There is nothing like the feeling of mastering a challenging game. My greatest gaming moment was when I finally beat Ninja Gaiden Black on the Xbox on master ninja difficulty. In Master any enemy could kill you quickly. I had to memorize the timing of every enemy’s movesets. I had to learn every strategy to defeat the virtually impossible bosses. And, of course, I had to die a lot. But I don’t do this with every game. Most recently, I tried to get 100% completion in Batman Arkham Asylum. I had beat the main game on its hardest difficulty level and I had found every riddle, but I could not master the challenge levels and I quit. So why are some games worth mastering and why do I fail to master others?
First, a game cannot be cheap. This was the main difference between Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2. You need to feel like there is a clear way to deal with any challenge. It isn’t fun to fail because of bad luck or something out of your control. Ninja Gaiden 2 often had you get riddled with bullets by unseen enemies. Arkham Asylum does not suffer from this. It was always crystal clear how to handle each enemy’s attacks. So if it wasn’t that, what was it?
If a game is hard, it needs to have responsive controls. Games like Runner 2 do an excellent job with this. When you screw-up in a game that has responsive controls you know it’s because you made a mistake, not a problem with the game. Arkham Asylum is almost perfect in this regard, though I feel like I should be able interrupt my a ground takedowns if someone comes to attack me. Also, sometimes it isn’t clear why my attacks will or won’t chain together. Though I think Arkham Asylum isn’t as tight as Ninja Gaiden Black, this wasn’t really the reason I failed.
Next, a game needs to be very careful in how it chooses to scale difficulty. Ninja Gaiden Black got appreciably harder with each difficulty level, but it the difficulty shifts never felt out of reach. One problem I had with Arkham Asylum is that compared to the story mode, the challenge mode seemed unforgivingly harder. Sure, I could defeat all the enemies on challenge mode; I could even learn to do it with some style. But what you had to do to get the points you needed seemed like it was asking too much all at once. To get 3 stars on the first challenge map you basically had to either never take damage or never interrupt your combo, both of which were very challenging, though not impossible. To get 3 stars on the predator missions you had to meet specific, but unclear criteria which leads to my next point.
What I think prevents me from mastering Arkham Asylum as compared to Ninja Gaiden Black is that it did not give me a clear path to improve my gaming. With Ninja Gaiden Black, it all made sense: try not to get hit, work on memorizing timings, figure out which kinds of weapons or attacks work best on each boss. But with Arkham Asylum, I felt like I was doing a fantastic job, but I still couldn’t rack up the points I needed to feel like I mastered the game. What was I doing wrong? The game didn’t seem to tell me.
This is where the help of the gaming community often becomes essential. I will admit, I didn’t master Ninja Gaiden Black on my own. I read articles and watched videos, especially when it came to boss fights. But I didn’t do that with Arkham City. Why not? Laziness, I guess. So in the end, is Arkham Asylum a game worth mastering? Probably. Whose fault is it that I didn’t? My own. But I wonder if a few little things had been different, if I could interrupt my takedowns, if there was a clearer objectives in predator mode, I smight have been willing to put in more work to master this game.
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