Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword - Nintendo DS (2008)

Six months have passed since the "Dark Dragon Blade Incident", how the events from the Xbox game are now referred to. Ryu has rebuilt the Hayabusa ninja village and lives there with the surviving members of the clan. While he is training his new pupil Momiji, the still weakened village is suddenly attacked by the infamous Black Spider Ninja Clan (it was they who were already tailing Ryu throughout his Xbox adventure) to steal the Eye of the Dragon, a mighty artifact able to upgrade Ryu's sword to the True Dragon Sword form.

The Cast

This is the premise to the first modern Ninja Gaiden handheld game, but this time, the pen... er... stylus is mightier than the sword. All of Ryu's attacks are now executed through the touch screen, and the only button you'll have to press throughout the game is the block button. What might sound odd works astonishingly well, and in no time you'll find yourself easily pulling off complicated maneuvers like the Izuna Drop. You walk by holding, attack by stroking through the enemies, and even can use your throwing stars or the bow by tapping on the screen. Jumps are realized through upwards strokes. Also, Ninpo is executed by drawing a symbol, and you can direct it's power afterwards. You hold the DS vertically like you're scribbling into a notebook, and thankfully there's also an option to flip the screens for left-handed use. Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword is easily one of the few games, alongside titles like The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Trauma Center and Elite Beat Agents, that make thorough and well thought out use of the DS' capabilities. The only move that doesn't work quite as well is the Ultimate Technique. You're supposed to rub the screen to charge it up, but if you don't to it just right, you'll execute several other commands before and waste precious reaction time. There's also a function for the microphone, but that is a very secondary one and feels kinda tacked on.

Of course, no one could ever expect a DS offshoot from the 3D Ninja Gaiden series to come without cutting back compared to its big brothers. Instead of a real time 3D engine, it counts on pre-rendered 2D backgrounds, like many of the better looking PS1 games did. However, for boss battles it switches to a 3D arena, and by the difference in detail you can see why they preferred the other alternative for the bulk of the game. The backgrounds look quite good, but they're a bit too static. Like, completely-still-waterfall static. The characters are decent 3D models but fit smoothly in the environment, except for a few passages where the nature of the engine shows its limits. For example, Ryu's not able to jump over the handrail of a staircase, although his jump is clearly much higher than the rail. The cut scenes are shown as colored manga-esque comic sequences, which are beautifully drawn but bring a lighter atmosphere to the whole story, which might not appeal to everyone used to the violent, dark tone of the console games. This might be the only never Ninja Gaiden game getting a Teen rating in most regions, in consequence, there's also no blood to be seen, much less beheadings.

A wallpaper from the game's official homepage

As good as the graphics look, they sometimes can get boring to long time Ninja Gaiden fans. Most of the enemies and bosses are recycled from the Xbox game (with some of them slightly simplified gameplay-wise), and also quite a few of the levels look more like a "best-of" compilation, than a completely new game. Sadly, the levels don't quite hold up to the standards set by its predecessor. Most of the time you feel like running from arena to arena, with the only platforming sequences being repetitions of the same wall jumps. Puzzles are also rare, most of them requiring use of one or more of your Ninpo techniques to solve. There's seven of them now, though some are more useful than others. In turn, you have to rely completely on your Dragon Sword for close combat, since it's the only weapon you get. After all, this is called Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword, right? At least you can upgrade it, but that makes it only more powerful without expanding your repertoire of attack moves or combos. The only new attacks you learn after the beginning are the multiple Flying Swallow technique against flying enemies and the counter, but the latter one doesn't seem to work too well here. The connected world of the first game was also abandoned, and you now access most of the several chapters through stone circle portals, with the Hayabusa village serving as your base to shop at Muramasa's store and chat with the villagers.

Not only did the gameplay get simplified, also the difficulty level has been lowered noticeably, which will please the many gamers who had to yield to the unforgiving Xbox game. But all the others might find that they overdid it a bit, and most of the bosses are ridiculously easy, at least on the only difficulty level that's available from the start. The dragon statues, formerly used plainly to save the game, have enhanced now, and in addition to auto saving(! Take care to copy your save if you plan to revisit a certain chapter directly, as you also can't go back to finished areas), they also recharge your life and Ninpo magic. Also, now a good portion of your life bar turns gray after damage, which will regenerate after each battle, which is quite necessary, since there aren't any refilling potions anymore, and you never get more than one Ninpo charge at a time during the entire game.

That said, despite all its shortcomings, Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword is nonetheless one of the most entertaining games on the DS and really worth it, if only to show off the real potential of Nintendo's hardware. As most handheld games, it's rather short, and skilled players won't need any more than five hours to play through the story, but there's enough replayability value to keep you at it afterwards. Through finishing the game, you unlock more and more difficulty settings, with each one containing individual wooden plates at a total of 45 to be found. Most of them are accessible through fiend arena challenges, but there's also some hidden ones you'll need the microphone to make appear. With these plates you unlock a gallery with lots of bonus content, like character profiles, in-game cut scenes, and letters from the villagers. You can even play the "Path of the Master Kunoichi" as female ninja if you manage to beat the quite unfair first chapter boss battle with Momiji.

Ninja Gaiden II - Xbox360 (2008)

Guess what? Another artifact, as dangerous as it is valuable, has been stolen from the Hayabusa village. By now you'd think that the village probably isn't the best place to store all these items capable of destroying the world, especially when the clan's killing machine, Ryu, is on vacation. This time the object in question is an ancient demon statue, which the Four Greater Fiends (didn't we learn in the first Xbox Ninja Gaiden that there are only three Greater Fiends? Now we're up to seven.) under the command of evil priest Dagra Dai seek out to resurrect the Archfiend and bring the fiend race back on top of the world.

The Cast

Where did all those people from Dragon Sword go? I don't know. And who could possibly care? Same as always, the story plays but a secondary role to set the stage for epic slaughtering of legions of fiends and ninjas. There aren't any real surprises, but it fulfills this purpose nonetheless. You'll see a bit more of the important characters than in the first Xbox game, and there's also more story development, but still not quite what you'd call award-winning material. That's not necessarily a weak point, though. If not through an interesting story, the cinematics convince through great action sequences, which is more befitting for a game about a super ninja. I'd prefer seeing Ryu jumping off a plane without a parachute only to use his sword as a brake on the runway of a flying fortress over a 10-minute philosophical conversation with the Greater Fiends any time of the day.

The action, similar to Dead or Alive's follow-up on the Xbox 360, has been made even significantly faster, and - thanks to the new hardware power - you'll get to fight sheer armies of fiends and ninjas at once. This time, there's a lot less healing items available. Instead, the system of a partly regenerating life bar and refreshing save points was adopted from the DS game. Also, extending your life bar through Lives of the Gods will replenish your health as well, which makes it now advisable to save them as precious healing items for tough boss battles.

Overall, there's been done a lot to make the game more enjoyable for less adept players. The (semi) permanent damage taken differs with each difficulty level, so on the lowest one, the Way of the Acolyte, you'll start most encounters with almost full health, while you have to face much less and weaker enemies than on the higher difficulties. You can also activate a tutorial, which teaches you all your ninja techniques during the first chapter. While Team Ninja finally implemented an easy mode, they seemed to have forgotten the normal one. Acolyte is arguably easier than the Ninja Dog mode of Black or Sigma, but the next available one has to be placed somewhere between the former Hard and Very Hard mode, and about halfway through the game, letting your guard down for just a second is almost always punished by death. On the other hand, of all things the Greater Fiends are still ridiculously easy. Itagaki once said that he wanted to put more human(-oid) bosses in the game to make them a more direct one-on-one experience, but none of them provides a challenge comparable to the later Ryu clones from Ninja Gaiden Black. And even if you should die in a battle against them, it's no big deal, because you now can retry them right away instead of having to start from the last save point, which are still rather far away from each other.

When talking about the difficulty, one certainly needs to address all the inappropriate critique that is exercised even by renowned magazines and other people who should know better. The difficulty of the game is often called cheap, also by people who have mastered the first Ninja Gaiden, but that simply has no validity whatsoever. The most common arguments are made about the armadillo boss and the multiple rocket launchers. An awful lot of reviewers complain about the armadillo exploding and surprisingly killing them after he is defeated, which can only be avoided through blocking or using a Ninpo. So, in a level where for the first time you encounter enemies that explode upon defeat, damaging you (which you can avoid - you've guessed it - through blocking), when the boss is blinking like crazy and light beams start to come out of it, how much more do people need to take a hint? As for the multiple rocket launcher enemies, these are also far from cheap if you learn how to approach and defeat them, and they don't force you to ranged combat the least bit, unlike described in many sources. As with the first Ninja Gaiden on Xbox, at least on the first two difficulty levels, there's absolutely no situation that is not totally controllable when approached with the right tactics.

Hm, where have I seen those blades before... (Xbox360 HD Promo)

The already great controls have been tweaked even further. A very pleasant change is the separation of the standard attack and interaction buttons, so there's no accidentally leaving rooms or constantly attacking while you just want to open the chest anymore. They also found a good compromise for the water running. Now you still have to press the jump button for each step on the water, but you can also start running from out of the water and skillfully fight on the water surface. Escaping throws now works much more consistently, but nonetheless, still but a fraction of them are actually escapable at all. The final change to the controls is a mere aesthetic one - instead of performing a roll, Ryu now dashes to the side to avoid enemy attacks. At first, it needs getting used to, but in the cold light of day, rolling around all the time actually looks a bit ridiculous, so I'd prefer the new animation. Its just a matter of taste, though.

What about the camera, you ask? Well, they certainly took a lot of measures to improve it. You can sense that there's some implementation that tries to prevent it from getting stuck in walls, and as the developers stated in an interview, they wanted to level the camera to give players a semi-2D, duel style perspective. The truth is, most of the changes actually make things worse. The camera gets stuck every once in a while, and a duel-friendly perspective doesn't really bring any benefit when you're fighting legions of enemies most of the time. I'd deeply advise to switch the game to 16:9 even if you haven't got the appropriate TV, since you often can't see crap in 4:3. Most of the problems can be compensated by placing the camera directly behind you with the right trigger, but it really would have been better if they just left things the way they where. The one good change, though, is the possibility to switch back to the free camera during boss fights, that especially comes in handy during the Path of the Mentor or Master Ninja, where more and more bosses are supported by annoying underlings. For no reason, you rotate the camera with the other analog stick while charging for an Ultimate Technique, which doesn't make any sense at all.

Speaking of which, the Ultimate Techniques are one of your moves that was greatly enhanced. Now, ranged weapons can also be charged into these powerful attacks, while a lot of the melee weapons have very mighty ones, and you can still continue to charge them while being hit, so if you're ready to sacrifice some health for these devastating attacks, you can really tear your enemies apart.

Cutting enemies to pieces, by the way, has become an important feature of the gameplay(!). Ryu is now capable to completely dismember most of his ordinary enemies, but that doesn't make them less dangerous. Instead, they go for hazardous desperation attacks like grabbing Ryu just to detonate themselves together in a suicide attack. To counter these not-quite-disabled foes, you have a set of gory finishing moves at your disposal, called Obliterations, that you activate with your strong attack button. Together with other gratuitous effects, like fountains of blood, pieces of corpses that keep lying on the floor, burning enemies running around screaming, and Ryu nonchalantly shaking of the bloodstains from his weapons, Ninja Gaiden is surely one of the most violent and gory games in existence, and I'm wondering if they didn't overdo it. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from being a moralizer and I'm all for seeing the proper consequences for your waving around with pointy weapons. To say it with the words of the heroine in Bloodrayne: "When you saw the blades, what did you think was gonna happen?", but they could at least offer an option to tone down the degree of violence for people that can't or just don't want to stomach such an amount of explicit slaughtering. Of course, dismemberments are a significant part of the gameplay, but they could always present them just through disabled limbs without destroying this aspect. On the other end, the violence doesn't deliver the redeeming qualities it could have, because you only can hack apart ordinary enemies, while the bosses always stay in one piece, although most of them do have their individual obliteration moves to be killed with. This is something done much more consistently in the God of War games.

You're not going to find many games with this degree of violence...

Ryu lost most of his previous weapons, making room for a far more diverse and interesting set of replacements. Next to the familiar Dragon Sword, the Vigoorian Flail, the Lunar Staff, and double katanas, you'll find Wolverine-styled claws (fitting shoes inclusive), a sickle on a chain clearly inspired by God of War Kratos' blades, tonfas, and a huge scythe. The latter one is one brutal hell of a weapon and, sadly, hopelessly overpowered against anything that is not ultra fast. Once again, all of your weapons can be upgraded for sharper blades and longer combos.

The Ninpo attacks have mostly been replaced, with Ninpo magic actually becoming useful, or at least it can get if their level is maxed out. The Art of Inferno now launches multiple fire balls instead of one bigger one, so you're always getting multiple hits, no matter where your enemies are standing. New are the Flame Phoenix attack, which kinda replaces the Fire Wheel, the Wind Blades, which, at level 3, can kill a whole screen of ninjas in a single strike, and the Piercing Void, a gravity attack.

The graphics look generally pretty good, especially the various creatures and their animations, but there's also some things to be left desired. Instead of adventuring through a cohesive area, Ryu now visits several places on earth, including a revisit to the Hayabusa village, and there's a much greater variety in the environments thanks to that. While most of the locations - especially the cities New York, Venice and Tokyo - look great, there are also a few less sightly ones, and some downright ugly caves. While there's some decent enough lighting in some areas, the engine is lacking in certain stock special effects, especially reflections. Even the better looking levels are much less dynamic than action game fans are used to nowadays, and you'll still come across countless invisible boundaries and obstacles that shouldn't be ones. Interaction with the environment, in other words destructible objects, are also very inconsistent and much too sparse. So why can you destroy the round tables, but not the square ones? Why can you break the display glass in the museum, but no windshields of cars or wine bottles? While these things may not afflict the game itself, they definitely don't help with suspension of disbelief. Together with the fact the levels are a bit too straight forward, with puzzles or crossroads making themselves scarce, it really lets you feel the linearity. There's also times where the engine can't cope with the ridiculously high amount of action on the screen, which can, though rarely, cause severe slowdowns, especially when fire effects are involved.

Audio-wise, Ninja Gaiden II is a big improvement. You've got a lot of thrilling fight music that dynamically adjusts to the situation, and even some beautiful orchestral theme tunes that would as well suit a blockbuster movie. The sound effects are executed in an equally professional manner, and the sounds of squirting blood and screaming enemies accurately support the gory impression of the graphics, but also beyond this, things like the hall in a cave or frizzling fire provide for a great atmosphere. Once again you can choose freely between Japanese or English voice acting, with a wide range of subtitles available. Each version of the game is region code free, by the way, and has all the languages, so you can go for a really cheap East Asian copy if you don't want to spend too much money on it.

Dueling it off in front of Tokyo's skyline... (Xbox360 HD Promo)

With Microsoft's construction kit policy on the Xbox 360 hardware, developers aren't allowed anymore to assume a hard disk installed, and so Ninja Gaiden II loses all the caching benefits of its predecessor. In addition to a medium length loading time for each stage, there's also points the game has to reload during the chapter, which is done particularly bad. If you happen to be in a battle at such a position, you'll constantly cross that invisible border, and the game stops every time to reload again and again, which can not only get on your nerves, but just as easily get Ryu killed.

Even with Xbox Live developed to its current state, there's still no multiplayer duelling mode available. Instead, there's once again the leaderboards and the new Ninja Cinema, which is actually a great idea, but not executed very well. It's basically a video recorder you can turn on while playing the game to show the world how awesome you are, but only the 2000 leading players are able to upload their recorded movies, which probably makes sense to avoid spamming with boring and unspectacular videos. The great flaw of the Ninja Cinema is the fact that you have to watch the video just the way it was played, neither can it be paused, nor do you have any control over the camera, which is a serious step back from Team Ninja's own Dead or Alive replay function.

The game is also quite a bit shorter and offers less replayability value than Ninja Gaiden Black or Sigma. The mission mode has now been integrated into the main game, with only nine missions in its retail state. These you can also only access if you find a certain item very early in the game, that isn't hard to miss, so you should keep an eye out, for the additional items you get through this challenges are the only ones you can't buy later at Muramasa's shop if you missed them. The Scarabs have been replaced by Crystal Skulls, but these don't have any in-game effects and just give you achievements for your gamer profile. Boring, isn't it? The only things you unlock upon completion of the game are equally boring color variants for Ryu's suit instead of cool costumes, a filter that makes the game look like a silent movie (which isn't quite as boring, but you probably wouldn't want to play with it activated for a long time, anyway), and a plus game for the current difficulty level. These let you start a new game with all your items and upgrades intact and are also vital for some of the achievements where you have to use the same weapon during the entire game.

To lengthen the game experience, Tecmo intended to cash in with new downloadable content. At the time of its release, you can buy a separate mission mode with 25 new tasks for 800 MS points and a whole bunch of costumes for 200 points each (they all come in five colours), but none of them are particularly exciting and they seem like a waste of money.

Downloadable Costumes

MP3s Download here

Ninja Gaiden 2 Theme
The Skull
Twisted Shadows
The Underworld