Ninja Gaiden

Usually I would avoid talking about something as dry and static as enemy spawn positions, but for Ninja Gaiden, their naive implementation colors the entire play experience. Instead of enemies appearing once their spawn point is visible on screen, blatant spawn triggers dot the terrain, yanking the enemy into the play-space once you collide with the trigger. Unusually, the relative clarity of the spawns and the manner in which they’re deployed manifests taut positioning dynamics. The most vexing for a new player is that spawning the enemy and then backing up to secure one’s footing often fails, as killing the enemy and then stepping back into its trigger instantly revives it. When the player initiates the spawn, they must be prepared to push forward as they kill it. Pushing forward quickly enough can reward the player for this by despawning the enemy against the back wall, assuming they get beyond the enemy without killing it in the first place. However, enemy triggers rarely stack, with sequential triggers staggering their entrances. This inversely favors slow progression, dealing with each enemy one-by-one while standing ground to avoid respawns. At its best, the game creates scenarios that encourage the former, while at its worst, it lapses into slow-chug memorizer runs in the latter paradigm.

The archetypal setup for this dynamic has two elements: a projectile wielder on a platform away from main character Ryu Hayabusa, and a flying enemy that swoops in near the platform edge. It’s a bit more than just a high/low configuration, as both roles can fluidly fill each need: arcing projectiles cut off a jumping approach, and the downward swoop of the birds keeps the player from staying grounded to wait it out. In some cases, the trigger for the flying enemy sits over the gap itself, preventing hugging the edge to lure it in on safe ground. Even when the latter is possible, the lack of additional ground locks any response in place, lest the player wander behind the trigger and respawn it later. Navigating through all the configurations of this design idiom reminds one to lean on the ninjutsu subweapons. Whether a power-up gives the player their own projectiles or turns their jump into a lethal cyclone, knowing which to bring to each encounter and, for extremely useful power-ups like the latter, how to conserve points to deploy it in must-use scenarios is key. It’s in these moments when the player stands above a precipice that the claustrophobic design pushes the power-ups to the forefront.

Out of all of the enemies in the game, the birds have a special amount of care applied to their movement. They smoothly modulate their speed, curving up to meet the player no matter their starting position. In the later levels, they sometimes spawn in directly below the player! [src]

And beyond that, Tecmo didn’t need much else! In its totality, Ninja Gaiden embodies the sloppiness of the burgeoning console action scene: a giant health bar, fragile enemies, and pick-ups everywhere. Compared to the more deliberate Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden looses the movement restrictions and speeds up the attacks. Outside of the pristine construction discussed in the paragraph above, these conditions limit the ways for the designers to turn the screws, and even that example does little to scare the player without an insta-kill pit in the middle. This keeps the difficulty rather pleasant for most of the game beyond little knock-back deaths here and there. Once the endgame approaches, however, Tecmo leans into their worst instincts and draws out the most memorization-heavy aspects of the system. More frequently triggers drop in enemies behind the player, often to pincer them. In cases like these, stacking the triggers would properly trap the player, but when the triggers are staggered, taking out the enemy formation one half at a time becomes rote after the trigger position is sussed out.