Gaiden is pronounced guy-den. According to IanOji, this word can translate as "foreign telegram" or "message from beyond." pfft tells me:
While that word is also pronounced "gaiden", the title screen shows it written in kanji, which makes the intended meaning unambigious. According to EDICT, 'our' gaiden means "side story, anectode"; it seems to mean a small story about the same characters as a longer epic, but outside the main narrative. It should be noted that "ninja gaiden" is the American title. In the original Japanese the game was called "ninja ryuukenden" (ninja dragon-sword legend). Presumably, that was judged too difficult to pronounce for English-speakers... The chosen title may have been inspired by the more logically named "Final Fantasy Gaiden".
Video game released for the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom* gaming consoles in 1989 by Tecmo. The game has achieved a somewhat memorable status amongst old school gamers - probably because it was one of the first games with cut scenes between levels (on a side note, is it some sort of requirement that every Nintendo game with these have a villain say "ha, ha, ha, ha" every couple levels?) and also allowed the player to be a l33t ninja. This game was l33t in pre-l33t years. Ninja! Hiiiiiii-YA!
Um, yes. There wasn't any l33t sp34k but uh, anyway...
In Ninja Gaiden the player is Ryu Hayabusa, son of a ninja father (Ken Hayabusa) killed in a duel. In a note left by said l33t ninja dad, young Ryu is instructed take the family sword and go to America to meet a Dr. Walter Smith (who, despite his uncommonly common name, Ryu seems to have no problem finding). Along the way (after the first level), Ryu ends up captured (then escaping) and in possession of a mysterious statue. See, Ryu is getting attacked by all these weird people along the way. Eventually, we find out why! Apparently, the statue Ryu obtains, when combined with a similar statue, and placed on an altar somewhere deep in the Amazon rainforest, summons forth a powerful demon that does lots of bad things like killing people and breaking stuff. Bad, you know.
The game showed Ryu in a 2D world that would scroll to the left or right, depending on which way the character was moved. The primary weapon was Ryu's sword and the secondary weapons were the...
- Shuriken - Ninja stars. Little circular things with points that get thrown at things that get cut up by them. The weakest of the secondary weapons but handy nonetheless.
- Windmill Shuriken - A stronger version of the shuriken that attempts to return to its thrower (except when thrown at bosses). If the player dodges the windmill shuriken as it's returning, it can hit enemies behind the player as well before attempting to return again.
- Art of the Fire Wheel - This weapon sent a stream of fireballs upwards diagonally from the player, killing anything (but bosses) in its path.
- Jump and Slash - This causes Ryu to swing his sword around as he's jumping, therefore doing damage to enemies he hits in mid-jump without having to hit the attack button.
- Invincible Fire Wheel - Creates a wheel of fire around Ryu for a limited time, protecting him from harm and damaging anything it touches.
In addition to these there were also various
power-ups that increased the ninja's
health or the game
score. The secondary weapons were used by pressing
up and
B at the same time (B alone was the normal sword attack and
A was jump).
Unfortunately, as the game progresses it tends to get really obnoxious. At first it's rather fun, running around killing all these guys with Ryu's sword and such, but eventually in an effort to make the game harder the designers decided to just throw irritating amounts of enemies on the screen at the same time. So while trying to jump over a pit which falling in would result in death, one must deal with things like an enemy shooting in Ryu's direction (horizontally only though) and standing in the way of a safe landing, a bat flying in a somewhat zig-zag pattern at Ryu, and some hawk (or similar creature) flying around with the intent of colliding with the ninja. Then, if the player manages not to fall into the pit, some guy that I think is supposed to be a soldier but looks more like a (American) football player in the 8-bit graphics, will come running at the ninja from off-screen in an attempt to knock him back into the pit. Admittedly, there really isn't much else to be done to increase the game's difficulty as it went on but that doesn't mean this wasn't annoying.
Nevertheless, the game is quite addicting and fun (for the first few levels at least). There are six acts, as the game calls them, which each contain several levels. Ultimately Ryu must defeat the horrible demon contained within the statues (of course), as well as an evil warlock that has brought them together called The Jaquio, and six weaker bosses that can be defeated by using one of the two following strategies:
- Keep hitting the boss creature before it manages to bring the player's health down too far
- Hit the boss creature as much as possible without getting hit, then climb a nearby wall for safety until the creature can be hit again.
There's some variations on these strategies that should be used for a couple bosses but overall this will do. Having recently played the game again on an
emulator, I found the most difficult part getting use to how a NES-style controller would be setup again.
The game went on to spawn two sequels. I haven't played much of the sequels but from what experience I do have with them, they just seem to get progressively more obnoxious quicker. The original seems to be the most enjoyable. The three games were packaged together on the same cartridge and released for Super Nintendo in later years. The game was also ported to the Gameboy, Game Gear, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, and the PC (possibly only in Japan for the PC though I haven't been able to confirm this).
Game Credits**:
Story: Sakurazaki
Screenplay: Sakurazaki, Faw
Image Illustrations: Runmaru
Art Works: Runmaru, Parco, Uma, Naga, Wild Tagou, Niwakamaru
Program Works: Madoka Southernami, Masita
Assistant: Nosuke
NES Translator: Kevin and Daniel
Sound Design: More Yamasan, B.B, Hakase
Director: Sakurazaki
*TheBooBooKitty says re Ninja Gaiden: YOU KNOW, *cough* - This was an arcade game first. But it was terrible. I own it, it is truly bad.
**These are taken from screenshots at http://www.geocities.com/lsteele42/NGaiden1/credits/credits.html. I no longer have the actual Ninja Gaiden game cartridge (or even an NES to play it on) nor anything that came with it. In the game full names weren't given in the credits so if anyone can fill me in on the missing parts of the names above, that would be great.