Itagaki`s final Deathmachine
After TECMO stole his unfinished Dead or Alive 2 prototype and take it to production without him knowing, being acussed of sexual harassment and fall into depression and drink,the Michael Bay movies and Aerosmith songs made him resurge as a Chad-rockstar human-hater (also he began to shout that those who play videogames in easy mode are nothing but dogs xd)
And so Ninja Gaiden 2 was created (actually, Doa 2 Hardcore was created first, but that's not important now) a non-stop action videogame made by insane and horny people, taking the movement and management dilemmas of the reboot and black version and multiplying the pivoted combat while leads the action through relentless pressure due to the insane avant-garde bunch of enemies which any of they can potencially end you.
Nothing impossible tho, there is already a Chinese guy who has completed the game without taking damage ,and how the hell has done it is what I wonder in my lonely nights.
I presume this emphasis in bolt action ,explosions and high numbers beyond human limits of cocaine is the result of the overdose of Bay movies that Itagaki was exposed during his depression.Or maybe not.
I buy it anyway.
With a great sense of energy, complex streets built for bouncing, jumping and acrobatics, the game is an ode to digital topography and stunts.

at one point of the game the classic flamboyant-demon-Boy falls in love with the statue of liberty (yes) and you have to fight both. Yes, you fight the Statue of Liberty with a katana. Allegory.
Maybe videogames are too good for us.

I’m not too familiar with the Ninja Gaiden series. The only other game I’ve played to a significant degree is the NES original. So, one may wonder, why did I play the modern Ninja Gaiden II instead of its more beloved predecessor Ninja Gaiden Black? Well, I’m not like other Backloggd users. I say ‘Castleroid’ instead of ‘Metroidvania’, I don’t quote other users in my reviews, I hate ironic humour, I always commit to my comedic bits unwaveringly, and I just like playing sequels before the original games (The real reason is that I had trouble trying to emulate Black and happened to see this one at a game store).

All of that being said, the game is pretty good, but fairly different than other action games I’ve played. To quote user Herbert in his review of Ultrakill, “Doom Eternal was Ninja Gaiden Black (for FPS games)”. I can’t attest to how similar Doom Eternal is to Ninja Gaiden Black, but it is pretty similar to the latter’s sequel. The brutality, the need to consider every enemy, the gratifying finisher moves, a bit of platforming every once and a while, etc… However, part of the reason I like Ninja Gaiden II much more than Doom Eternal is that you have options in this game. The best way to display this is the fact that this game has achievements for clearing the story with a single weapon. Anyone whose played Doom Eternal knows that trying to use one weapon in that game is pretty much impossible due to the way enemies and resources are designed. You will use every weapon in the ‘right’ way, or you just won’t take down enemies efficiently. Personally, this kind of restriction is not appealing.

In Ninja Gaiden II, there’s still ‘right’ ways to take down enemies, there’s just way more of them. You have a pretty solid set of weapons to use, swords, claws, staffs, chain blades, and more. Each one has different moves that will greatly change the way you need to fight. Attack power, speed, range, mobility, and even specific moves are all things to consider when choosing a weapon to wield. I mostly stuck to the Dragon Sword because it was quick and allowed for a lot of mobility and the Lunar staff because it had good range and crowd control, but I’d switch to the other weapons for certain situations too. This game is far from accessible or easy, but this one allowance is what makes the game engaging for me. Certain moves work well for certain situations, but I had to learn them for myself, and if I didn’t like that move, I could try another weapons’ alternative that, while not identical, would usually get the job done. You also have a good selection of ranged weapons that have different use cases, usually firing quick shots can be a nice disruptor while a focused attack can be used to kill weaker ranged enemies.

It also helps that the normal enemy design, while extremely brutal at times, makes fights super fun. While you have the potential to eviscerate enemies, they can do the same to you. Enemies will lose body parts in fights, and if you don’t finish them off, they will suicide attack you for a third of your health, so every enemy needs to be taken seriously. I know some people say the camera is ‘outdated’, but the truth is that enemies are too aggressive and plenty to be approached with a lock-on akin to Ocarina of Time, and the soft lock-on here was pretty consistent for me personally. Anyway, the multitude of strong enemies means you’ll need to master finishers, essence charges, and a few fundamental combos like the izuna drop to annihilate your enemies. What ties this together is the covertly brilliant ‘lasting damage system’. While health pickups are generous and you actually recover health when no enemies are nearby, your max health will slowly go down the more damage you take, and the only way to restore it is with save points and items. This makes every fight feel tense, because not only can one wrong move massively cut down your health, but even if you do overcome this particular challenge, you’re going into your next fight with a bit of a disadvantage. This means many fights have not only the frantic, all-or-nothing feeling that games with generous checkpoints do, but also the tension and call to mastery that more scarce checkpoints create. More games need to try something like this.

Honestly though, while the common enemies are mostly great, the bosses are a bit mixed. There are some good ones, and they’re usually the most conventional opponents, humanoid bosses that are hard but feel fairly similar in design to common enemies. However, way too many require you to use the bow, and I don’t mean you just fire off a shot and then go in with your blades, you have to stand still, charge an arrow for a few seconds, and shoot, and for some bosses this is the optimal way to deal damage for the entire fight, at least to my knowledge. Really though, I think one issue that hurts all bosses a little is that you can’t combo on them nearly as hard as with normal enemies. All of this makes the fights feel a little more reserved in a way I don’t entirely like that for this kind of game.

I suppose that brings us to the level design. Apparently Ninja Gaiden Black has an interconnected map similar to a Metroidvania or something, but this game has mostly linear levels. They’re pretty solid. It’s hard to get lost, but you do have some optional areas and backtracking to keep things interesting. Ranged enemies are often placed in areas above, and you usually want to deal with them first, be it by shooting them a lot or climbing up and dealing with close-range. There’s some light platforming present, which is thankfully much better than in games like God of War where it’s boring and one mistake instantly kills you. The level design is mostly a really nice blend of fighting and light platforming, and some attacks even depend on jumping off walls to use, which means level design has an added importance to fights that works well with the agility of Ryu.

Alright, I usually only nitpick the stories of games (We’d be here a while if I did so with this one), but there were a lot of specific gameplay moments that really annoyed me. First though, I have to talk about the performance and glitches. I played this game vanilla on 360, so maybe this isn’t the best way to play the game, but frame drops weren’t uncommon and there were a significant amount of glitches. One time, an enemy got stuck behind a gate. The only way to open this gate is to kill the enemy, and since I couldn’t reach the enemy, I had to reload a save. One time these enemies that sprout up from underground started coming up too high before suddenly disappearing and repeating. This made the fight trivial but annoying. A few times an enemy just started standing in the air for some reason. These kinds of things weren’t super common, but they happened enough that I’m convinced that this game needed a little more polish. Load times can be pretty long too, and that one staircase fight’s reputation is completely earned. It would be really cool if it wasn’t in slow-mo! And look, I like hard games, but sometimes this game is just mean. After beating a boss one time, it just exploded and killed me in one hit. “Ok, next time I’ll run away before it explodes.” I thought. Still, it killed me in one hit despite me being far away from the explosion. I don’t usually like looking stuff up for games, but I ended up just searching the solution so I wouldn’t waste more of my time, and it turns out you just have to block it. This is the definition of a beginner’s trap. It’s trivial to avoid if you know about it, but the punishment is harsh if you don’t. Another time, I killed a boss on an island surrounded by lava. This isn’t a big deal because Ryu can obviously run on lava, but some sadistic bastard at Tecmo decided to put some lava bombs under the lava on the way to the exit. I didn’t notice the subtle tell of these bombs, so I died and had to fight the boss again. Again, dealing with these is no problem if you’re aware of them, so their inclusion serves no purpose other than to punish someone who already defeated a hard boss.

It's honestly the stuff in the previous paragraph that made me bump this down from an 8 to a 7/10. This does mean a replay on an emulator/updated version might have the potential to bring it back up to an 8, but I think I want to play Ninja Gaiden Black first. If that game has what I like about this one and what I don’t like isn’t present, I could see it becoming a personal favorite. As for this game, 7/10.

É como destrinchar o próprio inferno. Só você e sua espada abençoada pelos deuses, contra criaturas demoníacas, que mesmo perdendo qualquer ombro do corpo, vai seguir vivendo apenas com o objetivo de parar a batida do seu coração, pouco importa se familiares, amigos tá sendo mortos pelo jogador, a única coisa que importa pros inimigos é a sua morte, não tem tempo de choro, não tem tempo pra nada, a única coisa que importa é o sangue, é a adrenalina dos combates. O ápice dos jogos de ação não apenas pelo seu combate e sim por elevar todos os conceitos do gênero ao seu nível doentio, não existe humanidade, não existe sentimentos, existe apenas você e os monstros, inteligências artificiais, que só servem para serem mortos por você da forma mais cruel e antipática, foda-se se eles já não tem mais braços, se eles já tem mortos, você pode executar eles uma outra vez. A batalha não é só entre Ryu hayabusa e os demônios, é também do próprio player e o Itagaki (Diretor), ele quer que você sofra, ele quer apenas o seu sofrimento, você tá lutando contra 20 demônios? coloque bombas, coloque lança misseis, coloque 3 boss fights seguidas dane-se, nada importa, fora a busca pela brutalidade, e a busca pela insanidade, não é apenas Ryu Hayabusa que está na jornada até as últimas camadas do inferno, ele te puxa em suas mãos até lá, de forma forçada, afinal de contas é só você, ele o código ninja dele, e a fé de ambos. Acredite na sua fé, na Dragon Sword, e claro no izuna drop.

Pretty sure this game is what cocaine feels like. It just kinda throws shit at you not caring if it actually works or not and I kinda love it for it. When it just lets you fight dudes it’s so much fun, but it gets a little carried away with things you can’t really counter. Anytime I saw the ninjas that throw incendiary shurikens at you I’d just get upset, same with the skull worms. But the combat feels good enough that those annoyances just kinda fade away as soon as you get to start swinging a fucking demon scythe at dudes. Every single boss outside of the final one was kind of a joke, after a certain point I was able to beat them all by just spamming Y with the scythe. The story was basically nothing but I wasn’t expecting different so who really cares tbh. The dismemberment system was actually a really neat addition, seeing fiends throw other fiends’ body parts at me was really cool.

This game is good not because of difficulty but of insanity.

Even on normal difficulty, There are almost 7-8 or more enemies at once in this game. But unlike the dynasty warriors games, they will attack very aggressively. On top of that, they don't forget to provide supports from a distance.

However, the main character Ryu Hayabusa can use a variety of weapons and so be capable of fighting against enemies. He can attack in a wide area with UT, a strong-attack-hold invincible technique that has been available since the first game. Moreover, in Ninja Gaiden 2, the number of weapons has increased, and the concept of the delimbing mechanism has been introduced, making the flavor of Ninja Gaiden 2 different from the first one.

As I said, the most noticeable new feature of Ninja Gaiden 2 is the body delimbing. Enemies whose bodies have been partially severed are slowed down and killed by a single strong-attack, Which is called OT. Moreover, Ryu is invincible during while he executes OT! But beware, a severed enemy will "self-destruct" during a grab, inflicting significant damage that cannot be guarded against.

You have to consider what type of weapon has the best range and what type of enemy (human, demon, machine, etc.) has the highest rate of delimbing, and depending on the situation and enemy combination. If the situation is not good enough to attack enemies, You have to think about which would be the most efficient for defense -- guard, counter, or dash away. And sometimes you have to adjust the enemy pressures by leaving the delimbed enemy alone even you know the risk that they can do eventual self-destruction. These executions are done with split-second judgment. The enemy is killed. Numerous enemies come out again. And you make another decisions and kill them. Repeat. This is the basic flow of Ninja Gaiden 2.

After the hectic fights, Walls and floors are painted with vivid red blood and the dead bodies and their parts are all over around Ryu. Then, You will remind my words. This game is good not because of difficulty but of insanity.

Leaving aside the fact that my previous reviews Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden 2 and WET were the result of drunken nights and carousing, I still have a genuine interest in how some video games confidently carry a "Vulgar" aesthetic in times where the masses concentrate on photorealism, pixel art or cutewholesomethang (maybe?)
Let's also leave aside the fact that for video games, exploitation, in every sense of the word, is like a lung.

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Both Itagaki's ninja gaiden and WET have the will to inherit the most vulgar and savage aesthetics of Asian exploitation cinema, and its derivatives, only one does it passively and the other seems to be desperately looking for it, like comparing Chang Cheh vs Tarantino.
God forgive me.

Itagaki's ninja gaiden is at its core, in spirit more like the films it wants to be a playable response to -let's say Chang Cheh's cinema-, Ninja Gaiden is a wild, aggressive product for the player, who doesn't really care in excess for pleasing everyone and that guards its greatness in deep places that not everyone is willing to reach, although visually it is everything that at the beginning of the HD era and the great recession was asked of an AAA; it relies on clean, powerful imagery, a hyper-stylized plastic sense with attention to toned bodies, fluids, fabrics and movement, and had a strong cinematic component.
instead, WET is more like a Tarantino movie. Not like it stays in an egofalocentric pastiche that depends on the ignorance or incuriosity of people like Kill Bill was, but although it hurts me the reality is that WET has a -great- very interesting action premise that is tamed by a worthy planning of an AAA or study budget-at best-where the epidermal is the substance. Littering the already-suffering 30-frame image full of jagged edges and blurriness with burnt filters, stock sounds, and transitions that attempt to emulate a Grindhouse experience is certainly daring for a game whose playable core is efficiency and reflexes. the result pushes the game to exist as a short, cheap and unhygienic party, but very enjoyable, which unlike Tarantino does have a somewhat vulgar rebellious spirit.
Not that good as NGII, but hey.

The main thing that stood out to me when playing NGB was just how well designed the game is from its difficulty curve to the way you explore Tairon. NG2, is essentially the antithesis of that, though it's still a really fun time.

Where it's especially fun, is unsurprisingly in the combat. Its so fucking good here, it feels twice as fast as it was in the first game, the UTs got a major visual boost and they're so over the top awesome that they never get old and best of all, the weapons here are even better than in NG1. Most of the coolest weapons from the first game return here like the Lunar Staff and Vigoorian Flails (I wish Kitetsu made a return though) but the new weapons are even better. I love the cc you get with Kusari-Gama and the damage of the Eclipse Scythe especially.

I'm glad they nailed the combat because it's all you do in this game since the RE style exploration is gone in favour of linear levels. It's pretty disappointing since it was one of my favourite parts of the first game but at the very least it allows the game to have a wide variety of locations.

Outside of combat, the game makes notable quality of life changes over the first game. For example, essence will come to you even from long distances now, so killing enemies from far away doesn't feel like a waste. You can swim indefinitely without needing an item for it. Controlling Ryu just feels way better here, especially wall running and you can now hold up to 30 arrows instead of 15 and holy fuck, you're going to need them.

My least favourite boss in the first game was the helicopter because using the bow just feels awkward with a controller and this game has about 4 bosses that can only be damaged in that way. In general the bosses here just suck, the Greater Fiends and the Genshin fights are good but everything else is beyond forgettable from the worm in chapter 9 to the turtles that spend more time turning around than fighting you. It's made worse by the fact that you end up fighting most bosses in this game twice without much changing and it just reeks of laziness.

Another aspect that feels pretty lazy is the amount of enemies the game throws at you. NG1 had you fight 3-4 enemies at most and you really had to calculate your approach on how to fight them. Here, the enemies are easier, so to compensate the game throws a shitload of them at you. It's a pretty cheap way of making the game harder, and it does make the game pretty exhausting. I was burned out at the end of each chapter, but honestly, I couldn't get enough of playing this game. Seeing 10+ enemies on the screen at once all get torn to shreds with the new dismemberment mechanic feels so good and the combat never got old because I was too busy utilizing all the different weapons to see what I like best.

As for story, there's not much to say since it follows the exact same beats as the first game just with different characters. The cutscenes are way more hype here though.

For all its flaws, I can weirdly admire NG2. The game has this confidence to it were it doesn't care about telling a story, having memorable level design or even running well since it slows down all the time with how much enemies are onscreen at once (especially when you use the phoenix ninpo). All the game is concerned with, is having fun and exciting combat and it achieves that in spades but I can't overlook the fact that I feel the game is a downgrade from NG1 in every aspect other than the combat.

For better or for worse there is no other game like Ninja Gaiden 2. Tomonobu Itagaki, the game director,is famous for being kinda of a rockstar, doing what he thinks is cool even going against standard convetions to create games that are challenging and are not afraid to punish the player hubris.

This game is Itagaki at its most pure.
Incredibly fast paced with hordes of incredibly aggressive enemies that never give you time to breath.
Section with respawning soldier that shower you with rockets just like in a NES games and arenas full of neverending ninjas.

If you want to survive you'll need to be even more aggressive and master the combat system, knowing when to chain iframes to maintain your offense, when to use special execution, called Obliteration Techniques, to kill your foes fast and efficiently.

Itakagi at its finest is not always a good thing tho. Glitches and input drops are frequent, some section, enemies and bosses are infuriating and the game is not afraid to be a bit unfair at times and push you to your limits. And yet all of this flaws don't manage to bring the fantastic combat down.

Nothing will ever top the level of adrenaline that fighting hordes of Ninja that pelt you with incendiary shuriken all while you are trying to kill Fiend Mages and Archers that try to shoot you down. Dying and trying again until you finally manage to "die slower than you enemies" and survive to be ready to do it all again in the next fight.

This game hates me more than my ex girlfriend.

I have never played a game so uncompromising in its vision, which is to truly test the player and punish them for letting their guard down for even a second or making a slight mistake and to make them feel like worthless dirt.

It’s maddening but when you’re living up to the game’s expectations, you feel like a cocaine fueled cat in a room full of pigeons.

The best action game ever made and I do not say that lightly.

"I admire its purity. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." - Ash, Alien(1979)

Character action games tend to get a lot of mileage from their... well, characters. Dante and Bayonetta are both larger-than life flamboyant quipsters, styling on whatever bizarre monster dares stand in their path. But as for Ninja Gaiden's hero? According to instruction manuals and the occasional cutscene, Ryu Hayabusa is best described as a thoughtful young man, wise beyond his years. Though you'll never see any of that during gameplay.

In-game? He has specific animations for performing executions on people who have already been decapitated. Because this isn't about Ryu, not really. It's about how every single enemy in the game wants you dead more than they want to live. Cut off an arm, they'll stab with the arm they have left. Cut off a leg, they'll crawl your way with a knife between their teeth. Even the game itself will throw enemy after enemy at you until the engine starts to break under the strain. Self-preservation is for the weak.

If this game is about anything, it's about being a ninja, and being a ninja means murdering other ninja until the second you drop dead. It's no wonder that when Yosuke Hayashi took the reigns of the series for the third entry, he admitted to wanting to take a different approach to the violence. To explore the consequences of Ryu's taking of human life. Except, the second you try to step outside Ninja Gaiden's relentless kill-or-be-killed attitude, it falls apart. In a world focused on human consequence, Ryu's a maniac. But for the franchise's take on ninjas? He's the only kind of person who gets to stick around.

One more thing: a story that often gets passed around is how Itagaki got frustrated during development of the first game when he learned that ghost fish were being modeled for use as background decoration. He was quoted as saying "This is an action game. You can't just put something in there for atmosphere that is taking up memory and disc space. You either take it out or make it an enemy and do what I say because this is an action game." And that's Ninja Gaiden's attitude in a nutshell. If it doesn't want to kill you, what's the point?

eu me sentiria injusto comigo mesmo avaliando esse jogo por completo com base numa primeira playthrough sem me aprofundar no que eu sinto pensando nisso. Uma coisa que esse jogo me ensinou, ou, ao menos, reforçou um pensamento meu -- é que não existe objetividade na arte, e, por mais industrializado e moderno que seja, game design não escapa dessa regra.

e apesar de não me sentir preparado pra falar esse tipo de coisa, o que eu desejo muito do fundo do meu coração é mandar a Team Ninja e a Koei tomarem no CU por terem portado os Sigmas pra plataformas recentes mas terem prendido os originais (1/Black, 2) em consoles de gerações passadas

Apesar de que boa parte do que eu jogo precise disso, eu detesto configurar emuladores, procurar fix de erros e patches pra consertar o jogo quando preciso, ver as melhores settings pro meu PC rodar tal jogo e tudo mais -- é realmente desgastante.

Eu literalmente tive que dropar Ninja Gaiden Black por causa disso, não consigo terminar essa merda por conta de um crash perto da reta final do jogo e acabei tendo que zerar NG2 primeiro. Preservação dos videogames é uma pauta importante a ser debatida mas acredito que a comunidade gamer não tenha maturidade o suficiente pra gastar tempo discernindo esse tipo de coisa -- ao invés disso, muita gente acaba se magoando por ter seu console favorito portando coisas pra Steam.

Fiquei praticamente uma tarde inteira tentando resolver um crash que ocorreu no capitulo 12 de NG2 e apesar de ter conseguido (graças ao wolvez tmj luquinhas), eu não me sinto satisfeito e muito menos feliz por ter que abrir o Xenia Canary toda vez que eu quiser jogar essa obra-prima. A Koei Tecmo ter tentado "substituir" os Ninja Gaiden modernos originais com as versões sigma vai muito além de uma mera atualização nesses jogos -- vai completamente contra tudo o que eles tentaram expressar em suas composições.

I have a bit of a history with this game. When I was a kid my best friend let me try Ninja Gaiden Black on his xbox and said I'd never be able to beat the first boss. I remember trying over and over and eventually being able to beat him, but then never got past the second boss. Years later I found Ninja Gaiden II's demo on xbox 360 marketplace. I ended up playing it over and over to the point of obsession. The combat felt so insanely satisfying and addicting that I couldn't let it go. Sadly I didn't have the money to buy the full game at the time so I had to let it go. Years later I've played Ninja Gaiden Black and both Sigma games countless of times, but it only took me until now to finally play the original Ninja Gaiden II. And what a joy this was to play.

This has the best hack n slash combat of any game I've played. It feels extremely fluid, responsive, fast paced and intense with a huge amount of moves, weapons and other things to play with. It's by far the biggest strength of the game and it fully focusses on it. Unfortunately that does mean that the almost metroidvania-like level design with the interconnected world of Ninja Gaiden Black is traded in for fully linear levels with nothing but combat. For that reason I still prefer Black. But at the same time it's hard to go back to Black after playing this one, with the huge amount of combat improvements and overall quality of life additions.

This game is so over the top it makes Bayonetta, DMC and God of War feel grounded and restrained. It throws dozens of lethal enemies at you in many occasions and just pushes you, and the game engine itself to the absolute limits. Thankfully I played this on the Xbox Series X which ran it in a perfect 4K 60FPS, which feels utterly breathtaking for a game as fast paced and bonkers as this one.

It's very flawed, has plenty of bullshit sections, enemies and bosses. But man, 80% of the time this game feels like an absolute dream to play. When everything falls into place perfectly, it's hack n slash bliss.

There is no game like Ninja Gaiden II and there probably will never be.