Metachronos overall score = 9.5 / 10
Positive
# Some of the best, most intensely exciting action of any game ever
# Tons of content Even if you played tons of Ninja Gaiden, there's still a lot that's new
# Absolutely first-rate presentation--visuals and audio still second-to-none
# Even better than before--mission mode distills the game down to its purest essentials
# The old Ninja Gaiden arcade game is a hidden unlockable
Negative
# Most contents are find in the previous game
# Nothing will surprise you if you have played the first game
Remarkably enough, the best just got better with Ninja Gaiden Black, an updated version of last year's absolutely amazing Xbox action game. Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox didn't leave a lot of room for improvement, thanks to its astonishingly good presentation and fantastic action, which combined the depth and precision of a great fighting game with the settings and situations of a first-rate action adventure game. But this new installment seems bent on achieving nothing less than perfection by using last year's game as a starting point and fine-tuning its few issues, while also adding lots of new options and content, such as a lengthy series of stand-alone missions that emphasize the game's unbelievably intense, brutal, lighting-fast combat. The core game is still the same as before, but it's just as exciting today as it in 2004.
If you're unfamiliar with Ninja Gaiden, skip to the next page to find out what makes the core game so special. If you have played Ninja Gaiden, though, let's go over what's changed. Ninja Gaiden Black contains the original game in its entirety, including the content of the two downloadable Hurricane Packs that were made available on Xbox Live some months after the game's release. There are multiple new difficulty levels on top of that, plus the new mission mode (featuring dozens of different missions), and even the original arcade Ninja Gaiden game. Multiple difficulty modes are pretty standard in most games, but here the differences are much more substantial and compelling than usual. Enemies and item placements change from one difficulty mode to the next, so the challenge heightens, but there's still an element of excitement and discovery. Don't expect to be able to just dive into all the content from the beginning, though. You need to finish the game's story mode before the missions and the hard difficulty mode are unlocked, and most of the missions are initially locked, too. Tougher difficulty modes are unlocked as you finish the campaign or missions on the previous difficulty settings.
Ninja Gaiden Black is an extremely good-looking game. It's easily one of the best looking Xbox games, and by extension, it's one of the best-looking games ever. You could spot a few weaknesses in the visuals if you tried. Maybe a couple of Ryu's animations, such as when he shimmies across a ledge, don't look as good as when he does everything else. Also, the environments generally aren't very interactive, so don't expect to leave destruction in your wake, in addition to death. Enemies only appear in groups of about three or four at a time, and their corpses all vanish in pools of blood rather than pile up. The perfectly smooth frame rate, on extremely rare occasion, drops to just plain smooth. These are nitpicky issues about a gorgeous-looking game, which supports widescreen progressive-scan displays for the best possible visual fidelity. Ninja Gaiden boasts imaginative scenery and great-looking character design, as well as a few of Team Ninja's signature graphical touches--if you know what we mean.
The game sounds wonderful, too. Options for English or Japanese voice-over are available. The English dialogue may seem a bit corny at times, but it actually fits very well in the context of a comic-book-style, over-the-top game. The sounds of combat in Ninja Gaiden are terrific, especially Ryu's ferocious battle cries--which make him sound about as strong as he is--and the anime-style sound of steel cleaving flesh. Sure enough, the game features a fantastic soundtrack too, with unique music for all the different chapters and many of the boss battles. Some of the tracks loop fairly frequently, but the compositions are catchy and generally excellent, thus effectively fitting the overall tone of both the gameplay sequence in particular and the entire game in general. Those with Dolby Digital 5.1-equipped home-theater setups will relish the audio experience all the better. It bears mention that the sound presentation in Ninja Gaiden Black hasn't aged quite as well as the rest of the game, and you'll inevitably hear the same sound effects over and over and over as you fight. But as a whole, this game has great audio. Ninja Gaiden Black fulfills the last bits of untapped potential in what already was a truly extraordinary game and an instant classic. Though the underlying gameplay is mostly unchanged, by presenting so many more modes and options, Ninja Gaiden Black unleashes the absolute best this gameplay has to offer. With the launch of the Xbox 360 now just weeks away, you have to wonder exactly how the next generation of games could possibly improve on something like this.
Subject: Ninja Gaiden Black ( XBOX ) 
Sat Jan 12, 2008 10:36 am
