YMMV / Ninja Gaiden

YMMV pages for individual games in the series

• Ninja Gaiden (Arcade)
• Ninja Gaiden (NES)
• Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos
• Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom
• Ninja Gaiden (2004)
• Ninja Gaiden II (2008)
• Ninja Gaiden 3 (2012)
• Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z

Other Media

• Worlds of Power

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Series-wide

• Awesome Music: Has its own page.
• Broken Base: The story. Even if Ninja Gaiden revolutionized storytelling in video games since the NES era with its usage of cutscenes, it's mostly known for its hard and very punishing gameplay. For one camp, both are very important and they look forward if the story and world building could get good. But then there is a camp that believes that story is extremely unimportant and the series should focus on just making gameplay as tight and punishing as possible, and they could care less about the story getting to usually forgettable or So Bad, It's Good as long as they can look awesome in slicing fiends off and getting very fierce when the other camp suggesting improvements on the stories.
  • III/Razor's Edge showcased this quite prominently: By lessening the difficulty while creating a story that doesn't look like an Excuse Plot, it attracted the wrath of the second camp heavily, whereas while the first camp could agree on III being bad, they're more likely to forgive the improvement done by Razor's Edge.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: The series' English-language title is pronounced "Ninja GUY-den," not "GAY-den." Getting this wrong used to be one of the more sure-fire ways to piss off its fans.
• Hilarious in Hindsight
  • The simple fact this series is called Ninja Gaiden ("gaiden" meaning "side-story") due to Rule of Cool becomes hilarious these days now that Koei Tecmo state it's a side-story to Dead or Alive, despite Ninja Gaiden having been around a lot longer than the latter.^However... The statement makes much more sense when you realize that only the modern post-2004 series was called "Ninja Gaiden" in Japan and PAL regions; the NES and arcade games had different titles there.
  • Hilarity Ensues with Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, which is a side-story for the modern Ninja Gaiden trilogy, bringing the trope Gaiden Game full circle.
• I Knew It!: Due to the breadth of shared traits between Irene Lew from the NES trilogy and Sonia of NGII, more than a few fans theorized that Sonia was a modern re-imagining of Irene and that they were the same person (Sonia's bio even hints that her name is an alias). Come Dead or Alive: Dimensions, it turns out that they were right.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Ryu is frequently paired with Irene, Rachel, Momiji, Ayane or Kasumi in fanfic. Sometimes all of them at once.
• Narm: The Worlds of Power book is filled with this, starting with the acknowledgement on the first page, "Dedicated to the ninja in everyone's dad".
• Nightmare Fuel
  • About the only thing anybody knows about the original arcade machine is the circular saw from the continue screen.
  • Also from the arcade installment, the shadow of Ryu behind a window at the start of every stage, with Red Eyes, Take Warning before he bursts through the screen and starts the level.
  • Professor Bucky-Wise's One-Winged Angel transformation in the OVA: his skin peels off and he grows a second backbone as his human features fall off (his ears and eyes can be seen falling off and melting, respectively) as he becomes a green skinned Humanoid Abomination. The apperance itself is incredibly sadistic, stabbing Ryu in the arm and crushing Irene's arm when she tries to save Ryu, all the while it's smiling.
• Obvious Judas: Ninja Gaiden as a whole is notorious for this: seemingly friendly characters that turn out to be villains in “twists” that have ludicrously heavy amounts of Foreshadowing: Foster and Clancy from the original NES trilogy, Murai, from the 2004 reboot, Cliff Higgins from III, Professor Bucky-Wise from the OVA, and Alaricio del Gonzo from Yaiba.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: The story of every Ninja Gaiden game is pretty much an Excuse Plot to have Ryu Hayabusa running around and slicing people up in stylish ways. One may be forgiven for having trouble even remembering what sets Ryu on his bloody path in any of the games as you're dishing out flashy combos of death left and right.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Three of them in the arcade version - the second stage almost sounds like "Bad" by Michael Jackson, the second boss theme is very similar to "Iron Man" from Black Sabbath, and the ending music is almost Kyu Sakamoto's "Sukiyaki" note for note. These connections are made even more apparent by their official titles from the OST ("PAT", "I Am Man", "Six-Eight-Nine, Everybody Likes... Sukiyaki?" respectively), as well as the fact that, starting with the Virtual Console version, all re-releases have outright removed "I Am Man".
• Viewer Pronunciation Confusion: The "Gaiden" part of the title is pronounced "guy den," being the Japanese word for "side-story" (外伝), but when the series first debuted in the west, audiences frequently read it as "gay den." This eventually became prominent enough for The Wizard (which featured prominent product placement for the Nintendo Entertainment System catalog) to feature a scene where a store owner teaches a group of children the proper pronunciation by jokingly using it as a kiai.

The NES Trilogy

• Adaptation Displacement: Subverted — most fans who are aware of the two-player Beat 'em Up version of the arcade installment believed it came out before the first Nintendo Entertainment System game. In reality, the arcade version was developed simultaneously with the latter; the two development teams making their own game based its core design on the same concept.
• Breather Boss: Kelbeross in the first two NES games — even though only one of two can be damaged, they're extremely slow, have an obvious attack pattern, and there's even a safe spot in the boss room where Ryu can stand (it's directly in front of where Ryu starts the fight, with no obstacles in his way) and just repeatedly slash to win. An astounding example when the only difference between the fights from both games is that the visuals were updated for The Dark Sword of Chaos.
• Demonic Spiders: Birds or any sort of avian/winged enemy. 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.

• Goddamned Bats
  • Bats appear as regular enemies in the trilogy, and they're in all respects similar to Castlevania bats.
  • Birds across the entire trilogy: while bats at least fly in a predictable pattern and usually aren't difficult to avoid, birds actively home in on Ryu's position and are almost always by ledges and Bottomless Pits. In the first game, they take three slots off the life bar, making them the highest damage-dealers in the game that aren't bosses.
• Genre Turning Point: Someone following the plots of the NES trilogy today will find them Narmy and overdone with their "three Plot Twists per second" narrative, 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, compared to other games released during that generation.
• Memetic Mutation: "Just a girl. Get out of here!"^note What Ryu says in the NES Ninja Gaiden during his first encounter with Irene; without context, it almost sounds as if Ryu was being a misogynist
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Jaquio's Nightmare Face in the first NES game and the Baron Spider's White Mask of Doom in The Dark Sword of Chaos.
  • How about the Masked Devil from the first game?
• Scrappy Mechanic: A lot of problems, death pits and enemy hazards in the original trilogy could've been negated if Ryu could mantle up the top of whatever walls he climbs. He can't, so you need to jump between adjacent surfaces or hop off to a nearby platform and then jump higher than the prior wall. A few cases in the trilogy even have tight jumps where even if you catch the wall above a pit, you can't climb up it to safety, so your life is forfeit anyway. At least the first game only had the basic wall cling, so it made more sense for this limitation, but the sequels are fully willing to exploit this in the second stage, where the only way to progress is to jump into the wind current to reach the top of some platforms!
• That One Level: Oh, where do we even start?
  • The infamous 6-2 in the first game: 6-1 and 6-3 are extremely difficult as well, but 6-2 takes the cake for cheap deaths and one spot where players have to exploit a flaw in the programming to get past it. If players die even once on any of the three final bosses, they're forced to redo the entire stage at 6-1 again.
  • Stage 3-1 in Dark Sword of Chaos, where the periodic lightning reveals the stage before you while all enemies and items are otherwise visible. You basically need to exploit the lightning still going while the game is paused to be able to reasonably platform it, because the game swarms you with fireballs that will likely send you into a pit or mob you to death, and some of these jumps are tight. And just for an extra kick in the nads, the last part of the stage is a large number of one-tile wide platforms with almost pixel-perfect precision needed. You fall, back to the beginning of the stage.
  • Stage 7 in The Ancient Ship of Doom: not only is it the longest stage in the NES trilogy, but running out of time is always expected of players, and borderline impossible of ensuring that doesn't happen (this "perfect run" accomplishes the stage without death, yet closes with a mere two seconds remaining on the clock) unless something kills players first. More specifically, 7-1 has wind currents impeding player progress and can cause frequent plummets off the stage to death if care isn't taken. While there is a "Fire Wheel" ninpo spell that can be acquired, it's the only one in all of the stage, and incredibly easy to lose either through dying or picking something else up by accident. 7-2, among other things, has traps looking like part of the background until players realize too late they took damage from it. Sure, there are two One Ups for this section, but the first one is difficult to get without dying in the process. Finally, 7-3 goes completely overboard with the Spikes of Doom, placing them almost everywhere in screens that wouldn't be out of place in I Wanna Be the Guy. Oh, and if players are looking for health potions, don't bother: there's not a single one in the entire stage (and a single one in the Famicom version, on 7-2). Perhaps the only saving grace that is unlike the first NES game, losing to the Final Boss won't send players back to 7-1, but the sub-stages being so obtuse and the fact players have finite continues in the American version of this game make it much more problematic, though not one they'll have to repeat if they mess something up at the Final Boss.

The Reboot Trilogy

• Ass Pull: Obaba's comeback in Sigma II and III - the games don't bother explaining how she is revived when she's supposed to be Killed Off for Real in Dragon Sword.
• Broken Base: Several hypothetical features have been highly debated amongst players.
  • Should the series have real-time weapon switching in the vein of Devil May Cry? Those in favor of it argue that it would greatly increase the combo potential of the game, and would allow for more fluid gameplay with less pauses. Those against it say that Ninja Gaiden isn't focused on long combos on individual enemies the way that Devil May Cry is, and argue that this would create far too much overlap between the movesets of each weapon.
  • Should the series have a lock-on? Many cite the imprecision of the soft-lock that the games currently have, with Ryu frequently attacking enemies that they didn't intend to go after. Arguments against this point out that the soft-lock is a mechanic can be learned and mastered, and cite the intensity of the games as they already are, saying that the games are too frenetic and fast-paced to be able to reliably single out, and track one target with a lock-on, and would rather not compromise on this aspect of the series.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Following their respective debuts, Rachel and Momiji: both garnered enough popularity to warrant not just subsequent reappearances in Ninja Gaiden Sequels, but an immigration as Playable Characters in the Dead or Alive franchise and the Updated Re-release versions of Warriors Orochi.
• Event-Obscuring Camera: In the modern trilogy, specifically the ones released on Microsoft platforms, the camera will often be your toughest opponent, chosing the most impractical angle possible, zooming in without reason and putting mooks or even Ryu himself off-screen. Surely Sigma and Sigma II have fixed this problem, haven't they? Er...well, no. Fortunately, the camera in Ninja Gaiden III does its job decently, although still not perfectly. The most frequent problem is that enemies in the foreground obstruct your view because of the low camera angle.
• Goddamned Bats: Actual bats: these critters do annoying damage and come in large packs, with Action Bomb variants showing up from Ninja Gaiden Black and onwards. But on the plus side, they're quite likely to drop some much needed health orbs, making them rather useful in some cases.
• 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 the games where Hayashi was involved (Sigma, Sigma II and III) — any title not directed by Itagaki can only be a pale imitation. It doesn't help that before leaving Team Ninja pre-merger, Itagaki specifically said he didn't like 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: The various journals you can find on the bodies of dead ninja throughout the games often reveal that, though they may have been part of enemy clans, they were just as brave and determined to succeed as Ryu. Sometimes they even display thoughtfulness and internal conflict about what they're doing.
• Porting Disaster: The Master Collection on PC was a bit of a strange case on release — putting aside the disappointment from fans that the versions of 1 and 2 are the Sigma versions (which many consider to be inferior), the games in the collection had some of the most barebones PC ports of a modern game you could find, with no configuration launcher, no graphics or resolution options (requiring you to set the game resolution in the game properties via Steam's launch options), and no keyboard and mouse support. The one upside was that the ports themselves ran well without any real issues, and eventually Koei Tecmo patched the games to rectify the lack of graphics options.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The save system in the modern games 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 the 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.
• So Bad, It's Good: Whatever fans think of the respective plots of the modern installments - Dragon Sword and III/Razor's Edge have a little more detailed ones, not that this saves the latter from being a Contested Sequel, though.
• Tainted by the Preview: The Master Collection has garnered a lot of criticism among fans for a lot of reasons: the collection will only include the Sigma versions of the first two games, as the source code of Black and 2 have been lost, according to Team Ninja. The second reason is that Sigma 2 is still the same censored version for the Playstation 3, unlike Sigma 2 Plus for the Vita. The third one is the removal of online multiplayer for both Sigma 2 and Razor's Edge. And finally, the removal of the Jiggle Physics present in Sigma 2, which you could use by shaking the Sixaxis controller like in the PlayStation 3 version, despite the Dualshock 4/Dualsense and the Switch controllers having gyro support.

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