well this is worse than the original NGII, but still good on its own

more like a completely different game

purple blood is bullshit though

This review will only focus on Master Ninja difficulty

Having played the vanilla version of NG2 a ton and having heard a lot about Sigma 2, I decided to check it out for myself to see if the game was really that bad. The tl;dr version is: the game is good but there are also tons of problems that hold it back quite a bit.

The best thing about NG2 for me are the weapons. They are a lot (7 of them), have expansive movesets and tons of personality between them while still remaining familiar thanks to some shared inputs and Ryu’s base moveset. I still have to play an action game that has weapons this varied, numerous, dense, powerful but yet not overly complex to learn and understand.
Sigma 2 uses NG2 as a base, so the weapons are basically unchanged, which is great news. This means that the best aspect of the game is still there, and that alone would make the game at least decent and worth playing. How does the rest of the game stack up? The answer is good, but also eh. Team Ninja had the difficult task of retooling NG2 to run on the PS3, while also ironing out some flaws (of which there were many, let’s not kid ourselves), so it was inevitable that the enemy count would take a big hit. Enemy numbers return to the ones seen in NGB, and that isn’t necessarily bad. The problem is that NG2 is balanced around being able to kill almost every enemy in two moves or less (thanks to the abundance of moves that consistently delimb, Obliteration Techniques, Ultimate Techniques and some instakill moves), and that isn’t gone in Sigma 2. While completely changing the encounter philosophy of an action without changing the underline mechanics is a flawed idea, it can still produce an interesting result, but it depends on the execution. So, you have fewer enemies that still die fast, which means that the game would be dramatically easier. How did they go about it? Mainly with two big changes.

The first is the introduction of special enemies that have dramatically more health, are a lot more resistant to delimbing and dodge to an annoying degree. These, for example, include the Incendiary Shuriken Ninjas (which didn’t behave like this in the OG, and now also throw a lot less IS at you), some recolored enemies, the Robot Dolls etc. This is a very artificial way of creating enemy tiers and the way they went about it is pretty boring an annoying, to the point that you will just not bother with them at all and will just use the most effective way of taking them down quickly (like using the Kusarigama grab, which is a guaranteed delimb, or UTs), since other combos don’t work as well and take a lot longer to kill. Enemy design is still very good regardless, with a good variety of enemies that have a big moveset and a strong bloodlust for Ryu (which has to be expected since they are the same as Vanilla 2).

The second way they increased the challenge is a damage buff to certain enemies and attacks. For comparison, NG2 also had some lethal enemy attacks, but those were either the result of poor programming (like the Red Gaja tail slam connecting three times instead of one) or suicide grab attacks which you had to expect from a delimbed Ninja. Now all the high tier enemies do insane damage and every single grab in the game has the potential to one shot you. There are certain grabs (especially from bosses) which cannot be survived at all. What this means is that the battles are very one sided, with you destroying everything with ease while taking little damage, just to die at full health from a grab or a stray fireball. I suspect that these measures were put in because the health regen mechanic from the OG is still here and even stronger (you now retain 75% of the health you lost after a battle instead of 50%) and because the health you get from blue orbs dropped from the enemies has been increased. It would have been better to cut the health regen after a battle and to scale the damage accordingly, because this one-shot bullshit makes the game feel as jank as the OG sometimes.

The damage boost described above also applies to bosses, which make them also feel awful (even worse than they already were), but they also got a sizeable health boost on top of that, meaning that bosses are objectively harder here than in the OG, and that wasn’t really needed all things considered. Sure, some of them don’t have other enemies with them in the arena anymore, but those bosses were few in the OG in the first place, so this change doesn’t make up for the increased health and damage. Now boss battles are a grueling endurance test which can end in a split second unless you have a Talisman of Rebirth.

Truth be told, these aren’t even the biggest problem with Sigma 2. No, the worst thing are the new characters. The game has 3 new chapters to play, in which you use a new character for each one. To put it simply, these new characters suck. They are too weak (for both damage and delimb potential), only two of them have a Guillotine Throw (which normally would be a pretty important move but the version they have is weaker compared to Ryu), they don’t have Wind Run to do some effective crowd control, have a small moveset (with only one weapon) and only one Ninpo and one ranged weapon. The limitedness of their total moveset is bad, but what’s worse is that the encounters aren’t designed with it in mind since they get to face against some legitimately challenging encounters (coupled with scarce checkpoints and heals). The new chapters are some of the least fun I’ve had between NG2 and NGS2, and while the new girls have some cute tools to play around with, they are underbaked and underpowered. If these chapters were cut from the game, it would only be a net positive.

Aside from these, there are also some smaller, but still significant problems with the game overall, like the fact that weapon upgrades can’t be bought anymore and are instead given out at certain shops for free one at a time. You can’t max out weapons until the 8th Ryu chapter (out of 14), where you could max out everything in Vanilla as soon as you had the money. This removes some cool resource management and also means that healing items are the only thing you can spend money on, so you’ll always have those maxed out, even in the early game, adding to the one sidedness I mentioned earlier.
The Scythe was nerfed for no reason compared to NG2, to the point where now it’s useless against bosses (where it used to shine but still had competition). This was probably done in order to shill the new Greatsword weapon, which has very similar functionalities to the old Scythe.
Tests of Valor were removed (arena battles with tons of enemies that gave you a reward at the end) but not replaced with anything else.
The Bow can’t be charged anymore, and Ryu can’t use Incendiary Shurikens (since they would have been OP against the new high tier enemies). The ranged weapons he has are lackluster in general. He only gets two which are a fast-shooting low power weapon and a slow-shooting high power weapon. Those used to be all baked into the Bow in NG2, which was a more elegant solution. The Windmill Shuriken was also cut.

Lastly, I’ll briefly comment on the side content. You get a Chapter Select mode that substitutes NG+ and the partial NG+ you got in the OG (the one where you start with everything unlocked but not upgraded). It’s a nice inclusion but it has weird damage scaling and it doesn’t scratch the same itch that NG+ did. Both should have been included.
Ninja Race is cute, probably the best “new” side content of Sigma 2. A mode where a timer is ticking down and you need to get to the end of the level while killing enough enemies to increase the timer. Content reuse is heavy here (since the levels are all story ones) but the challenge it presents is fun and it might be cool to optimize it and try different strats, but it sucks that you can only use a limited loadout (one melee weapon, one ranged weapon and one Ninpo). Guarantee they did this to not make the girls seem complete trash in comparison to Ryu. It would have also been nice to have different enemy comp compared to story mode and to choose the difficulty (instead of being locked in Warrior mode), but alas.
Tag Missions are pretty bad. Lots of the same missions as Vanilla 2 (which weren’t great to begin with) but with an AI partner and with limited loadout. They also cut what were the best missions in Vanilla, which were the Survival challenges and the 100 fiend challenges. Ultimate Ninja missions are a fun gimmick for hardcore ninjaheads but you’d be insane to bother with it considering that you can’t play online anymore.

There is other stuff I'd like to mention (like the fact that you can't unlock the camera anymore during bossfights) but if I were to list everything we’d be here all night, so let’s conclude by saying this.
I don’t dislike Sigma 2 because Team Ninja wanted a NG2 game for PS3 with a reduced enemy count. I actually enjoyed my time with the game. I’m just disappointed that this isn’t even the best version of a “nerfed” Ninja Gaiden 2 they could have made. The game also results in a lot less memorable experience overall, since they made the design more conventional but didn't add anything to compensate for the of the craziness of the OG. The heart and soul of NG2 are still here (weapons and enemy design) and because of that the game is still plenty enjoyable and even kinda challenging sometimes, but the edges have not been sanded out very well. Despite this, if this was the only way to experience NG2, it would have still been a good way to do it.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 leaves me feeling conflicted. Most people that don't recommend this game are usually people that find the changes and tweaks to be too egregious to the original release; I can't really blame some of the complaints.

The biggest issue is the huge reduction of enemies that appear on screen, along with the removal of the gore. NGII is a very bloody and gory game, to the point that it becomes hilarious at how absurd the violence is. NGS2 tones this completely down and censors most blood with green/purple mist and body dismemberment being removed in some cases.

NGS2 improves certain fights by toning down the amount of enemies that NGII had, the improved bow controls makes some fights fun now, and the tweaks to some encounters are more balanced. It overall feels less cheap and frustrating, but you can tell that the game wasn't originally designed with some of these changes.

Its apparent that there are two directors, with different visions on how the flow of gameplay/combat should be, and I think this game suffers from that. Some bosses changed/removed, Tests of Valor removed, upgrade system is a downgrade, levels don't accommodate fewer enemies, additional chapters with 3 characters that ruin the pace, etc.

There are legitimate aspects of NGS2 that are better and make for a better game. I can see the team behind NGS2 having good reasons to why some changes happened; however there are certainly aspects of NGII that should have been kept.

Neither game truly reaches its full potential, especially Sigma 2. I would say that I enjoyed NGII more for how good the dopamine hits were and how cathartic every encounter ended up; despite NGII being a rather flawed and sometimes very unbalanced game.

I can tell the director of NGII wanted me to suffer and even punish me, but the director of NGS2 wanted the player to enjoy the game more and make it feel more consistent.

NGS2 is still good fun, and worth playing despite the changes.