Thoughts
I think it's worth playing through even if Black is an improvement in every sense.
>>12563423The beginning of "frustrating games are fun" slop. Yes I was filtered, just like the 99.9% of people who picked up this game and dropped it like a sack of shit after 15 minutes and moved on to better games, which is why no one remembers or talks about it outside of mongolian basket weaving forums.
>>12563456>slopCan you use normal words for once
>>12563456holy shit, what an embarrassing post. this is the sort of 'people' you have to share this shithole with btw.
>>12563456Only a weak and frustrated "man" would post something like that. Yikes.
I liked it but I'd lie if I didn't say that the difficulty at times feels more like the game being jank and mentioning it as a selling point due to the way the enemies attack and how you receive damage.
>>125634233d was a mistake
>>12563456I bought Black on my Series X like three months ago and I haven't touched it since because I'm afraid of getting filtered.
Haven't played the original(of the Xbox releases) as I got an Xbox late and NG Black was on the way so I pre-ordered that one. Loved NGB so much. Never beat the hardest difficulty though, but I cleared the default one. Isn't there cool stuff in NG that isn't in Black? I recall seeing a video breaking down the differences years ago, but I can't remember specifics.
>>12563456>The beginning of "frustrating games are fun" slop.Did you not play ~60% of the NES's library?
>>12563423Its good but I think too many of the combos are pointless or straight up not real combos and it feels the most efficient way to play is to spam on landing instant UT for every enemy.
>>12563810>filtered by fear of getting filteredAbsolutely pathetic.
>>12565010Zoomers can't think that far back
>>12563423an amazing game. Devil's Third was also surprisingly goodRIP Itagaki
incredible game. the difficulty is really overstated. its a punishing game that isnt going to let retards win by repeating the same retarded things over and over. however its perfectly manageable with basic pattern recognition and you can even pause to use items whenever you want. the nes games are much harder.
>>12563423The secret sauce to this game is its Zelda influence. Sort of like how DMC1 has the best vibes in the series thanks to its survival horror heritage, only here the gameplay is immaculate. The later games lost this as they became more and more obsessed with cuhrayzee action.
>>12565159>The secret sauce to this game is its Zelda influence
>>12565173Simple puzzle elements enhance the sense of adventure and progression beyond beating a series of pure combat trials. Tairon is Hyrule Field. You fight a doppelganger, and there is an inexplicable diversity of biomes. Vigoor Emperor - > Fiend Murai is just Ganondorf -> Ganon, complete with platforming interlude.
>>12565010The difficulty of the 8-bit era is something people seem to retroactively embrace but at the time it wasn't a huge selling point or something people enjoyed. It was just the way things were. I can tell you that as a kid who grew up in the NES era, none of my friends or myself ever discussed game difficulty as a positive. The difficulty of something like Ninja Gaiden was everyone's least favorite part. We liked the gameplay in general and the setting and the graphics and the cool animated cutscenes but by the end it kind of burned everyone out. The difficulty was something you dealt with, or something that ended up making the game unplayable past a certain point for some people, not something anyone actually enjoyed. If they'd tuned those games down a little people probably would have liked them more. We didn't have this weird merit badge "I completed this arduous task so now I feel superior" mentality like everyone does now, we just played for fun.
Platforming is a bit wonky (this makes the level up to the final boss an absolute drag), but other than that, really good. It has aged super well.
>>12565598Of this were true hard difficulty options wouldn't exist and everything would be streamlined to be easyFaggot
>>12563423Great game, but the camera can be a huge issue and often is the source of the game's difficulty. I actually felt the same when playing Sekiro, there was a boss fight in an enclosed space that I ended up playing as if it was a first person game, because the camera made my character disappear. It's the kind of thing you'd imagine modern games would have solved by now.
>>12563751He's right though
>>12565598This>>12565740The only guy I knew who played games on hard was a lonely autistic man
>>12565740Games DID get streamlined to be easier, you retard. And the difficulty options are just that: optionalIf people found the default difficulty of these old games reasonable then they wouldn't have sold millions of game genies back in the day and people wouldn't abuse save states and rewind functions when they play them now
>>12563423I dislike the camera's default position being eye level to Ryu's head instead of being placed a bit higher and looking downwards. Maybe that was more in 2. I do remember moving the camera and it just resets itself back down.
>>12563423If we’re counting Black, then it’s the greatest game of all time. No, I’m not memeing. No other action game comes close, and never will.
>>12565837I try to play on the hardest difficulty level I find fair. I agree some default difficulty levels are clearly intended for all audiences and offer so little challenge they become boring. But I don't want the alternative to that to be a perpetual neverending death simulator where I have to train for months to "beat" a 15 hour game.Too many hard modes are just developers lazily cranking up damage sliders until everything is grossly lopsided and every boss is a damage sponge while you die in one hit. And since the game wasn't designed around you doing 1/1000th the damage the enemies do it becomes less of a challenge and more of just a repetitive slog. Even hard modes should be balanced and a lot of them aren't.
>>12565150>the nes games are much harderNo, they are not. Like, they are objectively much less complex, even american 3, and outside of that one they are not punishing at all. I never understood this opinion.
>>12563423Prayers
>>12565598Can confirm. The difficulty was what it was and we had no reason to think that it could or should be any different. We just played whatever the fuck games we could get a hold of and tried to get further each time. With most games, just reaching a level we hadn't reached before was about as exciting as beating an entire game now.The only thing I disagree with you on is that at least in my circle of friends it WAS a big deal when someone beat a game. Even beating SMB1 was like a rite of passage at one point. But for the most part it was just a given that we would never finish most of the games we had but that was just how it was.
>>12563423Not really a fan of how there is like 500 combos and bosses and certain enemies are basically immune to all of them but a select few that you have to find through trial and error.They really should have trimmed down the combo count and focused on giving each move its own identity and usecase with pros and cons. Also the non-combat sections are pure boring filler.It just plays like a shitty fighting game for failed PvP players. I honestly just think enemy/boss design and gameplay setpiece centric action games (ie Souls) are so much better than combo-centric action games
>>12566274I kinda agree, but one, I hate how the player character maneuvers like a pig compared to NG/DMC and two, the bosses in Souls games get progressively more combo-centric/spammy in each successive game.
>>12563826IIRC the main omission was the Intercept mechanic. Black was a compilation of the original+ the hurricane pack DLC with some changes to item placement. Awesome game. NGB is probably in my top 10 of all time. In fact, I preferred it over NG2.
>>12563423ng04 legit gave me faith in games again.when you grew up during nes/snes/genesis era you can 100% feel that games got dumbed down for a massive new audience of normies.everything about ng04 felt like a retro game with love.
>>12566367And you still haven't beat MNM you poser shitter faggot
>>12565867I actually kind of hate this quote because it's like an admission he was just being contrarian and overdoing it on purpose to be le heckin' epic difficulty man and not basing the design around any rational criteria. If he thought it should have been harder to begin with, then why wasn't it harder? Was he waiting for feedback just so he could go in the opposite direction? If they said it was too easy, would he have made it even more easy to show them who was boss? Trying too hard.
>>12566375there's a reason why he has never made a single other good action game, and people let their true opinion show when they talk about Sigma (which is a sidegrade at worst). Because Sigma doesn't have that "classic" status, where normalfag retards must blindly suck it off even if they didn't actually like it or think it was a good game, with Sigma they can freely shit on it and say their actual views (not realizing they are disparaging Black by proxy, since they are 99% the same game)
>>12566394>fucked up transparencies, more loading zones, fucked up music and fucked up dodge frames based on directionbut muh side grade
>>12566406>don't have to awkwardly jam the stick in to move camera in combat>can set camera to normal or inverted for both directions (there is no way to totally remove inverted in Black)>more vivid color palette (Black is very muted and flat) >removes pointless padding like having to run back to Muramasa's shop to get the ticket for Han's Bar>more shops and save spots so you don't have to constantly backtrack or go 20+ minutes between saves>actually get a fucking aiming reticle for the bow&arrow in first person>can jump and shoot arrows>can use consumables without having to manually enter the menu every time (even worse since Black would block you from entering menu during certain animations so you had to quickly mash start before you died)>the menu in general is much quicker and snappier with key items separated>can start the game from Hard without having to play through the entire game on Normal first>Rachel chapters offer some nice gameplay and playstyle variety>new cool weapons like dual wield swords>faster load times>improved enemy AIIt's a sidegrade at worst, an upgrade at best. Yet, people suck Black off like a masterpiece and shit on Sigma like it's irredeemable trash (hint: they think Black is trash as well, they just can't say that out loud)
>>12566375It's called kayfabe, retard. NGB isn't even a particularly hard game, and the game doesn't revel in killing you the way Souls games do. He's just telling you (the spiritual game journo) to man up.
>>12566441Ninja gaiden being seen as difficult is more just that the game doesn't do a great job of telling you how to play and more forces you figure what works and doesn't
>>12566450nta but that was why I dropped it. I didn't get the impression that there was some hidden layer of depth or skill to learn. It just felt like a broken game.
>>12566418The NG community may be full of low IQ console warriors and NG2 cocksuckers, but Sigma is a legit downgrade.>backflip has less iframes than regular dodging>controller rumble stripped out because the shitty Sixaxis didn't have vibration motors>omitted the Red Muffler and DOA2 costumes, and now there are no rewards for beating the game on Very Hard, or for beating Eternal Legend>you can never wear the Shinobi Shozoku costume again once you've beaten the game because the costume select menu overrides it>removed the Nunchaku/Lunar from your starter weapons. You can't even obtain the Nunchaku at all on Hard/Very Hard because they just forgot about it.>dumbing down all the puzzles makes a bunch of the game's level design pointless and incoherent>parryable Berserkers>new motorcycle enemies are just bad>Rachel fucks up the game's pacing. She should have been a Separate Ways-style side chapter.>music remixed for the worse>BLOOMIt doesn't help that the Master Collection port inherits all the Sigma Plus downgrades like horrendously shitty bow controls that don't let you block in first person, and baby mode cheater items. The only thing unambiguously improved in Sigma is the dpad quick menu and defaulting to manual camera control.
>>12566567>unambiguously improved in Sigma is the dpad quick menu...Which you'll practically never use. Because why the fuck would you when consuming items in the menu is safer. The menus themselves are uglier and less intuitive yet you still have to use them to swap weapons and ninpo.
>>12566460>I didn't get the impression that there was some hidden layer of depth or skill to learnYou have to think about it more like a fighting game. The games more about positioning and knowing when to get cheap hits in
>>12566394I actually like sigma in theory the problem is every single version (including the master collection version) has noticeably more input lag than ninja gaiden black
