I think you can sum up the modern Ninja Gaiden series through the arc of chapter 7: you storm an airship, fighting a bunch of fun mobs and destroying it from the inside. You face off against a rival ninja, before driving a motorcycle out of the crashing wreckage. So sick... And then you randomly fight a giant turtle that just wanders around in a circle. The game repeatedly builds sequences up to a slam dunk and then punctuates it with a brick.

It was forgivable in the first game, but the sequel foregrounds the issue. Ultimately, this is a consequence of the maximalist philosophy of NG2 - there is no restraint, everything is more. Most of the worst elements could have simply been cut from the game and it wouldn't have even felt like anything was missing. But chapter 7 needed two boss fights, because we can't let that brilliant turtle boss design go to waste. Hell, let's make you fight two of them later on, really get our money's worth. It doubles down on its worst impulses.

Again, the core combat is excellent, but I just can't look past that stuff. Good boss fights are make or break for me, so no game with that Gigadeath fight could ever earn more than three stars, and I'm not even sure that's the worst boss in the game. With such great melee combat, why are there so many boss fights where the optimal (and often only) strategy is just "use bow and arrow until dead," or worse, some lame cheese? I want to square up and fight. These games have a handful of good duels (e.g. Murai, Doku, Genshin) but they just keep giving you lazy ranged fights and giant enemies with limited movesets.

Similar to NGB, a big part of the problem is the game's superlative reputation. For years I heard nothing but praise about these games - the pinnacle of the action genre, total masterpiece. It's not totally unfounded; I can see glimmers, and sometimes the games really shine. But I guess I do understand why, whenever I saw clips of the gameplay, it was never a boss fight.

Played it on the remaster on Series X. Really only way you should play it, never had an FPS dip ever the entire time I played it. The combat in this game is amazing, I think it is even better than Ninja Gaiden 1, but I am basing that of Sigma I will have to play Black. Although there is more mean punishing bullshit in this game, the pure bliss of the satisfying well balanced combat really outweighs it. Story in this game still isn't great, but it is much better since I actually felt a bit of something for the characters unlike the first. You don't really come to these games for story though, you come for awesome fights and over the top violence, which this game delivers in droves. The bosses are just okay to actually terrible, but the regular mobs are extremely satisfying to fight and learn their intricacies. This game isn't for everyone, but if you enjoy challenging combat and ridiculous violence this game will be amazing for you.

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.

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.

Genuinely shocked I was able to beat this, considering how crazy challenging it tended to get. I played this once or twice previously but I don't think I even managed to get past the second stage, so it's wild that I overcame that hurdle and managed to experience NGII in all its manic and insane glory.

Enemies keep coming at you, folks who can individually deal some real damage if you're not careful, so you're always encouraged to stay on your guard, adapt to whatever nonsense gets thrown at you and keep pushing. I played this on the lowest difficulty level, but it's by no means the easy mode and I experienced an appropriate amount of challenge.

Something I really appreciated is that there's often enough wiggle room, in your moves, the weapons, the items you can use and whatnot, that I never felt truly stuck. If I got my ass handed to me, I just needed to take a different approach and that would usually be enough to tip the scales in my favour. Admittedly using my best friend the eclipse scythe at more or less every opportunity helped with that, it's an excellent enemy shredder.

Couple of my favourite moments from the third act: fighting that army of ninjas up the staircase, where there's so many of them that the framerate slows way the heck down. It's genuinely beautiful to see the game struggle to render its ambitions, almost acting like a dramatic slo-mo fight scene, and the way it just kept going made me smile to no end.

An unexpected surprise came in the chapter where you return to the Dragon Ninja Village, and gradually make your way out through the woods, until you reach the ninja fortress that was the very first level of the 2004 Ninja Gaiden. I first played that game 18 years and, as someone who wasn't very good at it, replayed that opening level many times, so it was so strange to be exploring that ninja fortress - only now in ruins with most places unexplorable. It felt so oddly melancholic to revisit this place after a much longer gap in time than the original release (just under 4 years if you were playing these at launch), and such an unexpected walk down memory lane.

If Ninja Gaiden Black is gaming cocaine, Ninja Gaiden II is crystal meth. Extremely addictive and visceral combat, that for the last 15 years did not had been matched by any other game, will suck everything from you until you will not be able to move your hands. playing on newer Xbox consoles makes issue with framerate and resolution gone (epic staircase battle is finally 60FPS rock solid). This obviously does not solve all issues as uneven graphics and simplistic level designs in some parts of the game. However with such great combat, strong art direction and adrenaline-pumping music NGII is an essence of cool, escapist video game that cannot be stopped by anything.