Ninja Gaiden II

Ryu Hayabasa receives a message from a woman by the name of Sonia, that the Black Spider Clan are attempting to awaken the four Greater Fiends of legend in an attempt to destroy his clan. He encounters a woman by the name of Elizabet, and this later leads him back to his village which is soon under attack; Ryu pursues Elizabet and learns exactly what she's planning. -summary

While I was re-playing Ninja Gaiden 3, I felt the need to go back in time and replay the first two games for the sake of noting whatever steps it may have taken forward or backwards. When I came across Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 for the PS3 in my collection; I remembered never playing Ninja Gaiden II for the X-Box 360, which actually came out first with Sigma 2 being the update for it. After finishing it I can see why the game received an update in the first place. It was indeed a step down from the original, and there were several things I found about it to be quite annoying. In short, I'm glad that I decided to give the game a play, but after finishing it on the normal difficulty, this is a game I can't see myself coming back to ever again.

Game Play:

Released in 2008, Ninja Gaiden II is a single player action/adventure game that once again follows Ryu as he crushes all in his path. The story finds him chasing after a woman named Elizabet, whom steals the Demon Statue from his village during a battle with a ninja master by the name of Genshin. She uses the statue to reawaken the Greater Fiends lurking on the planet. Her ultimate goal is to reawaken the Archfiend. Ryu will traverse through 17 chapters battling many powerful Fiends as well as members of the Black Spider Clan, whom have joined forces with them.

The story is once again delivered through various tablets and memos, and this provides some type of back story on the Fiends. The story won't win any points for excitement, but at least it gives Ryu a reason for running around slicing people and creatures into ribbons, as if he plans on serving them on the side together with a bowl of Ramen; and since I'm on the subject of slicing and dicing, wow, this game deserves a hell of a load of cool points for making gratuitous violence look so damn awesome. I mean seriously, when Ryu gets open on his enemies, he leaves a serious blood trail of bodily destruction. If you need to back track an area for any reason, well, follow the trail of body parts and blood and you will be good. If you unleash his full powered Ultimate Attack on a single enemy, the poor bastard will be in at least a half dozen pieces.

The game's combat engine still operates in the same manner, with the player being forced to master Ryu's offensive and defensive capabilities; blocking, dodging, counter attacks, and combos will see to it that Ryu will survive most of his encounters. The fighting engine is still very deep with a plethora of weapons to master along with combos. Many of the melee weapons from the original game return, such as the Vigorian Flail and Lunar Staff. New weapons such as the chain-sickle Kusari-Gama, and bladed gloves called the Falcon's Talons will have you forgetting all about the Dragon Sword. These weapons are fun to play with as they have some very exciting and hellish moves, in order to kill and dismember opponents in a fashion that never becomes boring. You can grab enemies with the chain part of the weapon and hack off a leg. The bladed gloves will have Ryu stabbing them so deep and hacking them into pieces afterwards, you will probably feel sorry for some of them even though they just slashed you a few times. Ryu can also finish off wounded enemies with a technique called the Obliteration. This is a series of strikes or even fatal single strikes that violently finishes off enemies. The Obliteration is something that must be done immediately, because wounded enemies become suicidal by stabbing you very deep, and then blowing themselves up on top of you with explosive weapons. The combat is indeed the highlight because the weapons present so many different strategies, plus it's amazingly fast paced and blood pumping. The ability to upgrade weapons and magic is still intact, by collecting Essence from fallen opponents which acts as currency; the Essence still allows Ryu to use his Ultimate Attack, and it can also work towards healing him as well as replenishing magic.

This game is more linear than its predecessor. Every chapter is straight forward with maybe one occasion requiring you to back track, but that's mainly because that particular chapter takes place in a set environment and not because there's something you have to find. For the most part though, the action takes priority over everything which is actually quite different from the first game. There are no real moments to pull off your acrobatics or test your wall running skills against difficult odds to reach higher ground. This is actually something that I miss from the original, since there were times you felt like you were playing with a ninja, while in this game Ryu feels like just another action hero. Unfortunately, this is a very small gripe when compared to the game's other problems.

Ninja Gaiden II feels as if the developers at Team Ninja all came in to work on this game drunk everyday. Now I'm not saying that the game is terrible, at least for me as a hardcore gamer I welcomed the challenge; I came, I saw, I sliced ass. Casual gamers on the other hand... More than likely are quitting by the third stage boss battle because the game is way too difficult. Perhaps that may sound like a bit of a contradiction on my part since many people know I prefer tough games, but this game is hard for the wrong reasons.

The difficulty curve mainly comes from bad programming as opposed to working on your skills. OK, I will give it this; there are plenty of moments such as the second boss battle, which is against Genshin that relies more on skill. However, there's a very small batch of boss battles that are very cheap. They will spam highly destructive and difficult to dodge moves, thus, forcing you to really take your time which lengthens the battles. For example, leading towards the very end there are three boss battles. One of these fights are against a sorcerer named Dagra Dai. His lightening attacks are difficult to avoid anyway, but he heavily relies on these attacks which can make the battle really long, and the fact he's flying most of the time doesn't help. This fight probably wouldn't be as bad if not for the very poor automatic aiming with the arrow. I have seen some people claim that the arrow is very accurate at all times. Maybe they're talking about Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, or perhaps they should send me their copy of the game. Ryu seems to have a very hard time hitting his targets on different occasions. I would be able to nail Dagra Dai with about 4 arrows, then all of a sudden the arrows would just start missing despite him not even moving. The targeting interface has a few moments like these; there's another boss battle against two flying dragons. Forget about the automatic aiming hitting when it wants too, the other problem is trying to hit them manually. Ryu will automatically aim at the wall completely out of the area of the targets, because I'm guessing there's some type of glitch here that makes it impossible for him to decide which target to fire at. He's probably thinking, "when in doubt, shoot at nothing".

The enemy ninjas late in the game constantly unleashed explosive shurikens so damn much, that I thought an actual nuke was heading my way. I mean everybody is throwing these things at a very high volume. Many times I saw two of those things stuck in Ryu's back to the point where I thought he was growing them. On one occasion I was turning a corner and Blaow!, an explosive arrow and I had no idea where it came from. Team Ninja at some point obviously forgot the difference between challenging and cheapness. I also noticed another problem and this was during the combat. There's one stage close to the end where Ryu is attacked by something like 50 ninjas at once. Now I am aware that there are weapons for every situation, and during a moment like this, the Dragon Sword for example, would be a poor choice of weapon since Ryu mainly focuses on one opponent with this. The thing that caught my attention, despite whatever weapon I used, if Ryu hacks off a leg or an arm, instead of finishing the opponent right then, he would change focus to enemies who aren't wounded. This created a problem for me, because when he turned around from the injured warrior, the amputee would then attempt his suicide move. I fell victim to this a few times, and this is the fault of the game. There are also some glitches that people tend to ignore; enemies would some times be stuck in the environment running like mad in place, or not programmed to hop onto tables or over rocks to come after you. In this generation of games there is no excuse for hiccups like that.

The game has a lower difficulty called Acolyte; I tried out this mode and the enemies feel just as tough, which means newbies and casual gamers may not find much of a reason to continue playing. When looking at this game, I just can't help but notice how so much better Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is. There's one stage in this game that did not make it to Sigma 2, and it involves Ryu heading underground into a cavern where he battles some bug-like creatures. This area is very annoying, because you spend what feels like eternity running through the place hacking things, and then out of nowhere a boss battle will trigger. For my bad luck, I dodged the boss out by going into another area. It passed me by and I was forced to spend another life time or so trying to find it, just to engage in like a 3 minute battle if that. I found this segment to be no fun at all.

Ninja Gaiden II feels a long ways from the high standard set by the original. The game play in the original is top notch, while this game feels almost carelessly put together.

Controls:

Thankfully this area is spot on. The controller uses all of the buttons for various actions, such as quick and strong attacks, jumping, projectiles, and directing the camera. At one point I thought the button responses where kind of off for specific combos, but once I focused on the presses I realized it was me and not the game. It was more than likely due to the constant pressure from the enemies. The magic attacks are still performed by pressing two buttons simultaneously.

Graphics, Music, Sound:

Even though the game reuses the character designs from the original game, I think they still look great, and the game appears more glossy than its PS3 update. Personally I think it looks better. Now for me, the backgrounds and stage designs are what clearly stands out. Future Tokyo looks awesome with some good detail in the buildings. The place really does feel like the future. Some of the other settings like Volf's castle captures the epic feel of a high profile game, and this also goes for the later chapters that take place in the Fiend's underworld. The animation for the most part is still very fluid during the action. Ryu moves gracefully during his combos, as he strikes high, then strikes low taking off a leg with his Dragon Sword. The Obliteration's look really cool, as Ryu hacks off both legs, then when the body falls on its stumps, he takes off their heads with the finesse of a guillotine. Ryu's Izuna Drop defines cool. For those who don't know, Ryu launches his enemy into the air, then grabs them performing a dive driving them head first into the ground. The first game he obviously broke their necks, here nothing is left to the imagination as he explodes their entire heads.

On the negative side, along with the glitches in animation, the frame rate slows down to a crawl when there's a large amount of enemies. On one occasion it actually looked cool fighting in Matrix-like slow-mo, but this is obviously a glitch that shouldn't have happened. Plus the camera can work against you. I remember on one occasion during the quick combat, the environment itself blocked the action completely and I was fighting blind. The camera was also a problem during the two dragons boss battle, and I was some times killed by what I believe to be the dragons tail while jumping, simply because I just couldn't see it.

The music doesn't feel as well directed as the previous game, yet it's not really an issue when I think about it. The focus of the game is on the action, and the techno-rock scores carry the mood well enough. There are plenty of moments during the game where it feels like a big release and this is something I like. I enjoyed the voice acting with the English voice actor for Volf still delivering an awesome hammy performance. The sound effects are good, with the sword clashes during the blocks feeling genuine. The explosions are nice, loud, and painful to hear some times.

Replay:

I think with the exception of playing this game on the higher difficulties, there really isn't much here to offer. The single campaign can be around 8 - 10 hours, maybe longer considering the many deaths you'll suffer from cheap boss battles. There are leaderboards and DLC, but this is nothing when compared to the online multi-player found in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 for the PS3. If you dig the online scene a great deal, then Sigma 2 should no doubt be your buying choice. In fact, Sigma 2 is so well put together that game should be in your possession way before this.

Final Thoughts:

Ninja Gaiden II is not difficult the likes of Demon Souls, Dark Souls, or even its predecessor. It's difficult because of cheapness, and I really didn't feel like I accomplished anything beating this game. The only people I can imagine arguing that it takes pure skill to rock it are 360 fanboys who only want to praise their system as hands-down the greatest. I recommend this game only if you already played Sigma 2 and you're curious, but there are far better action games than this on the 360.

Rating: 5/10

Pros: Visually nice, gory and deep combat system

Cons: Glitchy and very cheap AI