Ninja Gaiden Black

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Ninja Gaiden Black
Ninja Gaiden Black XBOX.jpg
North American cover art
Developer(s) Team Ninja
Publisher(s) Tecmo
Director(s) Tomonobu Itagaki
Hiroaki Matsui
Yasuo Egawa
Producer(s) Tomonobu Itagaki
Designer(s) Masanori Sato, Noriaki Kazama, Katsunori Ehara
Programmer(s) Takeshi Kawaguchi
Writer(s) Masato Onishi, Daisuke Suzuki
Composer(s) Ryo Koike, Wakana Hara
Series Ninja Gaiden
Platforms Xbox
Release date(s) NA September 20, 2005
JP September 29, 2005
EU October 21, 2005
Genre(s) Action-adventure, hack and slash
Mode(s) Single-player

Ninja Gaiden Black is an expanded version of the 2004 action-adventure hack and slash video game Ninja Gaiden, developed by Team Ninja and published by Tecmo for the Xbox in 2005. Ninja Gaiden Black includes the original version of Ninja Gaiden, along with the game's downloadable Hurricane Packs, which were released via Xbox Live, and some extra additional content not seen in the base game. It also includes two additional difficulty levels: an easy Ninja Dog difficulty and an expert Master Ninja difficulty. The game follows the fictional story of Ryu Hayabusa (also a major character in the Dead or Alive series), a master ninja, in his quest to recover a stolen sword and avenge the slaughter of his clan.

Much like Team Ninja's other games at the time, most notably the original 2004 release of Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Gaiden Black was specifically targeted at a Western (primarily American) audience, mainly due to its depiction of extreme violence as well as its Xbox exclusivity.

Ninja Gaiden Black was Team Ninja's last title for the original Xbox before the release of the Xbox 360 on November 22, 2005; the game features a trailer for their first Xbox 360 release, Dead or Alive 4, as part of the game's "Movie Theater" option. The game is backwards compatible with both the Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, unlike the original 2004 release of Ninja Gaiden, which is only backwards compatible with the Xbox 360. It was released on the Xbox Live Marketplace for the Xbox 360 on February 11, 2008, and was made available as a digital download on the Xbox One in October 2017.

Development

Tecmo announced at E3 2005 that Team Ninja was working on Ninja Gaiden Black,[1] and later exhibited a working version of the game at the TGS 2005.[2] Black is a reworked compilation of the original Ninja Gaiden and the two Hurricane Packs.[3] The game features new foes, such as exploding bats and doppelgänger fiends who can imitate Ryu.[4] It contains more costumes than the original, and swaps Ninja Gaiden's unlockable NES games for an arcade version.[5] The game was released on September 20, 2005 in North America, September 29, 2005 in Japan, and October 21, 2005 in Europe.

One key feature of this version is its two new difficulty settings—the easy Ninja Dog and the very hard Master Ninja.[6] Itagaki added Ninja Dog after receiving complaints of Ninja Gaiden being too hard in its default incarnation,[7] although he believed that, with persistence, any player was capable of completing the game.[8] Hence he ensured that those players selecting Ninja Dog would be subjected to gentle mockery by the game—players on this difficulty setting receive colored ribbons as accessories, and Ayane treats Ryu as an inferior. In compensation, Itagaki made the other difficulty settings harder than in Ninja Gaiden. Another feature of Black is its Mission Mode, which comprises 50 combat missions, one of which is adapted from the custom game designed for the Ninja Gaiden Master Tournament World Championship final. The last five missions are based on those in Hurricane Pack 2 and form a linked series known as "Eternal Legend".[5] While most of the improvements made in the Hurricane Packs carried forward through this game, including the camera system tweaks and new boss battles, the Intercept maneuver, introduced in Hurricane Pack 1, was not included in Black, adding to its increased challenge.

Reception

Ninja Gaiden series reviews
Publication Ninja Gaiden
Black
GameSpot
9.4/10[6]
IGN
9.4/10[9]
GamePro
5/5[10]
1UP.com
A+[4]
Compilations of multiple reviews
Compiler Ninja Gaiden
Black
Metacritic
94/100[11]
GameRankings
94.76%[12]
Awards
Ninja Gaiden
Black
GameSpot's Best Xbox game 2005[13]
IGN's Best Xbox Action game 2005[14]
TeamXbox's Best Xbox Action Game 2005[15]

The original release of Ninja Gaiden was released in 2004 to much critical acclaim. Greg Kasavin of GameSpot called it "one of the best most challenging action adventure games ever made",[16] and IGN's Erik Brudvig said that it "sets a new standard for third-person action games in terms of length, depth, speed, and gore."[17] Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) called it "an unmissable instant classic", and declared that "no Xbox should go without [Ninja] Gaiden."[18] Critics also regarded it to be one of the most difficult games released prior to 2007.[19][20]

Ninja Gaiden Black also impressed reviewers. GameSpot noted that it had the best visual and audio presentation on the Xbox, and praised its new Mission Mode for "[distilling] the game down to its purest essentials."[6] IGN called its release "a rare and welcome day", which brought their "excitement levels back to the first time [they] played the game."[9]

From a technical point of view, critics regarded Ninja Gaiden and Black as the best of the available Xbox software at the time; the console hardware had been pushed to its limits without showing significant drops in performance. GameSpot's Kasavin was impressed with their "first-rate presentation" and said that no other games at that time came close in visuals and audio.[6] According to IGN, the games could "make [them] momentarily forget about the next generation of consoles".[9] Both Ninja Gaiden and Black were top-sellers, which led to them being compatible with the Xbox 360 for all regions on the new platform's release.[21][22][23] Ninja Gaiden attracted criticism for the way on-screen action is framed by the game's camera. The default camera system centers the action on Ryu and his surroundings, but reviewers were frustrated by occasions when the camera locked on to part of the scenery, thus losing track of Ryu.[9][24] Tecmo attempted to address this with the introduction of manual camera controls in the Hurricane Packs,[25][6] and most critics judged that either the camera frame was usually acceptable, or that Ninja Gaiden was a good enough game that its flaws could be overlooked.[6][18]

Consumers purchased 1.5 million copies of Ninja Gaiden and Black to August 2007,[26] with the bulk of these sales going to North America and Europe. According to the NPD Group, in its first month Ninja Gaiden sold 362,441 copies in the United States.[27][28] These sales figures reflect Tecmo's decision to target the non-Japanese (primarily North American) market. Japanese gamers were not particularly excited—according to Itagaki, only 60,000 copies of Ninja Gaiden were sold in Japan in the four months following its release.[29] The critical and commercial successes of Ninja Gaiden have led CNET and GameSpot Asia to induct the game into their halls of fame.[30][31]

The Ninja Gaiden games gained a reputation throughout the gaming community for their difficulty and attention to detail.[32][33] Although they appealed to gamers who, like Pro-G's Struan Robertson, wanted a "bloody hard, but also bloody good" challenge,[34] it was feared that casual gamers would find the learning curve daunting. IGN warned that gamers with lesser skills might not "get as much out of this game as others due to [its] incredible difficulty",[9] and Edge commented that "Tecmo’s refusal to extend any kind of handhold to less dedicated players is simply a failure of design, not a badge of hardcore honour" and "it’s impossible to believe they couldn’t have found a way to increase the accessibility of the game without undermining the gloriously intractable nature of the challenges it contains."[24] EGM found the challenge to be "rewarding" as it "motivates you to actually get better at the game."[18] Clive Thompson focused on Ninja Gaiden in his Slate article examining the motivation for playing difficult games. He contends that extreme levels of challenge can be initially very frustrating and may cause a game to be abandoned in disgust. However, where a game also rewards a player's perseverance by teaching the skills required to overcome its challenges, that player will have the motivation to finish the game. Ninja Gaiden, in his opinion, strikes the correct balance between challenge and reward; completion brings "a sort of exhausted exhilaration, like finally reaching the end of War and Peace."[35] In 2012, CraveOnline included it on their list of five "badass ninja games", calling it "the pinnacle of action gaming at the time, holding onto that crown for an entire year until God of War released in 2005" and "a true video game classic, and maybe the best ninja game of all time."[36] That same year, G4tv ranked it as the 83rd top video game of all time, also calling it "the best ninja game ever made and one of the all around hardest."[37]

References

  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named devint
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named gsngbrev
  7. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  8. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  11. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  12. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  15. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  16. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named gsngrev
  17. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named ignngrev
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named hurhands1
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named giint
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named history
  33. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  34. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named prongrev
  35. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  36. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  37. ↑ Top 100 Video Games of All Time #83 - Ninja Gaiden – G4tv.com
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