Ninja Gaiden Black - Master Ninja Mode - No Damage, No Weapon Upgrades

Well look at you reading the description, or the pinned comment because nobody reads descriptions anymore.

The rules for this run are pretty simple, complete the game without upgrading any weapons and without taking damage. No use of the True Dragon Sword or Plasma Sabre MK2 either. This run is segmented, obviously :)

Shoutouts to Seraphim17 who gave me the idea for this run, it was mentioned a week or so ago on stream and I thought it’d be cool to experiment with while making the enemy tutorials I have been working on. The original idea was no upgrades and I was only thinking in terms of Murumasa and JOTDS which is why I use the SOTD you get. I didn't think about it until the run was completed that SOTD are essentially a ninpo meter upgrade. I was thinking purely in terms of damage.

With that said, now that I am sitting on the other side of a completed run those extra ninpo uses do protect you from some of the BS patterns you'll come across during this run. You're clearly not meant to not have to open up certain bosses 25 times before they die.

Upon further reflection, I could have actually upgraded the ninpo as I would count using SOTD as a ninpo upgrade so I could have made my life much, much easier in the later chapters but oh well. There's a run for the next guy as we say.

In chapter 13 the technique scrolls are available to purchase from Murumasa once you get the TDS. Due to them being tied to an upgrade I didn’t bother with them but I wouldn’t say this is a rule. At that point in the game they’re not going to be much use anyway outside a couple of encounters.

So this run could be called No Damage, No Weapon Upgrades, No Izuna Drop, No Counter Attacks or Guillotine Throw but that title wouldn’t fit in the title field.

I threw away a lot of time on being stingy with ninpo use but even without farming you still get plenty of money just from the base fights so there really isn’t any reason to not use it.

Hydra 2 and the Flail clone were by far the worst fights in the game. The former due to aforementioned stingyness of me not wanting to use ninpo. The latter required some serious testing due to how low your damage output is and his behaviour changes a lot when he’s below 40% health.

There is a set distance where you can actually loop him with the wall cling wall attack but once his health gets low and you hit him a certain amount of times he just goes off the chain. You’re clearly meant to be fighting him with a weapon that kills him in fewer hits. This will come in handy if I ever get back to MN speedruns though. Dare I say the wall attack strat with the UF will be quite consistent.

Anyway, back to work on the enemy tutorials now. Enjoy this in the meantime :)