. Just need to be a little quicker. Just a little quicker…”
The one thing in the entire game that contributes to the difficulty where it should not is the camera. Though it has been improved since the original release and you’ve been given the option to move it yourself when necessary, it still has a tendency to center on Ryu from the worst possible angle at the worst possible time, and sometimes doesn’t focus on enemies even when Ryu himself is. I’ve died once or twice thanks to the stupid camera, and that’s not something that can easily be tolerated in this kind of game.
The game plays out in a linear story mode that takes place over the course of sixteen chapters, each moving through different environments and battles to reach a confrontation at the end. The setting for the game, for the most part, is a massive city called Tairon where Ryu is hunting the men behind the murder of his clan. This is the bulk of the game, and if you go in expecting mostly a lot of fighting then there is no way you can be disappointed in it.
The plot for Ninja Gaiden Black, as you may or may not have expected, is very silly. Well, “silly” isn’t the word, but it’s nothing you can take very seriously because it’s just so ridiculous that your little brother could have written it after watching a few ninja anime. That’s okay, as the plot is really just a vehicle for the action, but if that’s the kind of thing that bothers you then this game will drive you insane.
For those of you who played the original Ninja Gaiden, you probably want to know exactly what’s new to the game, what will make you sit down and want to play it again. For you newcomers, consider this a simple chat about what makes the game replayable to an incredible degree. The game’s five difficulties are each markedly different from each other, with two of them (Ninja Dog and Master Ninja) being entirely new to this version of the game. Each higher level of difficulty introduces new enemies, new items, and for the last couple of difficulties, new bosses. More than that, each subsequent difficulty setting is so much harder than the last one that you will find yourself actively adapting to familiar situations in new ways all the time, and your style of play will evolve as you move through the game. In this way the game is never boring, and it’s really something you can appreciate as enemies are replaced with newer, more powerful ones and bosses are either revamped or replaced altogether with hellions that just make you want to fall on the ground and die. Each time through the campaign is different enough to stand on its own merits, and if that’s not enough for you then beating each difficulty also unlocks a new costume for our ninja hero.
Also new to the game is the Mission Mode, which is really like the story mode condensed into its purest form: basically you’re set in the middle of a large room or other small environment, given a gauntlet of enemies or bosses to fight through, and simply let loose to try to fight through to the end. Each of these “missions” is very similar in that each of them is about killing everything in sight but they’re also different because each set of enemies requires an entirely unique style of play to get past. And when you get to the missions where they start throwing more than one boss at a time at you? It’s really something to behold. Throw in the fact that there are no less than fifty of these missions, each one increasingly difficult and insane, and you have something to keep you busy for a very long time.
Bottom Line:
Ninja Gaiden Black is, simply put, the definitive action game experience. It’s incredibly hard, it’s lightning fast, it’s very violent, and most of all it’s fun. With five difficulty settings across sixteen chapters, five costumes to unlock, over a dozen weapons new and old, great cinematics, and a fifty-level mission mode (each with five difficulty settings), this is a game you can keep coming back to for a long, long, long time. It’s true that it suffers from graphical slowdown in places, and that the game is so hard it may alienate new players, and that the story can be indecipherable if you don’t pay attention and is still stupid if you do, but this is still the best and purest action you can get, no questions asked. If you can beat the Master Ninja difficulty in the main quest, you’ve done something Biblical. Buy it. Buy it now.
| Pros: | Cons: | Final Score: |
|---|---|---|
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| 9.2 |
Posted: 2006-04-06 17:18:53 PST