parker’s desk

It took me awhile to get this game, get­ting here to Austin I ended up com­ing up with some prob­lems get­ting the XBOX 360 hooked up to my mon­i­tor and get­ting sound to work.  I sup­pose all of that worked out nicely because I got it for pretty cheap as a used title.  I doubt I’d be nearly as happy with it if I had paid full price for the game (I guess a good sum­mary of a review in it’s own right).

When I read reviews, I tend to skip ahead to see a score or sum­mary first and then decide if I care to read what some­one thought of the game after that…so I like giv­ing a basic sum­mary upfront.  For Ninja Gaiden II, the best way I can say it is if you’re a fan of the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion Ninja Gaiden (or Ninja Gaiden Black, what­ever flavor(s) you played through) and you just want more of the same – you’re in for a treat.  If you’re new to the series, or expect­ing much more – you will likely feel let down by this game.  For me this wasn’t Ninja Gaiden II, just Ninja Gaiden v2.0.

To be fair, I don’t think Team Ninja set out to make some kind of rev­o­lu­tion in 3^rd per­son action adven­ture games.  They have their own lit­tle place that proved pretty suc­ces­ful before in round one, so here in round two they’ve played it safe and refined what was already a pretty tight con­trol scheme and group of game mechan­ics.  For this rea­son, fans are going to play this game and (if they’re like me) really like the revi­sions and small touch-ups they’ve given the game.  Look­ing around the envi­ron­ment is a lit­tle eas­ier, the new quick-switching items and gear setup on the d-pad helps a lot, and the com­bat moves feel much more acces­si­ble and even for­giv­ing in some cases.

I absolutely love look­ing at the mess I’ve made of ene­mies after a big fight, that’s prob­a­bly my favorite por­tion.  Later in the game…I want to say around Chap­ter 10 or 11, there is a part that has you going up this extremely tall set of stairs into a tem­ple, sur­rounded by walls on the way up.  Every bit epic look­ing as you slaugh­ter your way through what must have been hun­dreds of Spider-clan ninja…when it finally fin­ished and I got to breath, I turned around to see the blood stained walls and steps like some­thing straight out of a proper action movie.  It was awe­some, and truly an expe­ri­ence I’ll carry with me as a devel­oper for a long, long time.

Unfor­tu­nately, there are too few moments in the game like that, and lit­tle “new” to the game either.  While the art is amaz­ing to look at, I can help but feel like it feels a year or so past it’s expi­ra­tion date too.  Ryu’s cos­tume looks more dated than ever now to me, with his very strange uni­sex crotch area (either that or the jew­els got whacked off at birth?)…I get that it’s styl­ized, but adding some­thing as sim­ple as tex­ture to it could have gone a long way.  It may have been touched up a bit since the last-gen games, but you’d have to put them side by side to notice.

The biggest thing that sur­prised me was the com­plete and total lack of inter­ac­tion with your envi­ron­ment.  Other than a table or bar­rel here and there, you almost never can have an impact on your sur­round­ings.  I want to be able to throw (or be thrown) through win­dows, smash gear and con­trols every­where, really trash the world around me dur­ing a fight and sit back to grin at the work after­wards.  I mean…I’m work­ing on a Nin­tendo Wii game for chris­sakes – an admit­tedly horsepower-lacking-system – that has damn near every­thing avail­able to be destroyed around you.  There is just no excuse for a mod­ern fight­ing game to have such a hard­wired, lin­ear expe­ri­ence like this…especially some­thing of the cal­iber of a Ninja Gaiden title to not keep up with the times here.

All that said…it’s still fun to play, as a Ninja Gaiden fan.  I doubt I’d have got­ten nearly as into it if I hadn’t enjoyed the pre­vi­ous incar­na­tion as much as I did…but Ninja Gaiden v2.0 is good enough for me, even if I’d expected an actual sequel.

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