Ninja Gaiden (2004 Video Game) - Reception

Reception

Ninja Gaiden was released to much critical acclaim. Greg Kasavin of GameSpot called it "one of the best most challenging action adventure games ever made", 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." Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) called it "an unmissable instant classic", and declared that "no Xbox should go without Gaiden." Critics also regarded it to be one of the most difficult games released prior to 2007.

Its remake, 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 " the game down to its purest essentials." IGN called its release "a rare and welcome day", which brought their "excitement levels back to the first time played the game."

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. According to IGN, the games could "make momentarily forget about the next generation of consoles". 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. 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. Tecmo attempted to address this with the introduction of manual camera controls in the Hurricane Packs, 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.

Consumers purchased 1.5 million copies of Ninja Gaiden and Black to August 2007, 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. These sales figures reflect Tecmo's decision to target the non-Japanese 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. The critical and commercial successes of Ninja Gaiden have led CNET and GameSpot Asia to induct the game into their halls of fame.

The Ninja Gaiden games gained a reputation throughout the gaming community for their difficulty and attention to detail. Although they appealed to gamers who, like Pro-G's Struan Robertson, wanted a "bloody hard, but also bloody good" challenge, 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 incredible difficulty", 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." EGM found the challenge to be "rewarding" as it "motivates you to actually get better at the game." 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." 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." That same year, G4tv ranked it as the 83th top video game of all time, also calling it "the best ninja game ever made and one of the all around hardest."