Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series on IC2S! It’s finally time for the entry you’ve all been waiting for: the 2004 reboot of Ninja Gaiden! This game was actually the second Ninja Gaiden game I had played, but I absolutely adored it, to the point where it made the top 25 of my all-time favourite games list. It has been more than a decade since I last played it and, in the time since, the action game landscape has completely changed. The character action game has basically disappeared and, in its place, the Soulslike has become utterly dominant. How does Ninja Gaiden‘s more old-school approach hold up after all these years? Read on to find out…

This is going to be a trend as we go through the 3D Ninja Gaiden games, but several different versions of Ninja Gaiden (2004) have been released over the years:

• First off, there’s the original game on Xbox. While it does have a few unique quirks which would be ironed out or removed later, this is basically just the base experience of Ninja Gaiden with no bells and whistles.
• Then there was Ninja Gaiden Black, which is largely a compilation of Ninja Gaiden and its DLC packs (minus one costume and one overpowered technique), plus some added weapons, enemies, bosses, difficulty modes, and small tweaks and quality of life improvements.
• Then there’s Ninja Gaiden Sigma. This version of the game was made to be a PS3 port, although it made several changes which fans are pretty mixed on. Changes include: improved graphics, many platforming and puzzle sections have been removed to make it more action-oriented and to cut down on backtracking, remixed enemy placements, there are new bosses, a new weapon, and some quality of life improvements to make the game feel less clunky. The biggest change though is that three bonus chapters for Rachel have been added, but these are very divisive since these chapters break the pacing, spoil some areas that you’ll be going to later, and a lot of fans do not like how she plays.
• Then there’s Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus. This was a PS Vita port of Sigma (and the way that I first played this game back in the day). It’s largely the same as Sigma, but it has some PS Vita gimmicky controls which hurt the experience at times and it has a lower framerate than its console counter-parts. That said, it’s perfectly playable and as fine a way to experience this game as any other if you don’t have access to a different version.
• Finally, there’s the Ninja Gaiden Master Collection version of Ninja Gaiden Sigma. This is based on the Sigma Plus version of the game, sans Vita gimmicks, and is easily the most accessible version available today.

For this Love/Hate series, I played through Ninja Gaiden Black through Xbox backwards compatibility and Ninja Gaiden Sigma on Steam Deck. I played through Black and Sigma on normal mode (in part because normal is the only mode available from the start in Black). I also played some Sigma Plus to get a feel for that version’s particular quirks. My thoughts here are based on a general overview of the various versions, but if any opinions are specific to one version, I will note that.

Love

• Combat – Ninja Gaiden has a very deliberate pace to its combat. Compared to its sequels, combat is much slower, more based around your defense and counter-attacking when it’s safe, and you rarely face more than a few enemies at one time. Furthermore, you can only heal by using items or by getting blue essence from slain enemies, which further incentivizes defensive play to survive (especially on the higher difficulties). However, as you learn to play and get deeper into the campaign, the pace of combat quickens – not so much because anything has changed (if anything, the game has gotten significantly harder by then), but because you’ve learned how combat works, when you can attack, and can afford to be more aggressive. This tangible sense of improvement as you go makes combat feel incredibly satisfying, and each new challenge you overcome feels all the more rewarding.
  • I also want to add that I rather like how Ultimate Techniques have been implemented in this game. Charging a UT is a fairly slow process, even if there is essence nearby when you do it, so you can’t just spam them to try to get an easy kill. You either need to be very deliberate about how you use them (like all the other aspects of this game’s combat), or you need to get really good at the timing of executing an immediate UT charge after jumping, which rewards skilled players. This game also causes UT charges to burn the essence that you absorb, so you need to make sure that you are willing to risk losing currency or health drops. This higher risk makes the greater essence dropped by enemies killed by the UT make more sense too.
• Difficulty – Ninja Gaiden games are well-known for their high difficulty, but like I said in the combat section, this difficulty actually contributes to why this game is so much fun. For all its difficulty, Ninja Gaiden feels very fair from start to finish. Difficulty is handled in a very linear fashion: you have some pretty basic challenges at the start with very exploitable enemy types. Then the game will steadily introduce new enemy types and scenarios which will you have to learn how to overcome. By the time you’re a few chapters in, you’re fighting enemies and pulling off moves that that would have gotten you annihilated you at the start of the game. By the end of a playthrough, you’re then more-or-less ready to attempt the next difficulty level, which is where Ninja Gaiden‘s difficult reveals its next trick: the linear difficulty curve continues into the next difficulty level and each difficulty is clearly intended to be played after completing the one before it and mastering its challenges (in fact, Black does not allow you to choose difficulty at the start at all, which reinforces that this is the “intended” way to play). Higher difficulties will introduce harder enemies earlier in the game, entirely new enemies are exclusive to higher difficulties, there’s new enemy spawns, less health items, and various other surprises sprinkled in. If you love Ninja Gaiden and want a challenge, then this game does a great job of incentivizing multiple replays.
  • This also means that skipping to a higher difficulty mode (as you can do in Sigma) actually makes that playthrough exponentially harder, because the game’s operating under the assumption that you already beat the whole thing on Normal and are coming in with the accumulated skillset that would entail. I was having a pretty manageable time on Normal in Black, so I decided to skip to Hard on Sigma since I figured I could handle it… and I was getting absolutely wrecked. I soon learned how to fight the upgraded ninja enemies, but then, whenever I got faced with a new combat scenario or a new enemy was introduced, I’d get demolished. It got to the point where I just had to give up and go back to Normal mode (which I was breezing through, thanks to playing Black at the same time).
  • Oh, and on top of all this, Ninja Gaiden has some bonus challenges for those who really want to test their might in the form of Fiend Challenges. These encounters are generally hidden off the main path and have you fight several relentless waves of fiends. They can really drain your resources if you are not at the top of your game, but they usually have some sort of major reward at the end that makes it worth your while (plus, y’know, it’s fun getting to put this game’s combat engine to its limits).
• Level Design – The original 3D Ninja Gaiden really stands out from its sequels due to its level design. Much of the game takes place in the city of Tairon, and you have a fair bit of freedom to explore, find secret areas, and figure out where you need to go next. It reminds me a lot of Resident Evil, where you’re finding keys and items to open up the next area, before looping back and giving you some kind of new shortcut to make navigation easier. Furthermore, this hub area changes over the course of the playthrough, with the city going under martial law at one point, meaning that you now need to deal with the Vigoorian military and LAVs in the streets hunting you down. I also love the bevy of secret areas which require you to platform using your ninja skills to find secrets and rewards (the Xbox easter egg that gives you the Windmill Shuriken and totally heals you for free is a particular highlight). Ultimately, Ninja Gaiden is set apart from its sequels because combat is just one part of the game: exploration and traversal are just as much a core tenet of the game design.
• Graphics – As is often the case for Team Ninja games (especially in this time period), Ninja Gaiden is no slouch visually. It has some rough edges from a modern standpoint, but it looks and feels great in motion. However, as good as the game looks on Xbox, Ninja Gaiden Sigma still looks fantastic. The colour palette has been made more saturated and vibrant, and everything is much higher fidelity (as you’d expect from a next-gen update).

Mixed

• The Story – The narrative of Ninja Gaiden is a real mixed bag. It’s extremely simple: Doku attacks the Hayabusa village and steals the Dark Dragon Blade. Ryu goes on a rampage to the Vigoorian Empire to get revenge against him. We do get introduced to some characters in the process, and there’s a bit of mystery and intrigue associated with this, but there is shockingly little narrative or character development beyond this initial setup.
  • On the one hand, the narrative presentation is amazing: the game will often feature gorgeous FMV cutscenes which are very slick and have striking direction that makes everything seem cool as fuck. This game’s presentation is told in a very serious way and it’s all about making everything and everyone seem like the coolest shit you’ve ever seen. In that regard, it succeeds in spades.
  • On the other hand, the narrative undermines itself in several ways. Like I said before, there’s next to no development once you arrive in Tairon: you want to kill Doku and get the Dark Dragon Blade, so you spend the next several hours trying to do exactly that. However, the game also fails to make its “big moments” land. For example, Kureha’s death is supposed to be this huge moment for Ryu: she’s one of his closest friends, and her death is a key reason why Ryu is so pissed throughout this game. However, when she’s killed right in front of him, her death barely even gets a response out of Ryu. The reveal of the game’s “real” villain is also really lame, especially after spending the entire game hyping up how much of a terrifying badass Doku is. But the real big issue with the narrative has to be…
  • Rachel. Really, I need to give her a whole bullet-point for herself, because the narrative fucks her over at every turn. She actually has a pretty interesting characterization and motivation: her family have fiend blood in their lineage, and this was used to turn her sister, Alma, into a greater fiend. Rachel then became a fiend hunter to try to kill Alma and free her soul. This is a legitimately interesting backstory and it gives her a bit more personality to latch onto than Ryu’s uber-serious stoicism. She also seems pretty competent initially and has a cool grappling hook to swing around on. However, she gets shat on by the narrative at every possible opportunity: immediately after talking shit about Ryu, she gets vored by a giant fiend, and she gets one-shotted by a bitch slap from Doku, necessitating a second rescue from Ryu. She fucks off as soon as you rescue her from Doku, only for her to immediately get captured again, fucking hell. She even fails to kill Alma when she gets the opportunity to (which is supposed to be her entire character motivation). Obviously, this could have been an interesting bit of character development, but when she doesn’t to do anything else of note in the story, it just makes her feel worthless. Oh and, to top it all off, at the end of the game she tries to fuck Ryu and he turns her down, so she’s just absolutely shit on from start to finish. At this point, does it even bear mentioning that her character design is ridiculous? Fighting demons in bondage gear makes her hard to take seriously, and her complete inability to do anything of note just reinforces that she’s clearly just here to be eye candy. At least in Sigma we get to see her beating down some fiends, but it’s far from redeeming her.

Hate

• Clunky Systems – Even for a game released more than twenty years ago, Ninja Gaiden has some weird design decisions that make playing it more of a cumbersome experience than it needed to be.
  • For one thing, you’re going to be spending a lot of time pausing the game to dive through menus. Any time you want to change your melee/ranged weapon, or heal, or use some sort of item, you’ll have to cycle through menus and halt the game’s pace momentarily. Sigma improves this a bit since it does allow you to cycle through your healing items without pausing, although I personally would have preferred a way to quick-swap between weapons.
  • Black has some really weird camera controls. Most of the time, the right analog stick puts you into first person mode (with inverted controls!!!)… however, there are some areas where you can control the camera, but you won’t really know if this is in effect until you try it. Generally, you have to just press R2 to automatically re-center the camera and hope that that’s sufficient. Similarly, aiming with the bow happens if you press B + left analog stick, which can be annoying if you’re trying to shoot quickly and then immediately move. Sigma, thankfully, has added free camera control to the right analog stick and maps first person mode to L1. The bow controls are also mapped to their own button, and the game even adds a reticle for easier aiming.
  • The controls for running on water also suuuuuck in Black. You need to run into the water and then immediately start pressing the jump button. However, if you jump too early or too late, you’ll sink and need to retry it. Thankfully, this is a pretty insignificant technique in this game… and thank God, or I might have raged. Sigma just makes you run on water automatically without requiring any button input, which is a bit too excessively dumbed-down… but, then again, it’s leagues better than Black‘s take on it.
  • For some ungodly reason, Ninja Gaiden does not give you access to an options menu while in-game. Hell, you can’t even quit to main menu without restarting the game itself… WHY??? Making matters worse, this isn’t even something Sigma improved, so I sure as hell hope that you like how everything is configured when you start playing, because tweaking it to suit your liking is going to be an absolute bitch.
• Auto-targeting – Ninja Gaiden does a fairly good job of making your attacks land where you want them to without a manual lock-on option, but there are times where your attack will not go where you want it to. This is especially prevalent when you use a single-target ninpo attack when there are multiple enemies on-screen, and it’s an utter crap-shoot which one will get hit.
• Grabs – So, like, I get why grabs are a thing in this game: if you are relying on blocking attacks for long periods of time to stay alive, they punish you severely. As a result, you quickly learn how and when to go on the offensive and limit your time spent blocking. That said… this game’s grabs are so fucking annoying. You get barely any time to react to an enemy’s grab, so when one goes off, you feel like you get stuck with unavoidable damage (and these things hit HARD).
• Random Auto-Blocks – Easily the worst aspect of this game’s combat engine is that enemies will randomly auto-block your attacks at times. This is especially noticeable with the Flying Swallow technique, and particularly when fighting bosses. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, they’ll just randomly, instantly block attacks sometimes, presumably to nerf certain techniques or make bosses seem “harder”. This basically forces you to just make your attack and then react based on whether the game lets you do damage or not, although it can be particularly annoying against the hardest bosses (looking at you, Alma).

Ninja Gaiden is a fantastic game. I love how it balances combat, exploration, and traversal. You can tangibly feel the meticulous design that has been put into every encounter, which helps make it difficulty feel fair and satisfying to get to grips with. My “hates” here are really gripes in comparison to this game’s strengths. I heartily recommend Ninja Gaiden (any of its versions!) to anyone who loves action games and is up for a challenge!