Ninja Gaiden 2 Black dropped on Xbox Game Pass and now I can hear bird song again

Somewhere in my house there’s an excellent book called Difficult Questions About Video Games. It’s a collection of testimony from players and designers and it covers all kinds of fascinating things. I remember – I have to remember this; I have no idea where I left the book – that it starts with a bit about Tomb Raider. Someone’s playing the first game in the series in front of an audience and mentions that the controls are really “fluid”. Someone else in the audience then asks what “fluid” means, and…and nobody can pin it down at all.

I’m in a similar situation with Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, which has just shadow dropped, rather appropriately, on Game Pass. This updating of a 2008 classic feels absolutely incredible, and yet – I’m far from an expert on most things, and Ninja Gaiden falls well within “most things” in this case – I’m almost powerless to express why.

Here’s something that occurred to me almost immediately. I remembered suddenly that in the old days of video game mags every review would have one paragraph at minimum about the controls – how they felt, how responsive they were, what they brought to the game. There was an understanding that a game is its controls to a large degree – it’s where a lot of the personality of a game is found.

Over the years I suspect I’ve fallen into a state where I tend to notice the controls most when they are very bad, or when they’re trying to do something specific. Remember how heavy Gears of War felt when it came out? I can still remember being slightly shocked and awed by the roadie run, which gave you full pelt movement but limited steering. It reinforced the fact that you were basically playing as someone as nimble as a rhinoceros, but I noticed that at least. It cut through. There was no doubting the developers’ intentions. Ninja Gaiden’s very different, of course. It’s trying to create a sensation of speed and whispery lightness, an air of nimble mastery. And so I spent yesterday afternoon messing around in the game’s first level trying to work out how it does this.

Firstly, I think there’s a clever bit of sensory confusion going on. Ryu’s big, but his audio absolutely doesn’t match his size. I have to really lean in to the TV to hear his feet making the lightest of pads on the ground as he moves, and then most of the other stuff I hear of him is the wind reacting to his presence – the swish of it around his clothing as he runs fast, the swish as he jumps, the swish-swish as his blade cuts through the air. Team Ninja uses audio in a way that reminds me of the way a painter might use negative space on a canvas – they give you Ryu’s presence through the rare parts of the world that he touches.

That near-silence when it comes to character movement feels quite rare, and it’s matched by the skilful economy of Ryu’s animations. And these animations count. I was a bit surprised to realise that Ryu moves at a fairly slow speed when he’s just walking around a level. I didn’t spot this at first because the animation suggests otherwise: Ryu’s always leaned slightly forward with knees bent in a runner stance. His frame contains a lot of potential power at all times.

I suspect his slowish walking speed is another trick, too. It’s there to make the combat feel faster. It really works. Combat really does feel blindingly speedy as you look for gaps to exploit and as you work to create space around foes who take up exactly as much room as you do.

Two other things I’ve noticed about combat here. For one thing, there’s the beautifully judged ghost of a hit-pause employed, which means that a flurry of strikes comes off as a strobe-like succession of power stances, each connection freezing Ryu, just a tiniest sliver of a second, in a pose where he looks his coolest. And something else: attacking is forward-movement in Ninja Gaiden. Every strike shunts Ryu forwards just a little. It serves to lock him into a connection with enemies and it also means even the most standard combo, which I think is bam-bam-bam-bam–bam! is three little steps and then a bigger one. (Each strike, incidentally, is capped with the lightest of disco grunts from our man in black.) I’ve spotted this in games before, but with Ryu it just feels like such a part of his character expressed through motion. Only forward!

There’s so much else to love in this game – don’t get me started on the sky boxes, or the gloriously stagey (I mean this as a compliment) feel of 2008 level design. But for now, the sheer embodiment the game conjures feels like a magic trick. It reminds me, weirdly, of when I first had my hearing aid fitted. (Stay with me here.) A sunny day in Brighton and I went into this room in the hospital audiology department thinking I could basically hear, and then…

And then when my hearing aid was fitted and turned on, it was like another room was rising up around me, another room that fitted over the first quite neatly but was made of sheer sounds. Little details all: the creak of a chair, the hum of air conditioning, a rustle of paper I could not pin down but which turned out to be a bus ticket in my pocket. I went outside and Brighton was suddenly transformed into bird song. Birds everywhere, but I just hadn’t heard them in years.

That’s what it’s like coming back to Ninja Gaiden all this time. So much delicate thought has been put into the controls and the movement, so much thought that even I can spot some of it. And I know that it will make me just a little more attuned to this stuff in lesser games for weeks to come. It’s the bird song that had disappeared but is suddenly everywhere again.