Hands-on | Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2

//Ah, memories…
It’s noticeable from walking through this demo level that the surrounding area is a lot like the Venetian locale found in the first Ninja Gaiden 2, complete with the same environmental textures, fruit stalls and even enemies, but there are many subtle differences that make for a far smoother playing experience. Firstly, the camera is finally more responsive, with producer Yosuke Hayashi citing the camera improvements to “listening to the Ninja Gaiden player community.” So it seems the colossal amounts of profanity from my gaming area traversed the seas and landed in his office, which is great. The camera now swings cinematically around you as you fight, but is always intelligent enough to move when you move, rather than the previous iteration in which it moved when it felt you needed to stare at a wall texture rather than the hundred foot skeleton marching towards you.

Though short, her level also details a few key changes with the enemies you’ll be facing. No two attacks are the same, with improved enemy AI meaning that for once, the ninja fight like ninja, lightning strikes and Sun Tzu training intact. With five of them to fight at a time on average, no longer will they all charge into a bottlenecked corridor for you to carve them up like a Christmas dinner. Now they will hang back, use projectiles, and aim to flank you in a pincer movement before the floating, fireballing ninja teleports in to deliver the death blow. It’s terrifying stuff when you’re playing at the pace of a game like this, and it’s a nice change from Ryu. With the man-in-leather, you could simply equip a ten-foot scythe and mash the strong attack button (Y on the Xbox, now obviously triangle on the PS3), smiling as everything fell apart around you. Mash buttons now and you’ll find yourself on the floor, very quickly.

The item system is still in place, though, like the first iteration of the game you’ll rarely visit it bar to equip a resurrect icon or simply to heal (though I’m still at a loss as to why eating grains heals wounds the size of a small dog). Hitting up on the d-pad in the middle of a fight, however, is still a ridiculous thing to ask of a Ninja Gaiden player, and you’ll sometimes find that, with the speed it needs to be pressed due to the flurry of enemy attacks at any given moment, you’ll often have to hit it at least twice for it to register the input, though this may just be the controller. Then again, you won’t care whether it was the controller or you, as you’ll be dead by the time it registers the fact you’d like not to die and go back five minutes.

That being said, the save points are now far more common, with the “oh thank God” healing statues being situated at several points during a level, as opposed to once or twice in Ryu’s storyline. Whether they’ve increased the number for his levels as well remains to be seen. I think, however, we’ve talked enough about Ayane and Ryu. Let’s talk Momiji.

//The female of the species
Can I just stop, for a minute? I’m wondering if Momiji was designed by someone outside of Japan, because she actually seems to be wearing clothes. Ignoring the fact her endowments would, when thinking along the laws of physics, render her unable to walk with her back straight, let alone fly around the levels, ten feet in the air, without even wearing a bra, she actually seems remarkably respectable for a Team Ninja female protagonist. I’m impressed, guys. You’re growing.

[Continues...]

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