Customer Reviews

Ninja Gaiden II

5 star:		(71)
4 star:		(35)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

NG2 had a lot of expectations to live up to. Having beat it, here's my review of what Team Ninja got right and what it got wrong. (I played on Path of the Warrior difficulty, so the easy setting may be slightly different)

Good:
* Much more detailed enemies and graphics, including the ability of nearly every bad guy to be amputated/decapitated and or chopped in half.

* Bodies of most enemies stay around after death, giving you an increased feeling of carnage and destruction. Leave a trail of death to follow!

* Cool weapons

* Easy saving of games at Dragon Statues

* Massive Boobage - unrealistic proportions and extra jiggliness

Bad:
* Some massive slowdown in certain levels when lots of enemies are onscreen. Game over screen visual effects styling is bad and often VERY slow framerate.

* No map. WTH? Some levels you need a map

* Almost completely WORTHLESS ninpo! The Inferno magic is about the only one that does anything (homes in on baddies). But being that many of the bosses are fire-based demons or flyers, magic is almost worthless. Piercing Void is absolutely useless as it requires you to target an enemy and by the time you launch he ball, the baddie has moved. Short-range on the wind magic equally useless.

* Some lackluster level designs, especially caves, tunnels, or building interiors. Several levels feel rehased, especially the Flying Fortress level.

* Added feeling of "cheapness", due to reliance on button mashing and cheap tricks by the level designers. Several areas of the game are maddeningly frustrating due to this kind of cheapness, whose idea of challenging you is to throw wave after wave of the same enemies at you, or put ranged attackers well out of your reach. Examples are the grenade launching soldiers that spam explosives at you from afar or archers, usually appearing in pairs. Exploding jellyfish/mines that respawn. There must be at least 30 of these each time you encounter them.

* The damn biting fish are all back, including the big grabby swimming ones and the airborne ghost piranhas.

* Stupid looking/ugly enemies, with lots of them having some skull motif. Many of the enemies' faces are modified versions of skulls. Stupidness includes wolves that hold katana in their mouths and chop you with them?!

* Having to kill bosses a second time. 1 guy you have to kill 4 times. I know this is a trademark of the NG series, but 4 times???

* Lack of replay value. NO UNLOCKABLES except a measly sound test option and new colored costumes when you begin the game again after beating it. No Sonia as a playable character, no Missions like in NG Sigma. Would be great to be able to play Sonia or Muramasa.

* Lots of dumb unrealistic mechanics like the ability to swim in lava! WTH??.. Invisible barriers everywhere, limiting your interaction with the environment and keeping you several feet away from touching what looks like accessible scenery. Another is the lava filled armadillo boss that comes out of the crashed air fortress.. this thing was the machine's power core??? Back to the cheapness of the design: this boss exploded after you beat it, causing instant death if you don't know what to do before hand. This boss is tough enough if you are playing it the first few times through and to have it explode and kill you is a cheap trick.

* Some bosses are VERY easy to kill with a fully upgraded Scythe

* Much uglier, sloppier items interface w/ blood splatter motif.

The predecessors Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden Sigma were much better in terms of gameplay balance.

Rent this first if you are a casual fan. Having owned and beaten all the variations of the first NG, I am highly disappointed by this game, especially the lack of extras. After seeing how many features Sigma packed onto the PS3 version, I expected those to carry over to NG 2. No chance. No way to view beaten cut scenes, no photo gallery, concept art, rotatable models, nothing!! It feels like a rushed product. No replay value at all. Perhaps they're going to double dip and release NG 2 Omega. Still a very good game, mind you, but just feels half-done.

After putting in over 400 hrs. on the original Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden Black I was looking forward to 2 and now my fix is here. Well I was initially a little disappointed and felt that they released the game too early but once I got to tweaking the camera, cinema playback and controller options it solved or eased alot of the problems I was encountering.

I'll keep this short by giveing the good points and bad.
Bad points first. There are frame rate issues if you have the auto cinema feature turned on they can get really bad when a lot of people are on the screen attacking you at one time. If you turn it off you probably won't see a problem with frame rates again.
Second problem is the camera, this can be a problem but you can manually adjust or speed up the auto adjust rate in the options menu and this helps a lot.
Graphically speaking it's a little inconsistent. The particle effects are great but at the same time some of the backgrounds are pretty bland. It's kind of a mixed bag but due to some of the things they've done regarding retaining chopped body parts long after you've left a room in the game it takes a toll on memory usage and thus taxes the 360 quite a bit. Add that to the size of the environments, the number of characters on screen at once and this game pushes the 360 pretty hard.
The other problem though not really a problem, but more of an annoyance is that the enemies are a little on the cheap side this time so you are forced to be a little more creative.

Now for the good:
Believe it or not they have actually improved the gameplay. You start off now with a long list of moves as opposed to hardly any in the original. Countering has been refinded so that you can properly time it. Weapons are now very varied and don't overlap in terms of usage. Enemy AI is incredible you can actually notice the enemies adjusting to your attack patterns. Granted this makes things more difficult but ultimately more satisfying when you win. The level design has gotten rid of a lot of the platforming and focuses much more on the fighting aspect of the game. Secondary weapons are chargable and are actually useful, can anyone actually admit that they used the bow much in the first one?

The story is actually a little more coherent now and makes a bit of sense, though not much. Last but not least It's a great game but a new Missions mode and a little more refinement of the default settings would have made this a classic.

Though still not for the faint of thumbs, this game still provides the smooth and intuitive action and beauty of the first and its ancestors. The easiest difficulty is now much more accessible to the average gamer as well. A must have for the serious action/adventure gamer.

Once in a while, a game comes along that justifies lying about going to a meeting so you could take off early from work and head home to play; Ninja Gaiden 2 is one of these games, and this was exactly what I did. It wasn't a complete lie however; I did have a meeting, a meeting with Ryu Hayabusa.

This game is bloody, the major selling point of the game and I absolutely love it. The bone-crunching, flesh-slicing action is intense and fast, and unlike anything in previous hack n slash games. Both graphics and audio are tip top, and the controls are smooth and responsive.

One function I particularly like is the convenient weapons and item menu that can be easily accessed in the middle of heavy combat. This is important, as enemies outnumber you 6 to 1, you will inevitably take some pounding and as your health drops to dangerous levels, you can immediately hit the D-pad to consume various herbal remedies to stay alive. Furthermore, you can switch weapons in the middle of a fight - so if you've been clobbering some poor dude for half a minute with your Lunar Staff and want to finish him off by slicing his throat from ear to ear, you can do that by switching to your Dragon Sword.

Concerning the difficulty, the hand-to-hand combat is very fierce and gets a little overwhelming at times; typically enemies attack in waves and by the time you're done with half of them, not much of your health may be left. The good news is that dead enemies' souls help restore health. The AI is pretty smart and injured enemies adjust their AI from aggressive to sneaky and psychotic - just waiting for you to turn your back and plunge that sword or talon through your chest. So remember - don't expect an enemy with only one arm left to just happily sit there, finish off him.

Unlike a lot of other games, bodies of dead enemies don't disappear off the screen, so bodies, limbs and chunks of bloody meat litter all over the ground after you've been through a wave of attackers, this is nice effect.

Also, blocking in this game is like taking cover in Gears of War, you can't do without it. Yet, while blocking you can either execute a counter attack after the enemy has finished his moves or dash away to escape. So, there is a huge number of fighting techniques and tactics that you can experiment with. Other aspects of the game are pretty conventional and straight forward - occasional save and heal points in the form of a dragon statue, a shop to purchase weapons and items, boss battles (which will REALLY test your wits and reflexes) etc. There isn't too much of a learning curve (which is good), all you need is to come to grips with the pace, various combos and pick out your favorite techniques.

This is one of the best games on the 360 ever, right up there with Gears and Devil May Cry; NG2 certainly edges Devil in the fighting department. For those into achievements, NG2 provides some 60 achievements, and what's fun is the ease of gaining achievements - you can earn achievements just by discovering and executing new skills, but as expected they are valued at only 5 gamescore points each. By the time I completed the first level, I've gained 11 achievements.

I knocked one star off because of camera issues, although awkward angles can be easily fixed by hitting the right trigger. Also, frame rates aren't entirely smooth and tend to slow down at various points, but this isn't too big a problem. Some levels will come across as just plain and ugly, and it seems level designers were lazy in this respect.

Another problem is the 'cheapness' of the levels, as others have mentioned, for example frequent and unexplained explosions on certain levels drain away your health - a clear indication that level designers were too damn lazy to think of challenges to test your skill.

But my biggest problem with NG2 is that you can't replay past missions, that is a real disappointment as mission replays are crucial to the replay value of the game.




Overall this is a great game, certainly an intense experience; as an above-average difficult game, you can feel satisfied that you'll fight many enemies and bosses many times before finishing the game, so getting your money's worth.

Being a fan of the nes games, this here is a complete love letter to the hardcore old school. You got werewolves on steroids and ninjas wielding sub machine guns and a story that does it's best not to make one lick of sense. Every single moment of this game is an action packed roller coaster ride that challenges you when you fail. If the game is too hard it's just because your not good enough yet.

Here, you are Ryu Hayabusa and you're about to take a journey that will bring you to Hell itself which just so happens to be in the center of mt. Fuji. The entire game really makes you feel like a ninja badass. You'll run across water, slice everything apart into bloody chunks, and you even swim in lava all the while teaming up with a busty CIA agent that wears battle attire that would make your Grandparents blush.

The real star here is the insane boss battles. I'm serious, there are more quality boss fights here than in five games. A giant electrified fish, a molten hot armadillo, a winged demon, and a huge multi armed werewolf named Volf are just a few of these encounters and every single one will get your blood pumping.

Ninja Gaiden 2 is the reason that I still play video games. With tons of beautiful locations to explore and a slew of weapons and magic at your disposal, how is this not pure gaming bliss. There are more memorable sequences than I can count on both hands but if there is one issue here it would be a spastic camera system. The camera is a truly deadly enemy but when I was fighting a ton of ninjas jumping around on clock gears in a tower with a evil winged demi god awaiting me at the top, all was quickly forgiven. If you love video games buy this one unless your a pansy, in which case you should play this game on hard until it pummels the weak out of your body and then play it the way it was intended. Like a Ninja.

if you liked the 1st game the sequel is better, more weapons and enemies and still very challenging, also has replay value with unlockable outfits.

Great game worth the money and longer than i thought it was going to be.

This game is incredibly good, I have been playing it since I got it and don't think I'll put it down any time soon. The images are incredibly good and all the different moves you can perform with each weapon give the game a great interaction.

Level 1 was lots of fun but at the save point at the end of the way I did not know I was supposed to jump on the roof, and I did not know I was supposed to press A continuously but I tried it. I ended up in a lovely park with a bridge and water. I tried jumping after I kept going in the direction I came at the end of the hallway. Finally I got to level 2, and that was the hardest level ever! If there is anyone stuck on level 2, it isnt in the strategy guide, but I found a big secret. When you shoot the bow and arrow anywhere, there is a red dot about the size of 2 grains of salt put together that you cannot see. When you see that dot, focus the camera and move the dot to the very center of the target. Then release B and the trigger, and if the dot hits the center of the eye, Bullseye! the gate opens! After playing more on level 2, you go up on a balcony and find secret rooms with the camera. I thought I never would find them. Again, there is a little red dot. Center it in the middle of the room and BULLSEYE!

I loved Ninja Gaiden since I was 5 years old back on the NES. Now it's only gotten better (as you'd hope) on the newest generation of consoles. There are some camera flaws, and the difficulty has gone down due to the new health system, but overall the experience has only gotten better, with faster action and more beautiful cinematics.

I recommend this to any Ninja Gaiden fan who owns an xbox 360.