Herbert (@xxgr1llmast3rxx.bsky.social)

Herbert's review of Ninja Gaiden II | Backloggd [important disclaimer: this review is focused on the higher difficulty playthroughs of Ninja Gaiden 2, the default difficulties are simply a good time that everyone should play, Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 change radically as your progress through the difficulty settings with higher enemy counts, remixed enemy placements, new enemy spawns etc.] Ninja Gaiden 2 is a masterpiece, it is the kind of masterpiece where the ways in which it is deeply flawed actually make it more of a masterpiece. Ninja Gaiden 2 takes action game concepts and pushes them into extremes far beyond acceptable tastes and standards, it is not about doing sikk kombos on a sandbag disguised as an enemy, it is not about pushing the 30 frame parry button when you see the enemy windup The Big One, it is about abusing every single mechanic you have access to, about getting the most out of every weapon, about taking every single advantage offered to you. Ninja Gaiden 2 contains almost nothing but constant combat for a full playthrough, Ninja Gaiden 2’s idea of a pace shake up is a room with two enemies instead of thirty enemies. Ninja Gaiden 2 occasionally threatens you with a puzzle or a keyhunt, only to simply explain the solution to the problem immediately, or to reveal the key in the very next room; it does this over a dozen times. Ninja Gaiden 2 has a random chance to replace the money reward of a common treasure chest with a swarm of ghost piranhas, nobody seems to know what dictates the chance. Ninja Gaiden 2 is maximalist-minimalism, or maybe Ninja Gaiden 2 is minimalist-maximalism. Ninja Gaiden 2 is Peter Brötzmann’s "Machine Gun", Ninja Gaiden 2 is Barnett Newmann’s "Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue", Ninja Gaiden 2 is Stan Brakhage’s "Dog Star Man". Ninja Gaiden 2 is aesthetically and narratively puerile because to do otherwise would be to distract from the mechanical radicalism at its core. In order to establish on a meaningful level that Ninja Gaiden 2 is a modernist masterpiece pushing action game design to the breaking point, and the conclusion of Itagaki Tomonobu’s performance as Itagaki, the hardcore game developer character he portrayed in interviews, we must first establish Ninja Gaiden 2’s action bonafides, as well as Team Ninja’s prior game development history. It’s easy to claim any random piece of junk is avant-garde, but we can say for certain that Pablo Picasso acted with real purpose in his paintings because he was a prodigy at 15; a master of the rules can break them better than any amateur. Beginning with the broader history of Team Ninja, look at the Dead or Alive series. The Dead or Alive games came into its greatest successes at a time when arcades were struggling, the core innovation was a the ‘Strike, Hold, Throw’ system, a basic rock paper scissors layer baked on top of a '''Virtua Fighter''' style 3D fighting game structure, the mechanic dropped the skill floor significantly, allowing even a new player who is desperately mashing buttons to interrupt a more skilled players game plan and give the new player a chance to actually interact with the game rather than getting bounced off the ceiling for a full minute. As the series progressed it retargeted the console market with a growing emphasis on varied game modes and unlockable costumes and characters to create a more compelling package to the content-oriented console consumer market, as other fighting games struggled with slim ports that only offered marginally inferior versions of the arcade experience. I don’t like to write about games as consumer products like this, but this bit of history is to make it clear that, when Itagaki Tomonobu decided to throw on a leather jacket and sunglasses and call the easy difficulty ‘Ninja Dog’. To call out the producer of '''Devil May Cry 4''' and demand he play the game in front of Itagaki to prove he was good at it, using full page magazine spreads to insult '''Tekken'''. To say in interviews that he deliberately made Ninja Gaiden harder after playtesters complained it was too difficult. It was all part of a performance, conducted by a man with enough business savvy to steward a fighting game series through a difficult point in the genre, to prepare an audiences for action games that operated at a level of conceptual clarity and difficulty that videogames had already began moving away from by the time of Ninja Gaiden Black, nevermind Ninja Gaiden 2, so that they would take on good faith these games were designed with intent, rather than assume, as gamers often do, that their extreme qualities were purely an accident or mistake, and Itagaki’s behavior was even confirmed as an elaborate performance by the lead producer of the Tekken series, Harada Katsuhiro, who bore the brunt of Itagaki’s antics, in a <a rel='nofollow' target='_blank' href='https://xcancel.com/harada_tekken/status/1884269347948146716?s=46'>recent twitter post.</a> Moving on to Ninja Gaiden 2 itself, action games often struggle to hit an appropriate approach to player resource dynamics, particularly health, action games of Ninja Gaiden 2’s time (and to this day) often have closed loop systems: as long as you survive to the end of the fight your health will fully recharge and all or many of your other resources will be resupplied, which takes long term performance and strategy out of the equation. Ninja Gaiden 2 has a very elegant approach to player health, any time you take damage you lose health obviously, and when you finish a fight, your health recharges, but a percentage of that damage reduces your maximum health, so if you almost die in a fight, your health will only be able to recharge to maybe 75% of its usual maximum, with the total maximum being restored either by limited items or once per save checkpoint. What this achieves is it allows enemies to be punishing and dangerous far beyond the normal standards for action games without getting the overall pacing bogged down by needing to treat every fight with utmost caution, while avoiding the opposite trap of each fight being a closed system, even a trivial breather fight can potentially cost a reasonably portion of your maximum health if you’re too careless, and you end up with a well paced tetris-like build of mistakes across a longer period of play that can potentially screw you over long term. Enemy dismemberment, in most action games, it’s not even a mechanic at all, just a source of visual feedback, in Ninja Gaiden 2 it offers a wealth of depth: Layer 1: an enemy who takes enough damage on a limb will lose the limb, this makes them slower, but more prone to using powerful and hard to evade grabs, an enemy who loses two limbs dies instantly, recognizing when when an enemy has lost two limbs in the middle of a chaotic fight and moving on to a new target is very helpful. Layer 2: you have a context sensitive finishing move to instantly kill a delimbed enemy, safely removing them from the fight, with no potential counterplay from the enemy, it will even snuff out grab attempts Layer 3: while dismembering an enemy, you gain i-frames, making it a powerful defensive move to avoid other threats, for example, finishing off an enemy while you are serving as a pin cushion for a dozen incendiary shuriken (this will happen often) Layer 4: an enemy killed with a finishing move (or charge attack) will always drop ‘yellow essence’ as opposed to blue or red essence, yellow essence is money, blue and red essence are health and magic respectively, meaning that killing enemies with regular attacks or magic attacks can be more practical based on your resource needs even though it’s more risky Layer 5: limbs are removed based on actual hitbox interactions, meaning it is possible to deliberately target specific limbs of some enemies, for example there are 4-legged cyborg enemies with guns mounted on either side, the very simple X, X combo on the lunar staff is a left-right swing that does exactly enough damage to destroy both limbs Layer 6: any given fight has a specific number of active enemies at a time if there are multiple waves, new enemies will always spawn in when a prior enemy has died, this means that depending on the size of the arena and type of enemy spawns, it is actually highly practical to wound some enemies so that they are slower and less effective and leave them alive, reducing the rate of new full health enemy spawns to a trickle that you control We see here that not only are there multiple elements providing a fairly significant amount of depth, but also the way it inherently interacts with other game elements such as weapon variety and enemy mechanics. Action games often suffer from ‘orphan mechanics’, game mechanics that only really exist with reference to themselves, a common example in modern action games is to give the player a very strong attack, and to balance it by making it take a set amount of time to cooldown, the only opportunity-cost the player will need to consider is whether they might need the attack again before it recharges, which can usually be mitigated by simply running away from enemies to run down the timer, and if the developer finds the move unbalanced, rather than needing to adjust it’s properties they simply increase or decrease the timer. This dismemberment mechanic is also in engagement with a longer history of action game design, it is an evolution of "Final Fight’s" basic conceit: use your attacks to deal damage, use your throw to control enemies, and at a deeper level, use the i-frame window of your throw as dual defense-offense tool. "Resident Evil 4" offered an alternative evolution of this system by asking you to shoot enemies to stagger them, creating a brief window where the enemy is vulnerable to a context sensitive melee attack that likewise grants the player i-frames. Being able to reimagine really critical micro-mechanical nuances like this is a core element of being able to make a truly great action game, big ideas and innovative fantasies are not enough. But any action gamer worth their salt knows that the deepest player mechanics in the world are meaningless without enemies to contextualize them, Ninja Gaiden 2 has many great enemies but I’ll highlight the particular favorite, the enemy that ties it all together, the Incendiary Shuriken ninja. The IS Ninja has the basic and ever delightful kit common to most Ninja Gaiden 2 enemies: they come in large groups, they’re fairly aggressive but rather than simply funneling directly around the player they take up a sort of ‘orbit’, a circular path around the player that they like to move in, taking turns coming in close for direct attacks, this keeps you moving and reprioritizing constantly. They’re evasive, doing all sorts of ninja flips and rolls that can keep you whiffing, highlighting Ryu’s many target tracking moves and abilities as a way to ‘aim’ your attacks and stay on target. They have instant grabs, which punish players for being too stationary, using unsafe moves or having bad positioning, but these are all standard elements, universal to most enemies. The highlight of course, is the Incendiary Shuriken, which they like to throw a lot of, to the extent that it is simply not actually possible to avoid them 100% of the time while also killing enemies, however, if you are hit by them they don’t explode instantly, rather they do a miniscule amount of damage and then after a brief delay, explode. In the very short time frame between getting tagged and exploding, you need to decide what you are going to do to not take damage, in fact when fighting IS Ninjas you need a general plan of action already in effect under the assumption that you will be constantly exploding. I-frames have been a core element of action game design since at least '''Final Fight’s''' desperation moves and throws (if any action game historians know of significant predecessors that not only have i-frames but emphasize them as a major mechanic hit me up), and obviously became even more prominent in 3D action games in response to it being more difficult to precisely control 3D games, but the IS ninjas and Ninja Gaiden 2 push it a little further, dodging isn’t enough, you will make no progress trying to time dodges to avoid exploding; jumping, bouncing off of enemies heads, executing enemies, charge attacks, throws, magic, you have many many ways to exploit I-frames and to solve the fights with IS ninjas you need to not only be constantly avoiding damage but doing it in such a way that it moves you closer towards finishing the fight and even so you are absolutely going to suffer health attrition no matter what, it is so easy for action games with easy access to I-frames to become totally flattened down to a matter of timing above all else, but with an enemy like the IS Ninja, Ninja Gaiden 2 avoids this trap, if not for every single fight, but for a great many of them. But the IS Ninja is also where Ninja Gaiden 2 begins to move into the extreme, because it’s not like you’re fighting three or four of these guys at a time like in Ninja Gaiden Black, no you’re fighting dozens, in long waves, the screen is always exploding, you do not have time to gather yourself, the only way to make yourself safe is to be attacking them, neutral ground is a losing proposition for you, they won’t back off and wait patiently like an Elden Ring enemy. Indeed it is not even enough to simply always be on the offense, you need to understand how to use the games core mechanics in a way that would be considered game breaking exploits in other games just to survive. A common powerful strategy in Ninja Gaiden Black and Ninja Gaiden 2 is the charge attack loop, it goes something like this: you have a powerful charge attack, it takes time to charge up normally, but when an enemy dies, they drop ‘essence’ a floating colored orb, by holding the charge attack button, you can absorb the essence to more quickly charge, by holding the charge attack button right as you land from a jump though, or after certain moves, you can instantly absorb the essence and immediately charge attack, then when you kill a few enemies with that charge attack you wait for the essence to appear from their corpse (it takes a moment) and then use that to fuel another charge attack. I simplify a few elements there such as guard buffering to get the basic picture across, in Ninja Gaiden Black, this technique can basically crack the game wide open, in Ninja Gaiden 2 it’s a core strategy, and even with the attack itself providing plenty of i-frames, the brief window where you’re waiting for dead enemies to drop essence will end up with you taking a shit load of damage if you don’t keep playing proactively, and even if you don’t fuck up the loop, often you will have to deliberately drop it- when you’re at low health enemies will sometimes drop blue essence that provides a bit of healing, but enemies killed by charge attacks won’t drop blue essence ever, so you need to switch up strategies and use magic or regular attacks at least long enough to stabilize your health. So the best approach to these IS Ninja fights is to kill a couple opener enemies to get some essence going, establish the charge loop, watch the health gauge because you will be taking damage, and be ready to drop the loop or use a healing item if you have one as the damage increases, making sure to keep repositioning the whole time to ensure your charge hits the largest number of enemies and you take the least amount of damage. This is a motif that recurs across the entire game, and the quality that gives it a sense of action-abstraction, the exploits and cheese strats are powerful enough that a lesser game would turn to dust if you had access them, but Ninja Gaiden 2 is tuned so high that they are simply the nature of the game. Bosses, for example, are inscrutable dogshit on a first playthrough, when is it safe to attack them, where the are the hitboxes on their attack, what rules do they even play by? I hated them the first time I played through Ninja Gaiden 2, but eventually I learned to love them, because almost every boss in the game can be beaten in under a minute, it’s not that there’s a single easy strategy to employ against every boss, it’s that each boss has quirks that can be exploited, a certain attack from them that can be punished and turned into touch of death combo with the right button, a move from you that has the exact correct amount of i-frames to never put you in danger, a magic spell that deals an obscene amount of damage, a timing that can cause their behaviour to loop. Many bosses don’t have just one exploit strategy either but multiple, so the rewards of exploring the whole variety of your tool kit against bosses are rich, While these bosses are not virtuosic like how we would think of a great Monster Hunter boss, they are virtuosic in the sense of being an extreme form of the bosses of the original NES Ninja Gaiden games, who likewise are mechanically strange and are best handled with careful application of exploits, here the exploits are simply more diverse, and the bosses more strange, in it’s own way, as much as the extremely thoughtful health system, or the shockingly deep dismemberment system, the busted ass bosses represent Ninja Gaiden 2’s well rounded understanding of the history and principles of action game design. Many of the encounters in the game are so strange that you cannot even imagine a ‘normal’ way that you were intended to beat them. It’s easy to imagine that most bosses were meant to feel like 1 on 1 fighting game duels but ended up a little scuffed, but then there’s the Death Worm Queen, which is basically a train on a race track that plows through you. There's a large tunnel it runs through switching directions seemingly randomly, were you supposed to stand in the little alcoves off to the side and try to attack it as it passes? That’s what I did the first time through and it took forever and felt very inconsistent, the strategy I developed later was to literally stand in the middle of the track, use the kusarigama charge attack because it has a ton of i-frames (a nuance I did not mention earlier is that even charge attacks are actually pretty varied in purpose depending on the weapon) and listen for the approach of the death worm, this ended the fight extremely quickly and looked ridiculous. What about when you need to shoot down some fireball spitting gargoyles and the game just spawns more each time one was killed, up to about 30 or so, were you actually meant to just dodge and shoot arrows the whole time? Usually you can skip them but it can be kind of tricky, are you supposed to attempt to run past them? The game offers no answers, you simply need to devise methods that work for you. Most extreme of all are the Tests of Valor, these optional challenges see you locked in an arena against waves of enemies, these waves do not change, it’s the same enemies the whole time, you kill one, another one replaces it, they take generally between 15 minutes and a half hour to complete, with no checkpoints, and you can only resupply based on what you take with you and what the enemies drop. Typically the aforementioned charge loop strategy does not work either or is only partially effective, so you will have to develop a distinct approach to to control the enemies in each challenge. Instead of the thrill of a typical combat scenario with rising difficulty and regular resupplies, these tests of valor offer pure palm sweat tension, every mistake adds up, your health gauge dwindles, your healing items dwindle, if you surrender to the desire to hasten the combat with reckless play you will almost certainly be punished, are they fun? Not in the sense that we would normally consider action games fun, but devising a strategy and actually seeing it through for 20 straight minutes with no reprieve or variation brings a type of stress and tension you’ll never feel in any other action game. As Newmann's painting so frightened Gerard Jan Van Bladeren that he attacked them with a box cutter, you too might feel compelled to take a hammer to the disc with some of the scenarios Ninja Gaiden 2 asks you to treat as serious game design. Even at the highest difficulty the game regularly breaks up these obscene segments with very reasonable action game encounters featuring enemies that do not throw exploding shuriken, or a smaller number of enemies that throw exploding shuriken, such as the famous staircase, where you fight your way up a gigantic set of stairs constantly fighting low tier enemies with a few IS ninjas sprinkled in, you feel like a god doing this, the mechanics are your oyster here, bookended by segments that demand rigorous play, here you get to freestyle, try out new combos, use weapons you wouldn’t normally bother with. It’s freestyle but it isn’t ‘free’, the sheer length of the fight means that attrition will get you if you are totally careless but you are given reprieve to play with the mechanics in a more contemporary sandbox style, within the limits of your skill. Ninja Gaiden 2 would be a good action game if it was nothing but these sorts of fights, but because they act as a relief from the more radical challenges the game is heightened to a masterpiece, alternating between demanding scenarios that require patience, long term strategy and extreme manipulation of mechanics, and freestyle scenarios that still require skilled play but let you express it via cool combos and sweet stunts that feel more traditionally in line with action game expectations. I have committed a minor falsehood throughout the course of this review, I have suggested repeatedly that this game is exactly as fucked up as it is completely on purpose, in reality, it had an extremely strained development, and Itagaki along with many of the staff with him walked after a dispute with CEO of Koei Tecmo withholding overtime pay and bonuses. That being said, many videogames, even many beloved videogames, had equally difficult or worse development histories. Ninja Gaiden 2 was certainly intended to be a highly difficult and extreme action game but it would have come out different if the Team was treated better and had more time. That being said, there is a funny obsession with intentionality in art, it operates on the assumption that art is a fully deliberate and rational effort; the writer devises a sociological point and then constructs a story to inform the audience. But art is about a process and a feeling, and the thing about accidents and the responses to circumstance is that they are as unique to the to the artist as things they do fully consciously and deliberately, they may not be 'intended' in the same way, but they emerge from the same philosophy and vision, and no art exists in a vacuum free from the pressures of reality. There is much debate about if Metal Gear Solid V deliberately feels that way: bitter, elliptical and half empty, but does it matter if a game was accidentally perfectly thematically and mechanically coherent or not? MGS2 had nearly as bad a development history as MGSV and its genius goes unquestioned because the accidents and mistakes aren’t as uncomfortable to the player to endure. Ninja Gaiden 2’s accidents would have looked completely different with a different director and a different philosophy, one only need to look at Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge, which had an equally troubled development, it's bosses for example, tend to manifest as a 'wait your turn and attack the weakpoint' Western-Action Game style of boss, this is an infinitely less interesting consequence of circumstances than Ninja Gaiden 2's ultra-exploitable weirdo bosses. At the same time, the player does not care about intent when they are imposing their own vision on the game. Modding out features they don't like, creating self-imposed rulesets to make the game more challenging than is intended, so on and so forth. Many people do not like the charge attack loop in Ninja Gaiden 2 because it takes focus away the action fundamentals and insist you simply should not use it, but why should I design the game for the designer? Are you not treating the game more seriously as a piece of art if you engage with it as it was made for you? “Do videogames need to be fun?” It’s a question you see thrown around occasionally, usually in reference to a game that is fucking boring and we’re supposed to pretend that it’s genius commentary that the game is boring, even though most games are boring. Ninja Gaiden 2 is never boring, but goes one step more specific and asks ‘Do action games need to be fun?’ It is always engaging, often extremely fun, but often painful, extremely stressful, frustrating, unpleasant, and oddly relaxing at times when it settles into a long rhythm, it’s funny but only ever in a mean way. Ninja Gaiden 2 is a full emotional spectrum, and what makes this most impressive is how it has gone about this. Action games that want to engage you in a variety of ways tend to do so by diverting from the core action mechanics: puzzles, exploration, minigames, that sort of thing, Ninja Gaiden 2 hints at those diversions only briefly, and instead draws it’s emotional breadth simply through pushing the action in radical directions, all but totally exhausting the possibilities the mechanics and enemies have to offer the play by the time you’ve completed a playthrough on the highest difficulty. It is easy to imagine a version of Ninja Gaiden 2 that keeps the high intensity action, but tamps down on the exploitability in the design- make all the enemies as engaging as the IS ninjas, reduce the effectiveness of the charge attack loop, make the bossfights into actual fights, make the weird extremely long repetitive encounters into actual fights, remove the cheese as much as possible. Basically, refocus the entire game on the action fundamentals it already posses while maintaining the extremely intense and dense style of combat. For some this would straightforwardly result in a better game, and maybe they would be right, but it would also be kind of like taking that Newmann painting and painting a Da Vinci over top of it, I can't help but think it would capture my imagination less. That being said I'd love to see someone try; Ninja Gaiden 3 Razor's Edge is underrated but it's quite different from Ninja Gaiden 2 and has it's own far less interesting oddities and problems, and Ninja Gaiden 4 is a modern platinum game so you can throw it in the bin pre-emptively, so the clean tight Ninja Gaiden 2 will exist only as a hypothetical and we are left in an inscrutable with a mess on a canvas. https://backloggd.com/u/Herbert/review/2443368