Ninja Gaiden II

"Just get NG Sigma and Devil May Cry 4 instead"

The first 3D Ninja Gaiden game was released for the original Xbox in 2004, and earned critical acclaim despite a few annoying flaws. It is still considered to be the best Devil May Cry clone, and earned two re-releases: one for the Xbox dubbed Ninja Gaiden Black, and more recently a PlayStation 3 version called Ninja Gaiden Sigma. While these re-releases improved on the original game, many people were still clamoring for a full-fledged sequel. The egotistical mastermind behind the series, Tomonobu Itagaki, assured fans that Ninja Gaiden II was spending so much time in development in order to be "the perfect action game". But now that I've had the chance to play it, I can assure you it was not worth the wait.

If you really care about the story, here's what you need to know: Ryu Hayabusa of the Dragon Clan likes to hunt and kill bad guys called Fiends. A blond woman with big breasts from the CIA shows up and tells Ryu that some evil Fiends are trying to resurrect something called the Archfiend, which apparently will destroy the world. You then go on a quest around the world wreaking havoc and hunting the Fiends, who have ridiculous names. One of them is a wolf, and his name is Volf. Clever? No. Nothing about the story is interesting; it simply serves as a loose context for ninja action.

At first glance, the game appears to be the Ninja Gaiden you know and love: the characters look great and have impressive animations, environments are slightly better looking than Ninja Gaiden Sigma, you have the familiar health and ki (magic) display, and the controls are almost identical. You begin playing and nothing seems out of the ordinary. In fact, you may even enjoy the first few minutes of gameplay. All the ninja moves are present: wall running, jumping from wall to wall, casting various Ninpo (magic) attacks, and wielding deadly weapons that now slice apart enemies limb by limb (and allowing you to finish them off with stylish "Obliteration Techniques") leaving bodies, limbs, and blood all over the walls and floor. All this visible carnage does cause some noticeable slowdown in several parts of the game, but the game typically runs at 60 frames per second. One thing that bothered me is the lack of destructible environments. While you could pretty much tear rooms to shreds in Devil May Cry 4, there are very few breakable objects in NGII.

This is cool for a few minutes, but once you really start playing all the game's flaws become apparent. For starters, there are flaws from previous 3D Ninja Gaiden iterations that the developers chose not to fix, the most notorious being the camera that usually ends up pointing in the wrong direction. It actually seems less adjustable than it was in Ninja Gaiden Sigma. You'll end up getting hit by off-screen enemies and projectile attacks such as shurikens and arrows. Speaking of which, you get a bow and arrows again, but the problem of aiming has not been fixed. You still have no target lock-on ability, and you can't move while shooting arrows. So while you're standing still trying to aim your bow at far away snipers, you end up getting hit and have to restart the aiming process. The best you can do is "blind fire" the arrows without aiming, which is inaccurate for distances greater than a few feet, and causes you to run out of arrows quickly. While the horrible bow and arrow controls may have been bearable in the original game, NGII has far more situations that call for usage of the bow, and they play out very badly.

As for the new problems, level design is generally lacking, there is less opportunity for strategy, and it's just not fun. Remember how the original game had a great sense of exploration? Well NGII is quite linear, and the level design never goes beyond "run down hallway, kill big group of enemies, get key, open door, then kill another group of the same enemies". Also, if Ryu is such a ninja badass, why can't his super ninja skills let him jump over so many small fences and obstacles? There are too many invisible walls in this game that keep you going down just one path, and serve as excuses to take massive detours around things that you should be able to just jump over. You can jump and do some neat ninja moves, but only in parts where the game wants you to. Most of these platforming segments are similar to things that you did in the original game since Ryu doesn't have any new moves, but there are on very rare occasions some interesting parts, like climbing up a set of moving gears.

There are several different enemy types throughout the game, but in each level you'll be fighting just one or two types over and over. And they come in much larger groups than they did in the original, with terrible attack patterns that really don't allow you to use any strategy. This is the biggest problem of all: NGII is a button masher. You can't use strategy like in the previous game. You can't block or dodge every attack, and there are too many enemies at a time to allow you to carefully circle them and wait for an opportunity to attack, so for most enemies and bosses you just charge at them, hit them with your strongest attacks, and hope they die quickly. This game is challenging, but it's not a fair or fun challenge: it's a cheap challenge built around the fact that you will get constantly hit by off-screen enemy projectile attacks and the fact that the game puts you up against about 10 enemies at a time, which makes it impossible to avoid every attack, especially when the camera refuses to give you a good view of about half the enemies.

Oh, let's talk about the unbalanced boss fights for a minute. They come in 2 varieties: ridiculously easy bosses that only require you to dash around them and then hit them with a few strong attacks, or ridiculously hard bosses that have projectile attacks that home in on you so you can't avoid being hit. There's also a boss that you fight in the water. I'm not even going to bother telling you the problems with that one, but if you've played the first game you'll know that water combat is a bad idea.

Graphics - 8 out of 10: Great characters, decent environment detail, some slowdown
Sound - ??? out of 10: Honestly, I wasn't paying attention to the music. Voice acting is cheesy though.
Gameplay - 3 out of 10: Flaws from the original, boring level design, no room for strategy
Replayability - 2 out of 10: Harder difficulty levels can be unlocked, but you won't care

Worse level design than the original, less strategy, cheap enemy attacks that can't be blocked or dodged, and flaws from the original such as aiming the bow seem even worse now. Yeah, there's no need to bother playing this game when quality action games like Devil May Cry 3, Devil May Cry 4, and Ninja Gaiden Sigma exist.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 07/03/08

Game Release: Ninja Gaiden II (US, 06/03/08)