Necroing to say that I played through Ninja Gaiden Black a while back and holy shit, what a game. It has its frustrating parts*, but wow. The crisp controls, the tight and rewarding combat, the way that the enemies challenge you and train you into getting better, it makes every single regular engagement fun.
It's a shame that the bosses somewhat fail to live upto that. (The military base boss fights and the bit where you stand there and block a helicopter's bullets are absolutely hilarious though, I will give them that much, even if they are shit.)
I'm also not really a story in videogames guy, but man, what a wasted opportunity there. The world design is cool, the music is great, but the story is, well, it exists. Let's not go any further than that. I will forgive it because the game does almost everything else well.
Definitely deserving of another playthrough on Hard, because I heard that it mixes up the enemies and items on every difficulty. I haven't checked out the mission mode either. There's a very generous amount of content left after a playthrough.
It plays fine on Xemu other than a few drops here and there, usually during ultimate attacks, atleast for a half decade old CPU. Sticks close to 60fps otherwise. It even manages to look absolutely gorgeous at some points. I'm sure it blew a lot of people away when it came out even on those old CRTs.
* I used save states for some platforming sections.
I want to play Ninja Gaiden II next, but getting the game here is almost impossible, and Xenia supposedly has a bug where the audio cuts off randomly. I'll wait a few years, I suppose. It's either that or dropping a lot of money on a console I won't really use otherwise. Maybe I should just bite the bullet and play Sigma 2.
If the rumours about Tecmo rebooting the series are true, I really hope that the new game is good and that more people can discover the franchise and enjoy the original too. Instead of a completely linear game like the later entries, hopefully they lean into that adventure game side of the original.
The setting makes absolutely no sense, but every time the game routed me back to an area I had been to before, or an inaccessible area I had only spotted before, I was really impressed. Maybe I'm just a sucker for all these old games that show so much ambition in a way that newer games don't even attempt to match.