Developer: Team NINJA
Publisher: Tecmo

What’s faster, a ninja or a giant molten lava armadillo? If you said ‘ninja’, technically you’d be right; if this were Itagaki’s test however, you’d totally have to stay after class and wash the blackboards. What is a “Class A Ninja” anyway, and why the hell didn’t they put him in a “Class A Game?” The answers to these questions and more after the break.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I’m totally in awe of the absolutely gross shit happening on the screen one minute and the next I’m turning off the console.

De Ja Vu? As far as I can remember this installment of Ninja Gaiden has the exact same story line as its predecessor. You start by fending off a Black Spider Ninja Clan attack on your hometown of Bumblefuck Japan. The Black Spider’s find some mystical statue that will awaken the Arch Fiend (that’s the really bad guy) and the sky will rain blood for a thousand millenia unless Ryu Hayabusa fights a bunch of four armed monsters. A good story never hurts, but let’s face it: the truth is nobody is buying this game for story. At best, it comes off as excusable campiness. I mean what kind of story are you gonna put behind Ryu riding a Pterodactyl carcass into the streets of New York City?

Ninja Gaiden 2 ’s combat system is unparalleled in the realm of hack’n’slash games. Essentially drawing from years of Dead or Alive game design they’ve created a single character who has a huge move list that changes depending on what type of weapon you’re using. If Team NINJA did anything right in this game, they absolutely nailed the weapons and fighting system. It’s essentially the same system from the original Ninja Gaiden , only now you have even more throws and combos. Just like in the first one, you still use essence to charge up your attacks quicker and unleash devastating combos that leave your enemies in fleshy little bits wriggling on the ground. If multiple enemies are close enough you can use the left analog stick to direct Ryu’s attacks and parse out damage between them. The combat system definitely sets the standard for any third person fighters coming after it. Unfortunately that’s about all this game does well.

This isn’t even a bad game — it’s a disappointing game. Level design and space is completely squandered. Access to game space is seemingly arbitrary: at one point you can jump over the railing of a stairway, for instance, and at another you can’t walk behind a desk. Some walls you can run on and some you can’t. Sometimes there are boxes you break open and sometimes there aren’t. My point is that nothing in this game is a solid design concept that you can rely upon. You may want to run across a certain wall and lop off an enemies head, and it may even look like you should be able to do it, but alas Ryu will be hindered by a magical invisible barrier. Even blood stains will get stuck on these barriers and appear to just float in mid air. Is it really that hard to make blood splatter through a staircase or against a curved wall?

I’ll say it right now: Team NINJA had the opportunity to create the best game ever. Ryu could have been swinging from chandeliers decapitating foes with the Kasuri-Gama . Level design could have allowed us to use multiple wall-runs during combat or think more about how to use the environment to our advantage. Instead the invisible walls and sketchy environment interaction hinders that aspect of the game and only let’s you focus on fighting on flat ground. That may have been all well and good in Ninja Gaiden for Xbox, but this is a different generation. New consoles have these capabilities and if I’m expected to pay $60 for a title, I want to jump off an enemies head, grab a chandelier, nail someone to the wall with an arrow and jump back into the fray slicin’ and dicin’.

One thing that really bothers me about Ninja Gaiden 2 is that there are no context sensitive attacks. Ryu should be pushing guys up against walls and executing Spider Ninjas over railings. With so much influence from DOA, I’m honestly surprised that this concept didn’t find its way into Ninja Gaiden . Is it too much to ask to see an enemies swords getting stuck in a tree or something? (Seriously they should have put me on the development team — are you listening Itagaki?!)

The graphics are…nice. It’s a pretty game to look at, but Ryu always seems to be glittering , even in the darkest caves of Mt. Midoriyama , where giant bone monsters dwell at the bottom of cavernous bone pits, he’s still got a twinkle in his eye. I think the problem is Team NINJA spent all their money on titty physics and had to scale back everything else they had planned for the game.

I won’t say much about the ‘puzzles’ in this game, mostly because there aren’t any. Unless you consider walking down that other hallway a puzzle I wouldn’t worry about using too many brain cells on finding keys. In this aspect Team NINJA seems to have regressed. At least in the first Ninja Gaiden there were large sections that you could revisit once you acquired the right equipment, or found a piece of a statue. Sure these were still go fetch quests albeit on a larger scale, but at least they were somewhat challenging and even required a bit of wall running or tricky maneuvering to retrieve the artifact. Ninja Gaiden 2 forgoes the effort that puts those artifacts thirty feet away from you in the opposite direction. It’s kind of insulting.

Seriously, is there some kind of genetic mutation that gives all bosses four arms?

Last but certainly not the least of your worries are bossfights. The first six or seven bosses you fight are actually pretty fun. Sure half of them are Goro clones, but at least you can block and use the techniques that Team NINJA has given you. Once you get toward later bosses everything you’ve learned in the game gets thrown out the window. There’s no blocking, enemies will gain mysterious powers where they can grab you with their mind, or some are just so big that simply being near them will hurt you. In fact, forget even trying to devise a strategy — it’s all dumb luck. By the way, use a Ninpo after you kill the armadillo, he’s gonna explode and take you with him. Fucking Team NINJA.

Ninja Gaiden 2 is a sorry attempt at ‘advancing’ the Ninja Gaiden franchise into the new generation of consoles. It seems hindered by last-gen problems and feels patched together from various unsuccessful brainstorming sessions. Maybe Itagaki was too preoccupied with his problems at Tecmo to focus on the game. Maybe he spent too many late nights with hookers and pounds of cocaine at Karaoke. Whatever the problem is, this game is totally unacceptable for two plus years of production efforts. Let’s hope Mr. Itagaki buckles up and flies right for his next project because in spite of this failure he’s proven he’s got some serious chops.

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