Ninja Gaiden/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • 8.8: IGN's 3.0 of Ninja Gaiden 3 gained quite a backlash. The Updated Rerelease Razor's Edge, however, got a much more decent 7.6.
  • Adaptation Displacement: Somewhat of a subversion. Most of the fans who are aware of the 2-player Beat'Em Up version of the arcade believed it came before the first NES game. In reality, the arcade version was developed simultaneously with the NES version, with the two teams making their own game based on the same basic concept.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: For Nintendo fans, the fact that Ninja Gaiden 3 will hit the Wii U and along with the dismemberment back.
  • Anticlimax Boss:
    • Sort-of with the Dark Disciple, who claimed to have the power of the "Devil Incarnate", but gets punched out anyway. He was piss easy in the original game, but Ninja Gaiden Black significantly upped the difficulty by nerfing the Flying Swallow (a diving sword strike that would be a Game Breaker in the original, if it wasn't already Nintendo Hard).
    • Considering that roughly 70% of the game is spent chasing her down, Elizabét in Ninja Gaiden II isn't much of a challenge. She's arguably easier than Volf. Until Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 rectified it: like with the Dark Disciple, good ol' flying swallow spamming won't work this time!
    • The Final Boss in Ninja Gaiden 3. Not that the fight isn't visually impressive, but you spend 50% of it fighting fiends it sends at you, another 30% doing QTEs and 20% actually fighting it (the way you fight the Statue of Liberty in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 more or less). All in all, it is probably the easiest boss of the game.
  • Ass Pull: Obaba's comeback in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Ninja Gaiden III. The games don't bother explaining how she is revived when she's supposed to be Killed Off for Real in Dragon Sword.
  • Author's Saving Throw: To say that fan reception of Razor's Edge is much more positive than the original version of Ninja Gaiden 3 is an Understatement.
  • Broken Base: Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2: some consider it inferior to Ninja Gaiden II because of the lack of gore, lessened difficulty and the removal of puzzles, but others consider it superior thanks to a more balanced stage designs, less cheap AI, frame-rate fixes and the removal/revision of the most tedious passages of the original, as well as additional content of playable characters and game modes. The drastically reduced number of enemies, and the introduction of a semi-automatic aim for the bow can be seen as a good or bad thing depending on who is asked.
  • Awesome Music: Has its own page.
  • Complete Monster: If you're thinking that Jaquio is a sick bastard, you're very right.
  • Contested Sequel: Yosuke Hayashi's drastically different vision for Ninja Gaiden 3 let many fans skeptical to say the least. Some fans think it is still a fun Action Game in its own right, if not on par with the first two games. Others prefer to pretend it never existed. Interestingly, Hayashi was already involved in another Contested Sequel. Razor's Edge is unanimously considered an improvement, but it remains this in its own right, since some feel it saved the game, while some others feel that it was still a bad game regardless of the improvements.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: Ninja Gaiden II is so ridiculously gory that it practically skips the offensive, and goes straight to hilarious. May or may not double as Narm Charm.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: The Ancient Ship of Doom has one in form of the theme from Stage 1-1. It's awesome as it's catchy.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • Birds or any sort of avian/winged enemy in the NES trilogy. A large reason why they're so terrible, at least in the first game, is due to a glitch with how the game handles enemy spawns: anything that's in the exact position of the level will respawn as soon as it's taken out, causing them to infinitely respawn until players deliberately trek across the stage. The problem is, particularly in the first game, moving forward is not always a reasonable option.
    • The "ghost piranhas" infesting the labyrinth in Zarkhan for the Xbox Ninja Gaiden due to pack-like tendencies, respawning capabilities and sheer, unimaginable attack speed and tenacity. Hilariously, they were originally decorative in the environment until director Tomonobu Itagaki found out about them and told the development team to make them enemies.
      • Their difficulty is slightly toned down in the sequel, with the exception of that one chapter where players must deal with them alongside the Water Dragon boss. However, this becomes noticeably easier in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.
    • In the first game, especially at the highest difficulties, a good portion of the non-human Mooks turn into this. The black "laser eye" fiends or the cat fiends are just hellish to fight in groups.
    • Ninja Gaiden II has a literal kind with Black Spider Ninja Rasetsu, as the boss on the first level. He and his other derivatives turn into common enemies later on.
    • Liked the Goddamn Bats in the first Xbox game? In Ninja Gaiden II, meet the giant bats! They are thrice as big, make thrice as much damage, are thrice as tough and are still unblockable. More often than not, players will take damage while trying to kill them.
    • The infamous Incendiary Kunai Ninjas from Ninja Gaiden II are usually this when fighting them in large groups; take a guess why by looking at their name. Strangely, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 kept them as this despite fewer on-screen enemies at a time, but for a different reason: though they use their explosives less often, they turn more resilient to attacks and are much more competent at close combat instead. This turns especially jarring at higher difficulties where their claw attacks deal huge damage.
    • Alchemists in Ninja Gaiden 3 has a Ground Pound-like maneuver that, while blockable, breaks guard and is hard to dodge most of the time. Furthermore, they're fast, agile, hurl homing "alchemy projectiles", block and evade often and frequently erect an "alchemy armor" of sorts that requires breaking it first before actual damage can be dealt, which light attacks from Ryu's weapons won't usually do; they also have a grab attack that not only slowly drains Hit Points, but the ki gauge as well. Finally, in Razor's Edge, the timing to perform a "Steel-on-Bone" Counter Attack is so exceptionally narrow compared to other humanoid enemies in the game that players will often opt out to dismember them instead, allowing an "Obliteration Technique" to finish them off.
    • Chimera in the later parts of Ninja Gaiden 3 are essentially faster, more evasive Incendiary Kunai ninjas, with the only saving grace is they don't have projectiles. Like alchemists, they too block occasionally and might get a bead on escaping out of players' attack combos more often than not. The problem with these Chimera comes if they're dismembered: doing so, and they initiate an unblockable Suicide Attack, homing straight for Ryu, forcing players to prioritize on dismembered Chimera lest they risk a chunk of health getting taken away. Fortunately, it's easy to note if a suicide-Chimera will begin its strike as they start sparking bright colors; additionally, if they don't reach Ryu in time, the suicide-Chimera will wind up exploding and doesn't have the effects of an Action Bomb would.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Robert T. Sturgeon in The Dark Sword of Chaos. A Mysterious Informant/Protector with an agenda of his own, Cool Shades, able to take down demonic horrors with a single gunshot, who turns out to be a top United States Army operative and such an extremely loyal ally to Ryu that he makes a Last Stand to guard his back in the very bowels of Hell? This is especially notable considering how well Ryu gets along with covert government agencies...
  • Evil Is Sexy: Elizabét, outside of her One-Winged Angel.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: The original Ninja Gaiden 3 is usually ignored, and Razor's Edge is considered by most the "real" version of the third game. And that's without considering those who didn't even like Razor's Edge.
  • Fashion Victim Villain: The Regent of the Mask in Ninja Gaiden 3. Having for an outfit a red Badass Longcoat, a Cool Mask, a mysterious hood and a gold-plated Gloved Fist of Doom, can only make you one. To compliment it, he's armed with a Royal Rapier.
  • First Installment Wins: Although Ninja Gaiden II and Ninja Gaiden III on the NES have many refinements, most people keep going to Ninja Gaiden I before the other two.
  • Game Breaker:
    • The Windmill technique from the NES Ninja Gaiden, capable of killing every single enemy (and boss) in the game with one use.
    • The Unlabo(u)red Flawlessness in Ninja Gaiden, when used by a player skilled enough to stay alive at 15% health, can cut enemies down with shocking speed (most of them at any rate). Then again, given the strict health requirement and the game's difficulty, this isn't as severe as the others listed.
    • The Izuna Drop in all the games is fairly easy to execute and will instantly kill any human-sized Mook. In Ninja Gaiden, enemies often block and you can only do it with "katana-like" weapons so its use is restricted. However, the sequel allows its use with almost any weapon, and enemies don't guard at all. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 nerfed it slightly by making some Mooks (almost all of them on Master Ninja difficulty) resilient enough to survive it.
    • Ultimate Techniques are a similar case: in the first game, without absorbing essence to speed it up, it takes 4 seconds to charge a full-powered UT and their range of effect is limited. In Ninja Gaiden II, it takes only 2 seconds, with some weapons' UTs being glaringly over-effective on large groups of small Mooks.
  • Goddamned Bats:
    • Actual bats for the modern games. The critters do annoying damage, and come in large packs. Explosive variants start showing up from Ninja Gaiden Black onwards. Almost all the enemies start as this and become Demonic Spiders on higher difficulties.
    • Bats are also regular enemies in the NES games, and they're in all respects similar to Castlevania bats.
    • Goddamned birds in the NES trilogy!
    • The "jellyfish" in the amazon level for Ninja Gaiden II. Sure, they don't move and are easy to eliminate, but they get in the way... and they just. Never. STOP. SPAWNING. Of course, you can try to swim trough them... at your own risk.
    • Dogs, the blue bugs and the human-like homunculi (pre-transformation into its "gorilla" or "snake" forms) often act as this in Razor's Edge.
  • Goddamned Boss: Two examples from Ninja Gaiden II.
    • The infamous giant worm boss in the Amazonia level. By no means is it difficult: it's simply horribly ill-designed, as 90% of the fight ensures players are unable to see it, even when they're hitting it, due to the boss tunneling itself and popping out from any direction without a sign for players to know where. Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 didn't even try to make it better when Team Ninja mercifully removed it from the level, along with the entire "green tunnel" section leading up to the boss and after defeating it. Those who haven't played Ninja Gaiden II and only Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 wouldn't even notice its absence.
    • The two "armadillo" bosses in the underworld level. The words "Camera Screw" will mean something until players have gone through this fight, which stands in contrast to the first armadillo boss at the end of the aircraft level. Like the above, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 removed it, replacing it with a fight against Marbus instead.
  • Good Bad Bug: In Razor's Edge, Kasumi has a version of the "Cicada Surge" technique called "Sakura Madoi", allowing her to evade not only melee attacks like Ryu, but also bullets and missiles, meaning it's possible to use Sakura Madoi to teleport into areas normally inaccessible, and in extreme cases, out of the map. This was fixed when the re-release was ported to the Sony PlayStation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360.
  • It's Easy, So It Sucks: Ninja Gaiden 3 is a far cry from its punishing predecessors. It would take Razor's Edge to ratchet the difficulty back up to normal, but does keep the easier "Hero" mode as a play-style that can be selected at any time.
  • Memetic Mutation:
  • Most Annoying Sound: The NES series, being very much Nintendo Hard, has the death jingle. Expect to hear it over and over and over again.
  • Narm:
    • The Worlds of Power book is filled with this, starting with the groaner on the first page, "Dedicated to the ninja in everyone's dad."
    • The "don't kill me mate" scene at the very beginning of Ninja Gaiden 3 is so overdone that for many it ends up being hilarious instead of a Player Punch.
  • Only the Creator Does It Right: What certain fans think about the modern trilogy and one of the reasons there's so much bashing on Hayashi's games (Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Ninja Gaiden 3)... any title not directed by Itagaki can only be a pale imitation. It doesn't help that before leaving Tecmo, Itagaki specifically said he didn't like Ninja Gaiden Sigma, that Ninja Gaiden II was the definitive version of the game, and he was the only one legitimate enough to continue the series.
  • Player Punch: Ninja Gaiden 3 goes to great length to make players feel the pain of the enemies they kill, be it the brutal Steel-on-Bone mechanic or the moaning of enemies if they aren't finished off as they crawl helplessly on the ground, bleeding to death.

Crawling and bleeding Mooks: I don't wanna die... I don't wanna die!

  • Replacement Scrappy: Although not a big fan favourite to begin with, it's amazing how much Sonia in Ninja Gaiden II can make you miss Rachel. Depending on how you see it, may or may not be rectified with Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.
    • Every woman in the modern trilogy is this to old school fans who still see Irene as Ryu's One True Love.
      • Which is all the more ironic in the case of Sonia, considering that she and Irene are one in the same.
  • Ruined FOREVER: This was the fan reaction when health regeneration was announced as a feature in Ninja Gaiden II, fearing that all the difficulty of the game would be removed. Boy, were they wrong.
    • And this is the reaction of many fans to Ninja Gaiden 3: no decapitations/dismemberments (though they're replaced by a somewhat more brutal mechanic), no shops or weapon upgrades, no healing items, only one weapon type and one ninpo. And small Quick Time Events. Sacrilege! And on the top of that...
    • Sequelitis: ... it went so bad that IGN even gave it a brutally harsh 3.0!!!
  • Scrappy Mechanic: The save system in the Xbox Ninja Gaiden makes it so that if players die, they restart at the last save point, no exception. This means if they die fighting a boss, they must redo any section between the save point all the way to boss again; additional redundancy occurs if death happens at the beginning of the next chapter without having saved the game, where they must fight the boss from the previous chapter again.
    • The Steel-on-Bone mechanic in Ninja Gaiden 3 was largely unnecessary due to it randomly activating in the middle of striking enemies and can interrupt combos. It's reworked in Razor's Edge where Steel-on-Bone is used as a form of Counter Attack to prevent enemy grabs.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Someone watching the plots of the NES series today will find them narmy and a bit overdone with their "three plot twists per second", but the trilogy back then was considered a big leap forward for video game story-telling by having cut-scenes and fully-sentenced dialogue, coming all together for a coherent plot.
  • So Bad, It's Good: Whatever fans think of the respective plots of the modern installments: Dragon Sword and Ninja Gaiden 3/Razor's Edge have a little more detailed ones, not that this saves the latter from being a Contested Sequel though.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: Two of them in the arcade version: the second stage almost sounds like "Bad" by Michael Jackson, and the second boss theme is very similar to "Iron Man" from Black Sabbath.
  • That One Achievement: It's literally impossible to obtain the platinum trophy for the Sony PlayStation Vita version of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus, as "Tag Mode" forces players to partner with the AI since Cooperative Multiplayer was removed. At least three missions demand two human players work in concert, which cannot happen if one of them is an AI-controlled character.
  • That One Attack: Zedonius' flame wall in Ninja Gaiden II is unblockable and undodgeable. Even some moves with invulnerability frames don't protect you! The only thing you can do against it is use a ninpo, but if you're out of it, pray he doesn't use it. The only reasonable way to truly evade it otherwise is to stay the hell away from Zedonius as much as possible.
  • That One Boss: Just about every single one of them, especially in the modern games.
    • Murai in the Xbox Ninja Gaiden deserves a special mention for being not only the first boss of the game, but being so goddamn hard to start with.
  • That One Level:
    • The infamous 6-2 in the first NES game. 6-1 and 6-3 are both extremely difficult as well, but 6-2 takes the cake for cheap deaths and one spot where you seemingly have to exploit a flaw in the programming to get past. If you die even once on the final boss, you're forced to redo the entire stage at 6-1 again.
    • The "Path of Zarkhan" chapter in the Xbox Ninja Gaiden: not that it's particularly harder than previous chapters, but you spend most of the level swimming back and forth to solve a puzzle, and after that, you must go through a very long and boring swimming sequence through areas previously visited, but now submerged. Ninja Gaiden Sigma removed that puzzle and made the level more straightforward, but you still have to swim a lot.
    • The Elevator Action Sequence in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 for Rachel's chapter, mainly because of Camera Screw issues and also because Rachel's melee weapon isn't very adapted to fight in narrow spaces. Of course, it gets worse at higher difficulties where the upgraded flare fiends are Demonic Spiders and deal a lot of damage... often One Hit Kills in Master Ninja. Furthermore, a fully-charged Ultimate Technique is no longer a guaranteed One-Hit Kill on Master Ninja difficulty.
    • Ayane's chapter is infamously the hardest one in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, and has plunged many a player into an abyss of despair in Master Ninja. Prepare to see the Game Over screen a lot with her.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: What some fans think of Ninja Gaiden 3.
  • They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Averted with the NES trilogy: people have noted the games copy a lot of things from Castlevania, most obviously the life bars, but most players agree the Ninja Gaiden games back then were still good in their own right despite the obvious influences. What likely helps is its Power Ups are fundamentally different from the ones seen in Castlevania.
  • Unfortunate Implications: In Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, you play a Japanese man who literally fights the Statue of Liberty. Granted, you were fighting a statue of Buddha two stages prior (presumably if the series ever goes to Rio de Janeiro, we'll fight Jesus).
  • Villain Decay: The Malice Four (Barbarian, Bomberhead, Basaquer, and Bloody Malth) become ordinary Mooks throughout the stages in The Dark Sword of Chaos and can be killed with a few hits. Granted, they're located on platforms where they'll most likely throw you into a pit, but they were major bosses in the first game. Bloody Malth was even the one who defeated Ryu's father.
    • Justified in a Guide Dang It: the Mooks are in fact sub-standard clones of the original Malice Four.
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