Bad Bosses and difficulty spikes

Since I've started writing this blog I can find myself thinking up how I'm going to write an article before I've finished the game. Take Ninja Blade for example, another of my recent GAME sale purchases. When I first heard of it years ago I thought "cheap Ninja Gaiden rip-off" and when I finally picked it up and noticed that it was by From Software my expectation changed to "rock hard Ninja Gaiden rip-off". The fact that my initial difficulty options were normal and hard only added to my concern. But when I actually got down to playing it, the story and style of it reminded me more of the crazy scenarios of the Devil May Cry series and the combat felt like more simple action-adventures like God of War than the more... technical(?) feel of the modern Ninja Gaiden series. It felt like quite an enjoyable blast for a Saturday afternoon and I was all ready to give it a glowing review as a hidden gem, well worth the £3 I paid for it if not more.

That is until I reached the Carrion Claw boss. Up until this point I think I'd only died a couple of times from stupid mistakes but I stopped counting my deaths before I'd beaten this one. I think the main problem with it was the lack of a clear method to beating it, I usually expect a boss to be a way of forcing you to prove that you have mastered a particular technique or skill that you have recently been taught, or at least have a set way of beating it. In fact, this boss looks like it should have a specific method as you see that your heavy sword can break through the armour on its main claws and allow you to use faster attacks on the exposed flesh underneath. This eventually causes the giant enemy crab to fall to the ground, exposing its weak point for massive damage - err, well no actually it doesn't.

I initially thought that when the crab gets knocked down you could damage it until its health bar reached a certain point and it would get back up again but I gradually realised that it only falls down for a set amount of time. You would occasionally hardly damage it at all before it would regrow its legs, then its armour and you're back to square one. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't so hard to damage those legs in the first place - as my fire shuriken ninjutsu didn't appear to have any effect on it, the only available option was to get in close and hack away at it. Avoiding damage here was damn near impossible as the main claws seemed to attack at random, with no predictable wind up animation or sound cues that I could determine. Its attacks could knock you off your feet at a moments notice or hit you with electricity that forced you to wobble the analog stick for all it's worth, lest you get stuck in a loop of electrocution or hit by more dangerous attacks. Beating it seemed like it would purely be a war of attrition, where I would finally get one lucky attempt and do more damage to it than it did to myself.

After the nth failure I was about ready to give up and decided to consult the internet, lo and behold I found others who had struggled with it and plenty of varying approaches to beating it. The accepted answer there didn't seem to work for me, as I said the fire shuriken didn't seem to do much damage and I couldn't really find a good spot to charge it up without getting hit by something. Obviously the destruction of armour wasn't working for me (though I was unaware that 'Ninja Vision' also slowed down the rest of the game, allowing you to get a few more hits in) so I tried the last answer of reflecting the irritating electric balls back at the boss. I'd found out earlier that the quick swords allowed you to pretty much mash attack and guarantee reflection, whereas the standard sword requires careful timing. So even with the camera positioning making it very hard to judge the balls positions I still managed to start hitting them back. I was very surprised to see the amount of health this approach took off and I think I then managed to beat it in a few minutes, never once taking out its armour or knocking it down.

So even though I eventually beat the boss very easily, the time taken to do so had really coloured my opinion of the whole game. The next few bosses started to feel similar, in that they didn't have a set way to beat them, just take whatever damage you can and be prepared to take a few knocks along the way. I always prefer bosses that you can look at and know they can be defeated perfectly if you have enough practice. I also find it boring having no option but to run away and hide from a bosses predictable deadly attack, it just makes it feel like a time sponge. One of the things I absolutely loved about the original Devil May Cry was that despite your close range sword attacks being the most effective, there was almost never a case where you had to stop attacking. Your handguns were always available to keep chipping away at enemies health bars, occasionally even providing you with a way of staying off the ground to avoid wave style attacks through their gravity defying recoil.

As for Ninja Blade I think I will probably finish it eventually but I didn't feel like I needed to see much more to write this - even if there was the remote possibility that it could redeem itself before the end, I'm not a professional reviewer after all. I found myself thinking of this Edge Article from last week, which suggests that you shouldn't feel guilty about those unfinished games on your shelf. Even though I managed to fight through that difficulty spike with some help from gamefaqs, that feeling of wanting to give up still lingers. Aspects that might have initially seemed interesting have also started to get annoying, like its Quick Time Events that have a rhythm action style grading for how well timed your button presses are. Though this seems better than having to press them as quick as possible I've still screwed a fair amount of these up by pressing the wrong button - especially when the game starts screwing with you and putting 'attack' or 'jump' commands onto the analog stick instead of the face buttons. The analog stick symbol was hard to read at the best of times so when it popped up in these cases you had almost no chance of getting it right first time. Rewinding the cut-scene when this happens only aggravates you more by highlighting the sections you managed, which you then have to repeat.

All of this adds up to leave me unsurprised that I found it in the pre-owned section after all. I read this Gamasutra article about an interview with David Braben, suggesting that used games are killing off single player games - whether or not you agree, I think that for purely single player games, your only weapon against being traded in early on is how inviting it is to play the whole thing again. You can't really do much about people who will always trade in games as early as possible to get the maximum trade value - even if they will pick up a pre-owned copy to replay it down the line. But I know that I'm usually a little more more hesitant to trade in unless I reach the end and think "yeah, I never want to play that again". I doubt that playing Ninja Blade over again with an increased chance of death would appeal to anyone but the most hardened achievement chasers.