Ninja Gaiden Shadow

"Wicked platformer, but is it really Ninja Gaiden..?"

I remember playing Ninja Gaiden on the NES. Beautiful game. Beautiful music. Great story, i loved every aspect of it.
I also remember playing Blue Shadow (or Shadow of the ninja) on the NES.
That too was beautiful. Great music, great action, awesome bosses, awesome 2-player mode.
So how about a mix?

YAY!

I didnt really know what to expect when i picked up Ninja Gaiden GB a good few years ago. I really wanted it to be like the original NG, but no gameboy conversion of a NES game ever was too much like its ''father'' so to say. Sometimes this was a good thing (Battletoads, Megaman) and sometimes it was definitely not (cant remember any examples of this haha).

It takes a certain amount of goodwill to give Ninja Gaiden GB a good review. The NG series is a trilogy in high regard with most serious nintendo-ers, and a very tough act to live up to. Im not sure how Tecmo went about doing this version, but a fair guess is they bodged their gameboy version of Blue Shadow and redid the graphics a bit to make money off the Ninja gaiden name. Ahh sweet money hysteria. This could have been a ridiculously bad idea, but the result isnt half bad. Lets take a look at what they took from each game and put together to make this one.

Ninja Gaiden:
The main character, his animations, his sword, his flame wheel magic attack.
Thats essentially it.

Blue Shadow:
Enemies, music, climbing techniques, general game world design, main enemy (emperor garuda).

in fact, it doesnt seem like Tecmo made any attempt whatsoever to disguise the fact that this is Blue shadow with Ryu stuck on top.
Its hard to explain, but i still dont think this is bad. One of the main reasons Blue Shadow never really took off was because it was utterly faceless. The two main characters (a male and a female ninja) didnt have any real personalities and the bosses, who cared about the bosses. Apart from the hack and slash stuff there wasnt a plot at all. Now throw Ryu, with his powerful background, into this, and youve got a sure hit no matter what. People will buy it just because it is a Ninja gaiden title. hell, they probably dont remember blue shadow anyway, right?
Both games were awesome, so an amalgam isnt bad. Its really that simple.

Blah, enough about game comparison. Lets get on with actually reviewing the game.

PLOT: A meteor hit new york and for no reason Emperor Garuda now RULES EVERYTHING AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!! So ''they'' send off Ryu to assassinate him. Thats about it. No cinematics between levels, none of that plot-stuff. Logical reason why. There are only 5 levels. Not nearly enough to give the plot any depth.

GAMEPLAY: You control a bigger and slightly better animated Ryu hopping from platform to platform slicing enemies with your sword and occationally throwing fire at them and using a grappling hook to hang on to iron bars and other things you can hang from. At the end of each level you beat up a fairly difficult boss and move on to the next level. Thats all there is to it. However, its quite quite difficult. The level design is excellent and moody, with elements like hanging on to a crane to get pulled up to the roof of a building and somesuch. these levels are far more logical than they were in the other Ninja gaiden levels. they actually make up locations. They're also huge :P
The bosses go from being dead easy to being tremendously difficult. The final boss is agony, but not in an unfair way. he's just very difficult. All in all, wicked entertainment.

GRAPHICS: Big and detailed. A little more animation wouldnt have hurt, but this is *fine* by all means. This isnt a GBC game, so its all in delightful monochrome. Wo0p!

SOUND: Tecmo-ish. Bloops and bangs and bleeps, all a bit like Blue Shadow really. The music is nice and spacey, and the effects are good. Sometimes i'd play through the game just to hear the end of game music. I love that piece.

I give this a 9. This a damn good platformer, so what if its a shameless rip. This is good.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 11/09/00, Updated 11/09/00