How hard do YOU like it?

There’s long been an argument that the entire concept of videogames being difficult and involving numerous player deaths are an antiquated hangover from the days before home videogaming, when games were designed specifically to tan your arse as fast as possible, thereby maximising their intake of 10p pieces.

Games should be about the experience they say - you’ve paid for it, so why shouldn’t you be able to have the entire experience regardless of your level of skill?

They have a point, but there should always be a place for games that are hard. Hard, but perfectly designed, perfectly balanced and perfectly fair. Games like Halo 3 (on Legendary at least), like Viewtiful Joe, and like the original Xbox Ninja Gaiden, which was a big favourite of mine four years back. These games force you to learn, to adapt, and essentially make you a better gamer than you were before you played. They were rewarding.

To some extent, that ethos has been carried through to the second title in the Ninja Gaiden series, as you battle huge numbers of demons, ninjas, demon-ninjas and various vicious beasties. With each new type of enemy comes a new challenge, one that can usually be overcome with some observation, some patience, a dash of skill and a girt big sword.

However, Ninja Gaiden II doesn’t quite get it spot on like its forebear did - occasionally forgetting that it can be as hard as it pleases, but only as long as it’s fair. It cheats, it gives you unreachable enemies who pepper you with firebombs, it respawns enemies right inside your personal bubble, it even gives you a boss who explodes when it dies…killing you.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Put up with some of its more annoying design-flaws however and Ninja Gaiden II has an incredible amount to offer, most notably a brilliantly deep and fluid combat system, which is even deeper when you take into account the numerous melee weapons that are available as you progress, such as bladed nunchucks, Wolverine-style claws, bladed chains and a horrific scythe-style thing. Each new weapon changes the fighting style, opening up new ways to chop your opponents into wobbling lumps of red mess.

Oh yes, it’s been a while since we’ve seen anything this gory – heads, limbs, chunks of flesh and fountains of blood bounce, skid, slide and spurt across the environment as you lay everything in your path to waste (they deserve it, honest...) in some of the smoothest and most-stylish action gaming has yet seen.

It’s also a bit of a graphical powerhouse. It’s not necessarily ahead of practically everything else on the market, as Ninja Gaiden on Xbox was at the time, but this is still a hugely impressive tour-de-force for the 360 with a huge array of gorgeous locales to fight through and hugely detailed, brilliantly animated characters throughout.

So, while not the apex of beautifully tough-as-nails ninjaness that its forebear was, Ninja Gaiden II can still claim to be a worthy action-game. Just don’t bother playing it through on Hard – if it’s not going to play fair there’s just no point. View it as an action-rammed adventure with a variety of incredible things to see and kill, and Ninja Gaiden II won’t disappoint. View it as a test of your purest, most zen gaming skills, and the disc will probably explode and blow your hands off when you open the box.

GAME's Verdict

• Team Ninja's usual graphical lavishness.
• A huge array of things to kill.
• Action gaming at its most violent.

• The challenge is no longer balanced and fair.
  
• Storyline leaves a little to be desired.
  
• The in-game camera leaves a lot to be desired.

Review by: Jonny Austin
Review Published: 06.06.08

GAME talks to Mister Ninja Gaiden himself, Team Ninja head man Tomonobu Itagaki.

Ninja Gaiden was originally a side-scrolling 2D platformer. What was your thinking behind updating the franchise as a 3D scrolling brawler?

I'd been working on the Dead or Alive fighting series, and I wanted to broaden my horizons to work on an action game, but I didn't know at the time it was going to be Ninja Gaiden. If I'd worked at Sega, perhaps it would have been a new Revenge of Shinobi, but as we had this brand at Tecmo called Ninja Gaiden, it seemed like a nice fit to bring that back.

It wasn't that I wanted to develop a specific title, it was more wanting to be successful in a new field, a new genre. I knew I wanted to do an action game, so the elements all came together and the result was Ninja Gaiden.

Were you happy with Ninja Gaiden, and what have you changed for the sequel?

I keep voicing my dissatisfaction for the first Ninja Gaiden – which I'm allowed to do because I made it! In hindsight, and knowing how well the sequel has turned out, I can honestly say I'm really not happy with most of the elements of the first game.

If I list the things I wasn't happy with, you're basically going to have a list of what was changed for the sequel.

I felt the first game was very simplistic and rigid in its pacing, and the story didn't work too well. Enemy movements and animations weren't realistic enough, and the fact that enemies blocked so often made it sometimes feel like you were attacking them with a rock. I also felt bosses didn't have enough appeal, and level design in general wasn't set up well. I'm basically my own worst critic.

These are all things we corrected in Ninja Gaiden II, and it shows how confident I am in Ninja Gaiden II that I can say this all about the first Ninja Gaiden.

Most players' big issue with the first Ninja Gaiden was the steep, hardcore difficulty curve. How has that been addressed for Ninja Gaiden II?

The way the first game was designed didn't allow for a great bandwidth of difficulty. It really had to be difficult to be fun. We had unappealing bosses with unappealing animations and unappealing attacks – so if they were easy to defeat, you'd just have a repetitive button-basher of a game.

There were too few pipelines through which you could affect the situation around you – you battled an enemy until one of you died, and that was it, with little change in the situation. And again, I'm only saying all of these bad things about Ninja Gaiden is because we've made such an effort to improve upon it all in the sequel.

How so? What are we going to see from the broader gameplay range?

We've made the combat in Ninja Gaiden II offer more interaction in every case. You're able to lop off limbs, which changes enemy AI routines, and every weapon has a different finishing move – so you're able to affect the situation. In the first game enemies died or not, it was quite digital, but here there's a more analogue feel to the action. More can happen.

There's also the visuals. In Xbox Ninja Gaiden, the difficulty provided a sense of urgency – if you were attacked many times in succession, you died. Here, it's not so difficult, but the action is more stimulating, so that instead provides that sense of urgency even though your life gauge hasn't gone down that much. It's the thrill of combat without feeling punishing. Aesthetic intensity.

Speaking of aesthetics - What's the process for designing levels? Do you start with aesthetics, story or gameplay?

We take a methodical approach. When we first start out, we have 'here are our story ideas, here are our level designs', and we compartmentalise and then mix and match to get the ideal combination.

In Ninja Gaiden we did it all at the same time, and if one thing changed, everything changed – it was almost spaghetti programming; very hard to separate. That's why it took so long to create. But with Ninja Gaiden II we've been more organised, and it's made for some great gameplay within some great looking levels. We hope fans will agree when they play the game.

Another game that's massively popular with action game fans is Devil May Cry. How do you find the two series compare to each other, and what does Ninja Gaiden II offer over Capcom's game?

Ninja Gaiden II is a game about killing, in all senses of the word. I see Devil May Cry as more of a target shooter. They're entirely different types of game.

You don't think they share some similarities in terms of approach and style?

I think it depends on your definition of style. In Devil May Cry you can insult enemies and taunt them before defeating them. To me that doesn't really fit in with the idea of a serious battle. I feel that really stylish action is putting the other guy out of his misery before he knows what's happened to him.

We are serious about making a game that portrays combat to the death. We don't like to throw around words like 'stylish' because we take it much more seriously. I think that's the real difference between Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden II.

So what next for yourself and Team Ninja?

We'll be working on a totally new project next. I can't say much about that unfortunately, but we hope Ninja Gaiden fans will look forward to it!

Thank you, Itagaki-San.

Interview by: Mark 'Lunar Staff' Scott
Interview Published: 20.05.08