There’s a severe lack of ninjas to fight in most levels, and later on you mostly find them paired off with bosses or ridiculously powerful mechs (at that point, they’re sporting rocket launchers in lieu of ninja weapons). Luckily, there’s no shortage of bosses to make up for the missing ninja brawls, but that’s like rejoicing over a kick to the groin. For anyone who tore out their hair over Alma in the first Ninja Gaiden, get ready to grab your ankles again, because even on Path of the Acolyte, Ninja Gaiden 2 bosses are horribly hard and as plentiful as Halloween candy on the first of November.

Most of the time, you’ll encounter more than one boss per level and not always in the standard mini-boss-before-big-boss formula. And, strangely, human bosses (or human-shaped bosses) seem to be easier to beat than ginormous monster bosses that require some sort of dominant strategy instead of a giddy hack and slash blitz. One chapter has you slog through the entire level before encountering a balls-hard boss that’s crucial to the story line - and once you beat him, you’re dropped into a second boss fight with a monster that’s a billion times more difficult than the story-related boss. Did we mention that you don’t get to save after the first boss fight? And that not all boss fights, should you fail them, restart you at the boss?

It’s little injustices like these that will start to grate on even the most hardcore Ninja Gaiden fan. Sure, you get healed completely at save points (the first time you use them, anyway), and your heath can partially regenerate when you clear an area of enemies - but these bones that the game throws us don’t add up to much in the face of the punishing difficulty. Tack onto that the technical flaws detailed in the next paragraph, and after your fourteenth attempt on the same boss, you’ll begin to wonder why they call Ninja Gaiden 2 a “game” instead of “work”.

Loving or hating the difficulty aside, you can’t mince words when it comes to the camera sucking. It frequently gets stuck behind enemies so that you can’t see where you are, what you’re doing and who the hell is killing you. Similarly, the graphics could use some of the TLC that made it into the combat. While the gore is all vivid and cool-looking, the majority of the level backgrounds are about as interesting as toenail clippings. The linear path story takes you through places like South America’s jungles, underwater ruins and flying airships where Ryu has plenty of opportunities to slice and dice everything from robots to insects. But most of these places look either fugly or boring (New York City hasn’t been this dull since PS2 graphics were next-gen). There are only a handful of car or NPC models used throughout the game and for all the semi-sci-fi flavor (this is set in the near-future, right?), the environments aren’t as stylized as the combat. And with the exception of the optional challenge levels (only found on Path of the Warrior difficulty or above), there’s no reason for exploring them.

Ninja Gaiden 2 is split between awesome combat and lackluster game design (come on, Ryu’s a ninja - why does he have to go find all these damn keys when there are windows to be snuck through?). If it was nothing but a blood drenched murderfest, we would happily let Ninja Gaiden 2 be the final chapter in the series. But this swan song misses some key notes with those camera bugs; and even if we could accept that the game is “supposed” to be hard and we’re “supposed” to enjoy having our asses handed to us, we can’t figure out why the environments look so last-gen and why it’s supposed to be fun to have our blood pressure jacked up a few points with each superfluous boss fight.