this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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Yeah I don't see many posts here so I was wondering if quizzing the community might inspire some new interactions and maybe help develop the identity here. No need to force in weekly things that other subs are doing.
I used to love Ninja Gaiden - what would be the best place to start? NG2 then? Unbalanced but satisfying sounds okay to me.
Sorry if I came off as dismissive, my first paragraph was just me musing on why this community in particular hasn't taken off.
So here is my opinion on the series: Ninja Gaiden Black is an adventure game with great combat. You have exploration, platforming and even an almost Metroidvania-like hub area you backtrack back and forth through. It's occasionally almost Zelda-like rather than purely an action game. Playing it on Xemu also offsets one of its flaws - stingy checkpoint placement. Just use (but don't abuse) save states and don't worry about it. It runs flawlessly on Xemu without any specific setup, and you can set rendering resolution to like x6 and it will look great.
Ninja Gaiden 2 (Xbox 360 version) feels like the crack cocaine of action games. Or I dunno, freebase Meth maybe. It feels like the best action game ever 50% of the time and the worst action game ever 50% of the time. It's almost pure action, just one murder hallway after another. The sheer amount of enemies, the aggression of the AI and the speed of the combat gives you adrenaline rushes like nothing else. HOWEVER! The game was rushed to release as the devs chased a bonus payout, and the game is blatantly not playtested and balanced properly. It's especially apparent in the second half of the game. I developed a sort of love-hate relationship with it: I screamed at it in frustration more often than most games but I also cannot wait to go back.
Setting it up in Xenia Canary was much more fiddly than using Xemu. The game must be hard capped at 60 FPS. You need to tweak a bunch of config settings to minimise the occurrence of an audio bug where sound might cut out until you restart (I can send you my config if you want). If you want to increase rendering resolution by x3 you need to accept some minor graphical glitches (primarily in the first couple of chapters).
Don't play NG3RE unless you've already played the other two and can't wait for NG4. Otherwise just pick your flavour - more adventure game and better balance or an unbalanced but beautiful mess? I should also note that both games are fairly short, my NGB playthrough was 14h and NG2 was 13h, so it's not a big commitment to play one after the other.
Huh, probably Black is the one then, I'm a pretty big fan of that style you describe and have actually been hankering for one lately.
Ninja Gaiden 2 sounds like someething everyone needs to experience once too though so maybe I'll put both on my list. I'm not super excited to fiddle with emulators but it sounds like it'd be worth it.
Yeah that seems about right. For Xemu, you need the BIOS, MCPX and HDD Image Files separately, which can be found here. No further setup or config needed. You can find the ROM at The Vault. Ninja Gaiden 2 ROM is also available there.
I can send you my config file for Xenia if you want to avoid most of the fiddling, but most of it came from YouTube videos and Reddit threads I found when googling "NG2 Xenia". It ran really well for me in the end. I experienced the audio bug maybe five times, and restarting fixed it every time. The graphical glitch artifacts were somewhat annoying the first handful of chapters, but still worth it for the higher resolution and completely disappeared after that (apart from during loading screens, but who cares about that).
You said you've played before so maybe you already have some fundamentals, but watching a tutorial video on YouTube that goes over basic principles can help a lot. The games sort of expect you to rely on certain mechanics that are never explained, and while you can figure it out yourself it's probably smoother to watch a tutorial. Also just experiment with combos and weapons: NGB felt very well balanced and encounters that seemed impossible at first felt very possible once "figured out".