Ninja Gaiden II

The Good

• Bloody, fast-paced action should keep you entertained.
• You can cut any monsters' limb.
• Superior animations make Ryu the best moving character around
• The new Obliteration technique is fun to perform and have deadly effects on your foes.
• The cutscenes are well made and fun to watch.

The Bad

• Sometimes, the game's difficulty crosses the line into cheapness
• The environments lack detail and have dull textures.
• The shadows are not great and feels pretty static
• The story is just an excuse to make you fight more demons
• The game has one of the most frustrating cameras around.
• The framerate isn't stable and gets more hit when you play it on harder difficulties.

If you get back to the origins of Ninjas, they were a group secret assassins specializing with arts of assassination, poison, archery, stealth and secrecy. The syllable “nin” itself means secrecy, assassination and endurance in Japanese. Well, Ninja Gaiden 2 is far from that. Instead of a stealth gameplay, you are put to fights hordes of demons and rival ninjas with your bloody techniques, weapons and Ninpo arts. It is not good as its predecessors but as fun as it.

As usual, you play as Ryu Hayabusa. A young leader of the Dragon clan (of course, what ninjas be without dragons :P) and one of finest ninjas of that clan. The story begins with introducing the games babe, Sonia. She is a CIA agent who looks for Ryu to help her to stop a great danger concerning the Arch-fiend. Sounds stupid, I know. So the story is just an excuse to make fight millions of ninjas and giant demons. But the story isn’t really important in the game. It is the core gameplay makes the game worth playing.

 he graphics aren’t up to the standards of its predecessors but not bad though. Some (not all of them though) environments are not detailed well and have bland textures. The green cave is a good example of that. The character models are great and detailed well and ranges from big boobies to blood thirsty werewolves. Although it has quite outstanding models but the shadows and lights are dynamic or impressive as Devil May Cry 4 had and it is pretty weird to see shadows on the ground and there is no one and then you realize they are on the upper floor. So by all means it is pretty static. What would Ninja Gaiden do without blood? The game got bloodier and even gorier. Blood showers are smooth and seeing someone’s limb flying around is cool too. Aside from the great blood and gore effects, it has few problems as well. Sometimes the blood will get on the invisible wall of some environments. Gore isn’t great as Ninja Gaiden 2 makes it. You can cut almost every part of your enemies’ body and it is fun to see their limbs fly around the stage with blood shower. The most superior thing is the smooth animations. It is good to see Ryu using his deadly weapons and move them around and kill his enemies with finishing moves. To make it short, Ryu is the best moving character I’ve ever seen in a video game.

The gameplay has become more excited and they fastened the pace which is a good thing. They even added a couple of new features and fixed some flaws. One of the new exciting things is the Obliteration technique. After cutting a limb of your enemies while performing a combo, if you press Y Ryu will perform a deadly finishing move and kill them instantly. Thanks to the great animations, it is always fun to perform these Obliteration techniques. The combat system is very simple: X for light attack, Y for heavy attack (surprisingly they are not slow), B is for projectile attack (like shrukin, bows...etc) and Y+B for Ninpo. Ryu can counter incoming attacks. All you have to do it press X or Y while blocking just before an enemy’s attack hits you. You will start the game with your trusty Dragon Sword and an unlimited amount of Shrukin. You will acquire new weapons, items and ninpos throughout the game. Every weapon has a wide array of combos even the heavy blunt ones. Each of them can be used for different situation whether you are fighting a tough fiend or surrounded by a group of scorpions. They added a targeting system to the Ninpos which and prove useful when you fight a boss with dozens of ninjas. The healing items are back along with the Life of God stones and The Thousand Lives of Gods that extend your health bar. You can extend your Ninpo gauge with the Devil stones and you can also level up your Ninpos with the Demon Jewel stone. The armlets aren’t featured in this game. The game’s camera is annoying and can be pretty frustrating at some time. You have to keep the R button pressed many times just to center the camera behind Ryu’s back. Ryu’s is quite acrobatic. He can run on walls and jump from a one to one without losing balance or anything. This might be good to avoid some slashes and smashes.

Your enemies have a good AI and they are not stupid. If they see you block too much, they will grab you and if you cut their limbs they will get angry and act suicidal. Your enemies range from foot ninjas, assault ninjas with modern weapons, fiends, werewolves and so many big badass demons. But so many times, they cross the line into cheapness.

Team Ninja added more saving statues to each stage and they will heal you once which is a good thing if you have a bloody fight. There is even a health regeneration system. It works like this: if you get hit a lot, a red bar will appear on the right side on the health bar. This is your endurance limit. When the fight is over, your health will be restored to that point. All these features will add a hope to continue the stage. As any Ninja Gaiden fan would expect, the game is hard and the difficulties consist of four stages: Acolyte (normal), Warrior (hard), Mentor (very hard) and Master (ultra hard). Mentor is unlocked after you beat the game either with Acolyte or Warrior and Master is unlocked by the game with Mentor. Changing difficulties will replace the enemies with stronger one (e.g. lesser werewolves will be replaced with greater werewolves) and the number of enemies will be doubled. Sometimes it crosses the line into cheapness. Yes, cheapness. On the first level, it will put you against Ninjas with Rocket Launchers and what makes worse, they launch multiple rockets and they don’t even reload (that is on Mentor). That is cheap but all these are rewarded with achievements so this and the unlockable custom varieties should be a motive to beat the game.

The boss battles are fun and unique. You have to use a different strategy against each one of them. Each stage has at least one boss and some has more. You will fight the four Greater Fiends twice and some of them are not hard to beat if you have a decent amount of health potions. When you kill enemies you will either get Yellow (currency), Blue (health) and Red (ninpo power) essences. Yellow can be used to purchase items and upgrade weapons at Murasama’s shop. They are scattered around every stage.

Aside from the bloody action, you can also go around and collect 30 hidden Crystal Skulls. Collecting them will give you achievements. Another new thing is that you can now film your playthrough with the new Ninja Cinema feature. It can be toggled anytime in the game to film your playthroughs full of blood. You can see them and even apply two cinematic effects to them but don’t consider it as video editing. And you can upload your videos to the web alongside with leaderboards. But this feature isn’t really impressive or anything fun. It is like seeing your brother playing the game instead of you. You can’t rewind, fast-forward, pause or do anything like that just watching.

 he game’s most disappointing thing is the unstable frame rate. The frames drop when you fight too much enemies and it gets more frame hit when you toggle the Ninja Cinema. To make it even worse, the game might freeze for one or two seconds and then go back normal. People who play on Acolyte won’t have this problem because you won’t fight millions of ninjas at once.

The game’s cut scenes are great and dramatic but the English voice acting is some what cheesy. It is weird to hear Ayane say “Uhh… The true dragon sword” like a baby. You can also switch the voices to Japanese which sounds more believable than the crappy English voice acting. The game’s music consists of rock, techno and orchestra. It adds a bit ambience to the game and it fits perfectly. Sound effects are totally mind blowing. Hearing your sword slashing someone’s limb will make feel like a badass. Sounds of blood shower, roars of angry werewolves and Ryu’s furious expressions while killing someone should make the game’s sound effects great.

The characters in the game are quite interesting. By all the means Ryu is complete badass, he can use any weapon, run on any wall and in same time being so honorable and good. While the demons from the other hand have zero sympathy or bathe in blood naked before killing you. And the old man Murasama is still in shape. Itakagi is in this game so it means there will be big boobs. The two femme fatales have big boobs and it is amusing to see the air moves them around thanks to the great booby physics.

Despite many frustrating flaws, Ninja Gaiden 2 might not be good as it predecessor but it still got few tricks up its sleeve. You will have a lot of fun killing the enemies and cut their limbs and burn big badass bosses to the ground. Ninja Gaiden 2 is worth playing and can be fun but it could’ve been better.