Ninja Gaiden 2
Developer: Team Ninja
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Platform: XBox 360
Release Date: June 3, 2008
Posted: July 26, 2008
Slicing and dicing enemies results in much spillage of blood. Ninja Gaiden 2 is the latest installment in the Ninja Gaiden series, featuring more bloodshed than any other title thus far. It is the player’s job to defend not only his family clan, but the entire world. Beware however; the game’s hype well outweighs its play.
Ryu Hayabusa is the player’s character throughout the Ninja Gaiden series; he is a member of the Hayabusa Ninja Clan and a highly respected one at that. This title opens with Sonia, a CIA agent, who has come to find Ryu and enlist his assistance in dealing with the Archfiend. She gets captured, he fights tons of enemies to save her, the Black Spider Clan leader helps a Greater Fiend steal a statue to resurrect other fiends, including Greater Fiends, all of which Ryu has to go kill; you get the point. Whatever Team Ninja could do to throw a bunch of random enemies at the player is what happens throughout the game. Big Greater Fiends have plenty of little Junior Fiends for you to take care of; do not worry about not having enough to kill.
What is fun about a hack-n-slash game if you do not get to use badass weapons? Luckily, that was one aspect of this title that Team Ninja did not slack off with. There are a range of ninja weapons that you can choose to fight with; in total there are 8: Dragon Sword, Lunar Staff, Falcon Talons, Dragon’s Claw and Tiger Fang, Kusari-gama, Eclipse Scythe, Tonfa, and Vigoorian Flail. Each has its own individual moves, combos, and finishers with unique and violent animations. My most favored was the Lunar Staff for its massive reach, and the Dragon Sword was most overpowered due to its Flying Swallow attack. Additionally, there are 5 ranged weapons: Shuriken, Fiend’s Bane Bow, Incendiary Shuriken, Gatling Spear Gun, and Windmill Shuriken. The Shuriken, Gatling Spear Gun, and Windmill Shuriken do not have ammunition to keep track of; whereas the Fiend’s Bane Bow and Incendiary Shuriken have a limited amount of ammunition that could be carried around.
When leaping with the Lunar Staff Ryu can remove the head of his enemies.
I used the bow probably more often than any other ranged item, which is rather surprising given that it is quite difficult to aim precisely with. There is no auto-aim, and the shots are the most unforgiving I have ever seen in any game. If you are not dead-on with your target, you can kiss that arrow good-bye. Not to mention, being attacked while charging up your bow can cause you to be interrupted, but when Ryu regains his balance he will still shoot the arrow that he was aiming with in the first place, wasting that shot. Not the most useful tactic while fighting bosses. In general, most of the weapons have a time and a place where they are most effective; the others, well, we just do not use those.
One key “feature” of the game is that Ryu is now able to literally chop off his victim’s body parts, thus making them easier to kill and enabling him to perform various finisher moves. Detaching different body parts will cause enemies to act accordingly; all the way to crawling on the ground towards Ryu in an attempt to kill him with a suicide attack. This extreme violence and bloody gore found throughout the game is very graphic and very cool, but is not enough to make this title great.
The Falcon Talons are a set of very fast fist and foot knives that I found to work extremely well on similarly fast enemies. This game has one of the poorer cameras I have seen. It does not follow Ryu well, especially where there are inclines (such as stairs), while running on walls, walking through or fighting in even slightly narrow corridors, or if he ever has to turn a corner. It is quite jerky and does not respond well to the controller stick either; generally this causes many moves to fail, leaving Ryu open to take hits.
The setting is not based in Japan alone. Instead, Ninja Gaiden 2 takes the player out and around the world in order to fight hordes of enemies. The Greater Fiends that were resurrected appear in major cities, such as New York and Venice; this adds a nice variety of backgrounds to the merciless killing that ensues. Graphically, however, the environments and cut scenes are mostly unimpressive, as it seems all of the artistic design was focused on making Ryu, the enemies, and flying body parts look amazing instead.
Most of the time, it was quite obvious where to head next in a given area: where the enemies you just fought came from. However, that was not always the case as on several occasions the player is unknowingly required to move Ryu to a very specific spot before triggering various scenes. Scouring areas to set off a trigger such as spawning a boss sometimes took away a great deal of time from the actual gameplay; so much so that it makes the game tedious.
There are several sections in the game that Ryu is required to be underwater; thankfully, he is part fish and does not need to come up for air. Unfortunately, the controls are extremely jerky and unwieldy whilst swimming, making it unnecessarily difficult. As soon as I was given the Gatling spear gun I thought to myself, “Dear God, are they serious?” “Underwater” ninja combat is not the first thing that comes to mind when I think of fun, and this game did not help any. For some reason, design had this ingenious idea of making you fight in water. To make matters worse, the enemies fight you from on top of the water while you are underwater, allowing them to hit you while you can not hit them. Keen? I think not.
The Eclipse Scythe, which you receive about half-way through the game, is extremely powerful and most useful against larger enemies. The enemies Ryu faces are made up of grotesque fiends and members of the Black Spider Ninja Clan. Generally, these are unsurprisingly similar to the enemies faced in the previous games of the series. They are humans for the most part or human-like; they all have some sort of limbs that need to be removed. One of the more unimaginative creatures engaged early in the game are zombie-like dogs that strike at the player with knives that they carry in their jaws. Of all the amazing and vicious creatures that could have been introduced, and instead we get demon dogs with incendiary knives. These dogs, along with just about every other enemy Ryu faces, are considerably cheap with their attacks. Most moves performed by enemies later in the game are unblockable, or deal damage even if blocked. Bosses in particular will perform unblockable and unavoidable grab moves against the player, especially if Ryu is under half health. This is not a “difficulty” problem, this is a design flaw, and makes the game incredibly not fun.
The variety in items, or rather the lack there of, is actually nice. There are very few items to concern yourself with, simply a light health restore, moderate health restore, single spell restore, a resurrection scroll, and several items with which you can increase your health, “mana”, and power. While the item simplicity is a positive feature, the fact that you can only carry a very limited supply of these items around is not at times. Generally, the only time the player should ever really need to use health items is during boss fights, and I do not believe I ever needed to use a magic restore items. With most of the bosses being rather cheap with their moves, having extra health items would of course have come in handy. Throughout play there are many chests, some hidden and some not so much, that will contain a decent amount of items for the player. If they are not enough, the shop keeper, Muramasa, will be more than happy to accept your karma in exchange for items.
In addition to the usable items, there are orbs that Ryu can collect while fighting enemies. Upon the death of an enemy, he will drop various orbs. These can be absorbed and will affect Ryu differently based upon the color of the orb. Blue represents health, red is for spell power, and yellow is karma. Karma is considered the currency in this world, and can be given to statues of Muramasa that can be found throughout levels.
Ryu encounters many different creatures during his travels, but they all fight exactly the same way. Muramasa is a vendor represented by statues whom you may give your karma to in order to purchase usable items, power-ups, and weapons. During the beginning levels, his prices come off as rather expensive, but as the player progresses through the game karma becomes much more available, making the prices seem not as high. Along with purchasing new weapons, there is also an option to purchase upgrades for your weapons. Each weapon can be upgraded twice for a total cost of 30,000 karma. Trust me, that is relatively little and the player will be able to have multiple weapons upgraded to the highest level; and it is well worth it. Upgrading weapons increases their power and unlocks additional, more destructive, techniques.
The game proved to be rather annoying in the hardware department as well. Besides the frequent and lengthy loading of everything, even the slightest action would cause the game to crash. Beginning boss fights, switching weapons, even just walking around, anything that would require the system to take action could and would crash the game. And I do not mean mere disc read errors, like Assassin’s Creed, I am talking about full-on game-controller-console freezes that require manual restarts of the system. Was it the console? The game? The disc? While any other game works perfectly alright, I have my own ideas as to the reason. Regardless, blame does not matter, it should simply not occur. If the gameplay were continuous and relatively seamless it might actually have been a decent destructive, violent, and gorey title.
While the title boasts having an online component, it does not in actuality. Instead, “online” Ninja Gaiden 2 is limited to player-uploaded videos of how badly they play the game, and leaderboards for total karma collected during each level. Do you feel driven by competition yet?
Overall, one can not expect much from a game coming from a series that has been known for its simple “just kill everything” play style. The only shining innovation lies within the slicing and dicing of body parts; more gore and more bore. And as frustrating as the game was, in comparison to the XBox title, the lowest difficulty setting for this sequel was much easier overall.
TLDR: Button-mashing, hack-n-slash ninja moves mashed together with constant blocking, numerous crashes, and jiggly breasts make Ninja Gaiden 2 relatively boring with nothing new to offer any gamer.
