Been revisiting a classic over the last few weeks and I've finally got my thoughts in place. What a bloody good game Ninja Gaiden is.

Masterful.

God, they don't make them like this any more, do they? Team NINJA's soft reboot of the classic Ninja Gaiden platformers turns the famously difficult series into 3D action games that, upon release, were on the cutting edge of the genre and are still absolutely essential titles to this day. I've spent the last couple of weeks replaying the first game (the Ninja Gaiden Sigma version, which isn't the best version available but it is the one currently on Game Pass as part of the remastered trilogy and, believe me, it is good enough for everyone except the purist) and I am finding it to be so, so refreshing. Although the action game genre is still where you can find some properly challenging games and Elden Ring's astronomical sales figures indicate that there is a healthy desire for games that are built around offering a specific difficulty, there's very few that are as aggressively against you succeeding as Ninja Gaiden is.

Don't get me wrong, Bayonetta, Devil May Cry and Revengeance are all brilliant games but part of their core combat is to ensure that the player can look cool at all times. There's the feeling that everything flows into one another with zero friction, allowing you to approach combat almost like it is a dance, constant motion and smoothly jumping between offense and defense. It feels good and it looks even better. It's a huge reason why these games are so enjoyable.

Ninja Gaiden doesn't appear to do any of that, at first. Of course, you can pull of some incredibly cool looking sequences but the first thing you notice when you fire up Ninja Gaiden is how STIFF Ryu Hayabusa initially feels. Blocking roots him to the spot and he has to do this before he can dodge roll - which can only be performed in the cardinal directions. There's light and heavy attack buttons and combo strings can be performed but the inputs are very strict so mashing buttons will result in the wrong moves coming out all the time and every single attack is a commitment. Once you've hit the button, you have to wait until the animation has completed before you can do anything else, so if you've done it unintentionally, you can leave yourself very vulnerable.

Even the most basic enemy can hit like a truck and they don't wait around while their pals attack - they get stuck right in and can be utterly relentless. Learning their attack chains and where the gaps are is paramount to success. Mastering the counter attack is also crucial - essentially allowing you cancel your blocking animation into a big strike of your own - if you want to survive against the legions of enemies you'll encounter. This combination of lethal foes and extremely measured combat means that, until you have mastered it, it can feel almost sluggish and like you simply don't have the tools to survive, which of course, is far from the case.

The beauty of Ninja Gaiden (and why it is still one of the best action games around) is that it rewards players who embrace the challenge and begin to master the tools that they have at their disposal. That word used above - 'commitment' - is the key. Everything you do offensively or defensively in this game has risk and reward, so you can't just throw attacks out wildly or turtle up defensively, you have to commit to everything and make these decisions in the heat of battle. You have split seconds to decide whether to use an opening for attacking or putting up your defenses and the margin for error is small. It is absolutely thrilling stuff. As you become more accustomed to what the game is asking of you, that stiffness disappears almost instantly and instead reveals a level of precision that is rarely found, even among the other leaders of the genre. You start piecing together these incredible looking sequences of combat where you off a small army of enemies with relative ease and, perhaps due to the fact that a lot of the moves aren't these overtly flamboyant animations, you feel completely in tune with Ryu as he performs the actions you are inputting.

Like all great action games, you have all the tools you need from the word go and the game just throws challenges at you that continue to up the ante until the credits roll. Ninja Gaiden just does this to a more intense degree than its peers. Most combat arenas are memorable scraps and the boss fights among the best in any action game. It's still a top, top tier title, provided you approach it knowing that it is going to show you no quarter. Ninja Gaiden is very, very difficult and the only way you're going to get to the end of it is with practice and execution of everything you've learned.

Now, this is the part that puts some people off and where Ninja Gaiden differs in its approach to most other titles. As you've no doubt heard me talk about before, I think the 'difficulty discourse' has largely been co-opted by both sides of the debate as some sort of point scoring exercise, with one using it to perpetuate Gamergate rhetoric and the other weaponising genuine accessibility issues that less-abled people have with videogames. I come down somewhere on the side that I think a videogame being simply about overcoming a set challenge is completely fine and it doesn't require a suite of difficulty sliders to make that challenge more accessible to all players. I think there is a lot of enjoyment to be taken from mastering a skillset and overcoming adversity and being rewarded for it. I bounced off Celeste because it straight up says that collecting the extra challenging strawberries on each stage gets you nothing and doesn't even add anything to your save file to say you did it, instantly undermining people wanting a challenge and framing them as try-hards. Don't fucking patronise me, indie game.

Ninja Gaiden has the opposite approach. Die too many times and it asks you if you want to 'abandon the path of the Ninja'. Should you choose to do this, you will find yourself on NINJA DOG difficulty, where the game berates you for a lack of skill and even has a cutscene where a character expresses disappointment with Ryu. These other games offer 'easy modes' so players can experience the narrative with minimal friction. This is Ninja Gaiden's way of telling you the narrative isn't the reason you should be playing it. You've missed the point. Sure, you can do it and you can see how the whole story unfolds for Hayabusa and company but that's not what creator Tomonobu Itakagi had in mind for Ninja Gaiden. Honestly, I loved it. Every time I got splattered by a boss so many times the game started goading me with an easy mode, it steeled my resolve.

I've had a great time playing something that is so unapologetic in what it is. Even the look of the game is like nothing else - all the characters have superhuman physiques and everything from clothing to human skin looks shiny and plastic-y, giving them the appearance of action figures come to life. The stage themes go from traditional Japanese pagodas to a strange, European styled city full of heavily-armed PMC goon to an underworld full of demons. Like the combat, everything initially feels quite disjointed and awkward but once you've spent some time with it and it starts to click, it starts to form a cohesive and satisfying whole.

Although the Master Collection being added to Game Pass allows for people to take a risk free punt on it, its not a total instant recommendation across the board. Sadly, the Sigma version of Ninja Gaiden 2 is a much more considerable downgrade than Ninja Gaiden Black to Ninja Gaiden Sigma, missing out on a lot of extra enemies and the entire dismemberment mechanic, so although the overall quality of the game is strong enough to make it still worth a look, its nowhere near as essential as the original game still is. The least said about Ninja Gaiden 3, however, the better. Steer well clear of that one.

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