Ninja Gaiden Sigma

"Fun only in short bursts, if at all"

Before I start with Ninja Gaiden Sigma let me offer a disclaimer. I know that “it's my opinion” is sort of a rallying cry these days when it comes to hating games that nobody else does, but this is about as close to a “wrong” opinion as you can possibly get. Speaking as “objectively” as possible, Ninja Gaiden Sigma is an excellent game; some – myself included – are going to really hate it.

The crux of this game is its difficulty. This game is absurdly hard. Absurdly. On Normal difficulty the bosses will beat the crap out of you many, many, many times before you finally beat them. I don't even want to think about this game on a harder difficulty mode. And so of course I hate this. I suck at games – I don't mind a challenging title, but Ninja Gaiden Sigma hits a level that I've never seen before and never want to see again. It's so challenging that it stops being fun, and that's a bad thing.

But in addition to just generally stripping this game of any entertainment value it might have, the difficulty brings up another weird problem with the game: it's environment. Ninja Gaiden Sigma takes place in a decidedly weirded-out alternate universe, where dudes in trench coats have conversations with faceless Samurai and the local militia carry swords in their back pockets…just in case. This is all fine, I guess, but when you've got your hero Ryu Hayabusa who can survive impossible leaps from the tops of telephone towers and can defy the very laws of freaking gravity by running on a wall around corners, it feels very off that a lowly little grunt can really beat up on him. Maybe this is just me being conditioned by the other action games I've played, but I expected Ryu to be a little more capable in the killing-people department.

So about thirty minutes into Ninja Gaiden Sigma I was dangerously close to putting it down, when I'm like “Okay, suck it up, and just play this game.” How liberating! I knocked the difficulty down to the embarrassing Ninja Dog level, told the game to go off and die with its humiliating little cutscenes, and got to it.

On this lowest difficulty level the game is much more manageable – at times maybe a little too manageable. But after really plowing through a good chunk of the game one last thing occurred to me before I put down Ninja Gaiden Sigma for good: even when it's not being mean and unfair and beating the crap out of you every chance it gets, it's still not a very fun game.

It's fun in short bursts, but any attempt at an extended play session ended in failure. Much of this probably has to do with the faulty level design, whereby you'll run from one big arena to another. There are some occasional puzzles but they're insultingly easy, and it's very clear that the game exists only for you to kill stuff. I kind of have to ask: why even bother designing a game? Why not just have one of this little virtual arenas where you kill wave after wave after wave of enemies? It would have been the same game and I'm sure would have cost a lot less to make.

The other reason that Ninja Gaiden Sigma can't hold your attention for very long is that it's not a very visually exciting game. It looks pretty, but Ryu just doesn't do much cool stuff. For example: Assassin's Creed and Heavenly Sword were semi-comparable action games on the PS3. They were fundamentally flawed games but both were fun just to see what your button presses would translate into on-screen. It was different every time, environmentally influenced, and just very fun to watch.

There's nothing similar in Ninja Gaiden Sigma. This is probably the game's hardcore, purist side coming through, but if you hit square square triangle with the Dragon Sword equipped Ryu will do the same thing, every single time – even if you're facing a wall. It's ironic, really, because the developers have clearly set out to create a very intelligent, sophisticated action game, and I know many people think they succeeded. But in their attempt to create such an intelligent-playing game, they ended up making a very unintelligent-looking game.

At a certain point I just said “Screw this” and had to put down Ninja Gaiden Sigma. There came a point – relatively quickly, actually – where I realized that I just wasn't having fun. Maybe that makes me a shallow person or a shallow gamer, unable to be satisfied unless I'm being satisfied now. But as radical as this might sound, when I play a game I want to have some fun. Ninja Gaiden Sigma has no fun involved for anybody not willing to sink a very significant amount of time and effort and frustration into this game.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/19/09

Game Release: Ninja Gaiden Sigma (US, 07/03/07)