games: Ninja Gaiden 2

Ninja Gaiden II is one big gore fest from top to severed toe. You, Ryu Hyabusa must strive to defend the powerful ancient artefacts your clan has guarded from the archfiends. As you hack and slash your way through hoards of ninja opponents ,who still come after you even if 2 or 3 of their limbs are scattered on the other side of the room, blowing themselves up in a last ditch effort to pull you down.

The combat animation is great, and the non-squeamish of you will revel in the sheer brutality of the game, littering your wake with more blood and body parts than Titus Andronicus.

But if you don’t quite fancy that, then you’d better buy something else, as beyond a few bits of basic platforming, and shopping to improve your weapons, this is pretty much all there is to the game! There’s some plot about the Hyabusa ninja clan, guarding powerful ancient artefacts from the archfiends, which works well enough to hang the action off, but isn’t going to substantially change your life.

And so that becomes the real question with this game, is the fighting enough to carry the title? Well, yes and no.

When it works, it works beautifully; the pace is delightfully furious and if you can get the timing right, it is really very fluid. And there are a whole raft of weapons and combo moves to master and 4 magical nippon attacks to incorporate keeping the whole thing fresh and varied.

But there are also some serious annoyances, such as not being able to defend against certain types of ranged weapons, or sudden difficulty peaks, particularly with bosses, where you will all-of-a-sudden and with no obvious reason why, find your ass repeatedly handed to you on a plate.

Getting past these moments will often feel like luck rather than experience or epiphany, making some of your successes rather bittersweet.

Now, the Ninja Gaiden series is notoriously difficult, but this title has been made a little more accessible. Your health will automatically recharge itself, which seriously helps, and there are lots of pick ups dotted around the place. Move combos are introduced gradually and you also get reminders as you continue, and while subtle control will require time and skill to achieve, you can at least see its coherence from the get go and certainly on the Acolyte setting you should be able to button mash your way through the first few levels easily enough.

The biggest problem with Ninja Gaiden II though is the camera. The default look sensitivity is really pretty slow and pulling the right trigger to re-centre the camera behind Ryu’s head can easily disorient you given the pace of combat. It also has a nasty habit of positioning itself badly against walls or through doorways, and there are times when you can only move the camera within an unrealistically narrow field, usually noticeable when you are bombarded by projectiles from an unseen source. Switching to 1st person view, intended for looking around, doesn’t really help either.

There are also some issues with the graphics. While the combat is animated really well and the opening location of Sky City Tokyo looks gorgeous, then compared to what we got with Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, or God of War II.

The majority of Ninja Gaiden II just doesn’t look that cutting edge and locations are flat, empty and repetitive. And the cut scenes, when compared to say Devil May Cry 4, although abounding with cherry blossom and heaving bosoms, are rather lacking in detail. There are also technical problems, with some rendering flaws and tearing, severed limbs getting stuck in mid air, and some very noticeable dropped frames in places.

So in conclusion, this is a fun bit of fast paced ultra-violence which will certainly get some regular play after hours at the Fletcher household, but it’s not quite the polished production it could have been. Worth checking out, but if you’re going to buy this, make sure you take it for what it is. Sometimes ninjas aren’t deep. A pretty decent 3 stars.

For the best of the rest:

IGN:
US, May 26, 2008 - If, as many have said in the past, Ninja Gaiden on Xbox is the greatest action game ever made, then Ninja Gaiden II on Xbox 360 is just a sequel. It won’t redefine the way you look at action games. It won’t make you cry tears of joy. Don’t let that dissuade you. Sequels to such outstanding games often have difficulties living up to expectations and that may end up being the case for some with Ninja Gaiden II, but those that go in looking for some pure action will leave all smiles…and perhaps with a controller broken out of frustration or two.

Euro Gamer:
My living room is full of twenty-something gamers, and they’re watching a friend play through the first level of Ninja Gaiden 2. The air is filled with laughter - hooting, cackling, whooping laughter, punctuated with sharp intakes of breath and observations that, well, everything looks like it hurts. Really quite a lot.

Kotaku:
Last month when I spoke with Tomonobu Itagaki in San Francisco he told me that Ninja Gaiden II represented the culmination, the absolute height of the franchise and because of this he would no longer be making any more Ninja Gaiden games. Ninja Gaiden has always been about perfection of timing, on some level the art of the sword, this is no more evident than in this latest game.