XBOX-HQ.COM - Ninja Gaiden 2

You’ve got red on you - Ryu Hayabusa sharpens up his act for a 360-exclusive sequel, while Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, like the initials, fits perfectly on to the DS.
Anyone else would have crawled under a rock after last year, when Tomonobo Itagaki railed against the makers of Tekken, dismissed underachieving gamers as ‘ninja dogs’, then produced the utterly average Dead Or Alive Xtreme 2. But there he was, the brains and mouth of Team Ninja, swaggering across the stage at this year’s TGS. His trademark braggadocio may have lost some currency over the years, but mention of Ninja Gaiden clearly has not.

With many still discovering and returning to 2004’s breakneck bloodbath, be it through 360 emulation or PS3’s Sigma remake, there’s no denying the timeliness of announcing a proper sequel. The hardcore, faced with the rise of non-gaming and Japan’s labored uptake of new consoles, are yearning for some old-school pain. Ninja Gaiden 2, as you discover from the off, has more than enough to go around.

“I’d like to say that we’re not depicting this violence for the fun of it,” insists Yoshifuru Okamoto, the game’s producer. “We want it to actually have meaning inside the game, in terms of the experience. Violence is a key challenge of this project – we don’t even think it’s possible to alter it. I understand that in Japan we will be Z rated [the dreaded adults-only rating, which effectively brands games as culturally hazardous]. In the US, though, we’re confident we’ll be an M [for Mature].”

Integral or not, the violence in Ninja Gaiden will have you feeling like Lady Macbeth after just five minutes’ play. Granted, heads did roll in the first game (in most versions, at least), but this is something else. Ryu Hayabusa’s staccato sword-swipes literally chop his opponents to pieces, leaving heads, shoulders, knees and toes in great puddles on the floor. Better – sorry, worse – still is what happens to the pieces left attached: without a hand or foot, for example, enemies will writhe, hobble and hop around until finished off. And like the Black Knight himself, they’ll fight you the entire time.

“The enemy AI changes as he loses an arm or a foot,” Okamoto explains. “Our objective is to show cool action right up until the enemy is killed. But our ninja won’t search bodies or steal weapons from the dead. Bodies remain solely for the purpose of graphic realism. I think the increased power of Xbox 360 has made a unique way of depicting violence possible: how the blood is spilt, how the body is dismembered and how the parts remain on the ground.”

With this in mind, together with an image of Jack Thompson spontaneously combusting upon sight of it, it’s worth pointing out that there is a story beneath the carnage. While Itagaki will doubtless say otherwise during the remaining months of development, Team Ninja is especially keen to expand Ninja Gaiden’s audience. “After we released the previous Ninja Gaiden,” says Okamoto, “we thought about the game and realized that a gap was forming between what we originally wanted and the reaction of the players. It was very much about the difficulty level – and we felt the need for casual gamers to enjoy our game as well.”

It’s too early for Okamoto to go into detail, but he promises a more intense and ‘interesting’ game than before, with a wider variety of rival characters and boss battles. Foremost will be a rival ninja to Hayabusa – a nemesis central to the game’s events. The proposed enemy types sound a mite familiar – demonic beasts and gun-toting commandos join the usual ninja hit squads – but their attack patterns and strategies, whether grouped or isolated, are more varied. The need to find the right weapon for each challenge, furthermore, will be brutally enforced.

“It all started with the weapons we wanted Hayabusa to carry,” says Okamoto, “turning him into some kind of super ninja. This led us to think about the actions which would fit these weapons, and how that in turn would affect the game’s fun factor.”

But the problem, as it exists in this early alpha code, is less a question of challenge and intrigue than that old Team Ninja bugbear, visual evolution. You could cut and paste concerns over Ninja Gaiden 2’s technology from reviews of either DOA4 or DOAX2: it just doesn’t feel particularly modern. Ironically for a game which cuts more flesh than a chef who moonlights as a serial killer, it’s disconcertingly clean. Light and shadow effects, for both characters and environments, are quite deficient, leaving some very smooth (60 frames per second) but flat visuals.

He might not have lived under a rock for the last year, but you have to wonder how much Itagaki and his team have isolated themselves from the influence, and more importantly the examples, of other studios’ games. Okamoto openly admits to a policy of looking away from ‘the competition’, and speaks little of conflict with Devil May Cry 4 because he ‘hasn’t seen it’. Ninja Gaiden will certainly make headline news simply for its gore, and will probably be enjoyable as hell for the masochistic elite. But if it wants to speak to casual gamers as well, then graphics are a language it can’t afford to ignore.

News-Source: Next-Gen