Ninja Gaiden II

The saving grace here is the fanbase. If you’re in this group, there’s no reason why you won’t love Ninja Gaiden 2, despite its faults. You don’t care about next-gen graphics, level design and fairness, right? You like having Tomonobu Itagaki stamp on your ego, rob you of your sanity and piss down your throat. You’re going to switch on the Ninja Cinema mode and upload every single video of yourself getting more than a 100 hit combo to Xbox Live and pat yourself on the back when you suffer a massive coronary halfway through the final difficulty mode.

That’s always been Ninja Gaiden’s appeal, even back on the NES. It’s unflinchingly hard, unapologetically cheap and just when you think you’re getting good with the combos, a multi-boss sequence demoralizes you in that way that you’ve come to expect from the series. There’s a fine line between challenging difficulty and blood-boiling frustration. Depending on who you are, Ninja Gaiden 2 will either respect that line or slice it up into tiny pieces and force feed it to you with bits of broken glass.

So those of us who aren’t down with the difficulty level are going to want to play a game that utilizes the Xbox 360’s potential with a balanced difficulty level that complements the solid gameplay - and thereby restore self esteem - leaving Itagaki’s insatiable bloodlust to the hardcore crowd that loves it so.

May 26, 2008