Realised I haven't written about this one yet, yeah it's a goddamn masterpiece of character action in my eyes.

It's so fast and frenetic, throwing everything and the kitchen sink at you and never giving you a moment to rest. I know some people miss the interconnected world of the first, but I never really felt like that complimented the type of pacing I want from an action game.
Call me simple but I just wanna go-go-go whenever I play a game in this genre, running around a map and getting lost doesn't really do much for me so I'm happy that this one is much more to the point and linear.

Onto the combat, I love the split second decision making that permeates every moment of a duel. Whenever a blue orb popped out of an enemy I always played the positioning game where I held up my guard as to not immediately collect it and had to make the on the spot choice of taking the free health or using it to charge up Oblivion Cross Cut to swiftly take out an enemy.

However, despite my love for this game, there is one complaint I can lobby at it. There are some really tedious bosses that do not compliment the best aspects of the gameplay and in fact force you to whip out your bow and slowly chip off their health bit by bit. The bosses I refer to specifically are GIGADEATH and the Twin Gold Dragons, they're not overly challenging nor cheap but they are a hindrance whenever I go back and play this game.
However this game also has a Vergil equivalent boss. And as any well versed action player knows the best fights are always 1 on 1 duels against an enemy the exact same size as you. To this standard, Genshin does not disappoint.

I implore anyone who's interested in hyper challenging action games to check this one out. I may slightly prefer Devil May Cry 5 and God Hand overall, but this is a bloody good number 3.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.