He’s got blades. On his feet.
It’s taken me a long time to write anything about Ninja Gaiden 2, primarily because (spoiler warning) it is worse than the first Xbox incarnation. Beyond all the visual pomp, crimson splatterings and outright noise that NG2 manages to throw at you, the core fighting system has been tweaked into something nearly unrecognisable. This is without mentioning the infuriatingly obtuse camera and absurdist difficulty settings.
I am a great fan of the first Xbox outing of Hayabusa; playing the original when it came out and on both Hard and Very Hard difficulty levels after that, and before 2 came out playing through Black on the Xbox Classics feature for 360. The first game is so much better than the second because the balance it struck between skill and preternatural ability was borderline genius; it fostered that “one more play” ethos because any failure was a failure of yourself rather than the game. Two corrupts this and makes the game your enemy by including cheap, and most tellingly, unfair enemies.
The first thing one notices about NG2 after playing NG is the minute timing differences in attacks. These take a minute or so to adjust to as one settles into familiar ebb and flow of crowd control. The second is the much lauded extremity removal. It is at first exhilarating seeing limbs and vermilion being scattered to the wind but within half an hour of play, tactical play and knowledge of which attacks eviscerate are subsumed into normal play. The final major change to the fighting system concerns the obliteration attacks, sudden-death moves in common parlance. These arrive after a foe has been suitably hacked up and a single, well-placed button press later dispatches them with suitable aplomb.
If these were all the changes to the core mechanics then this would be a very different diatribe, unfortunately the great detractor, as mentioned before, are the enemies. The maxim religiously adhered to in the first was that any enemy could kill you outright through cunning and viciousness if you didn’t keep your wits about you; the second doesn’t discard this but softens up the enemies so that only groups of them pose any particular problem. So groups is what it throws at you. In the bloody fury of the first hours of play, this doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, but as the game wears on it becomes tiresome and each wave of malefactors becomes a speed bump rather than a challenge.
Ninja Gaiden 2 truly condemns itself however by introducing enemies who consider themselves above the laws of the game. Enemies which fire cluster missiles which can track beyond their forward firing range, ejecting from the side or even the back of their rocket launcher. Enemies which stalwartly continue on their animation cycle despite a brutally heavy scythe impacting their torso. Enemies which repeatedly throw exploding shurikens far quicker and with more accuracy than anything the protagonist can muster. This is without even mentioning the boss fights which range from the invigorating to the lacklustre.
This all contributes to a game that, camera aside, is technically marvellous but destroys the mentality that made the first so engaging. Combat, especially on the harder difficulty levels, is conquered through persistance and luck than skill and planning and as cathartic as the carnage is, there are too many self-imposed barriers to make Ninja Gaiden 2 anything other than a game for the most ardent and self-flagellating of fans.
