Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden II, which was originally released in 2008 on the Xbox 360. This was the first Ninja Gaiden game I played, which means that, in addition to getting me into this franchise, it was also the catalyst for my obsession with the Dead or Alive movie and games. I liked it at the time, but does the game hold up in 2025? Read on to find out…

As usual for this franchise, there are a ton of different versions of this game. However, Ninja Gaiden II has probably the most splintered and non-definitive release history in the franchise:

• First off, there’s the original Xbox 360 version (which I will refer to as “OG”). This version stands out due to the hordes of aggressive enemies you’ll face. Combat has been balanced so that enemies are more numerous, but they die faster than in later re-releases. The difficulty can occasionally get downright unfair about halfway through the game, and there are some lazy, recycled boss encounters in the final stretch which are excised in future releases.
• Then there’s Sigma 2 on PS3 (I will refer to this version as “Sigma“). This version added a bunch of things (most notably, bonus chapters for Momiji, Rachel, and Ayane), and changed and remixed enemy encounters to be less frustrating (including removing most of the water and ranged combat sequences). However, there’s two major caveats to this:
  • The number of enemies on-screen has been noticeably reduced, and their health has been increased to compensate. This results in a game that has large combat arenas which feel kind of empty, while also making combat a somewhat grindier affair.
  • To make matters worse, the fountains of blood and gore have also been removed, which further makes combat less satisfying.
• Then there was Sigma 2 Plus for the PS Vita (most commentary about falls under the Sigma umbrella, but if I need to refer to this version in particular, I’ll call it “Sigma Plus“). This version adds more new content to Sigma, including more difficulty modes, costumes, game modes, and it restores the gore. However, this version suffers immensely from really poor performance: the game will dip below 30 FPS regularly, the resolution will also get lowered dynamically to try to compensate, and the game’s frequently interrupted by load times… Unfortunately, this makes the game really difficult to recommend.
• Then there was Sigma 2 on the Ninja Gaiden Master Collection (again, if I am referring to this game, it’ll be under the “Sigma” umbrella). This version is based on Sigma Plus, but with much better performance… however, for some ungodly reason, they removed the gore again. WHY…!?!!
• Finally, we recently got Ninja Gaiden 2 Black (which I will refer to as “Black“). This version is running on Sigma code in Unreal Engine 5, making it far and away the most graphically impressive version of the game thus far. While it is based on Sigma, several encounters have been removed or remixed in order to bring it closer to the OG version, ultimately landing somewhere in between OG and Sigma. While it does not have quite the enemy count or aggressive chaos of OG, it also has all of the gameplay improvements of Sigma, leading to a much less frustrating experience, making it probably the best version of the game for new players.

For this Love/Hate series, I played through Ninja Gaiden II on Xbox 360 backwards compatibility and Ninja Gaiden 2 Black on PC. I played through both on path of the warrior (aka, hard mode). I also played some Sigma 2 Plus during the course of this review (this is the version I originally played back when I first tried the series) and some of the Master Collection version of Sigma 2. My thoughts here are based on a general overview of the various versions, but if any opinions are specific to one version, I will note that.

Love

• Classic Hack ‘N Slash Gameplay – Goddammit, I cannot believe I’m saying this about a game released on the Xbox 360, but the gameplay here leaves me nostalgic. This game was released pre-Dark Souls, in the era before action games slowed their pace, gave everyone stamina bars, and discouraged blocking. That’s not to say that I don’t like Souls games (far from it!), but their gameplay style has become so ubiquitous that it’s a legitimate breath of fresh air to go back to this kind of fast-paced, free-form character action. This game is just pure, unadulterated mayhem as you slice through swarms of enemies at high speed and try to avoid getting killed in the process. Even the 360-era jank that we’ve refined away over the years (camera issues, weird collision detection, etc) just fuels the nostalgia at this point, although I also never really felt like they presented me with any hurdles in my playthrough.
• Combat – It should probably go without saying, but Ninja Gaiden II really nails the feel of combat. While the first game had a very deliberate pace to every encounter, Ninja Gaiden II‘s combat is pure chaos, a flurry of blades and blood as you try to kill your enemies faster than they kill you. You feel like an absolute badass as you effortlessly cut through enemies, and the dismemberment/gore acts as the crimson cherry on top (which is a big reason why I am not a fan of most of the Sigma versions of this game; the fountains of blood make every kill so satisfying). Making it through an encounter while sustaining minimal damage really feels great, and it nails the fantasy of being the ultimate ninja badass.
• Healing – For how hard these games are, I really like how fair Ninja Gaiden II feels with its healing. Whereas the first Ninja Gaiden forced you to rely on health elixirs and blue essence to stave off damage, you could be reasonably expected to minimize damage if you were playing carefully, and you had enough resources available to make a reasonable number of mistakes not feel overly punishing. In contrast, Ninja Gaiden II throws so much at you that it expects you to take damage, and it has given you way more opportunities to heal as a result. Every time you take damage, a small amount of HP will no longer be available unless you use an item or find an unused save point to clear it. However, after every enemy encounter ends, the rest of your HP bar will refill. As a result, the game is designed under the assumption that you’re going into each fight with plenty of health, and encounters can be balanced accordingly. This also means that, even if you make a mistake and lose a lot of health, you’re never too far from the next full heal. Even then, you can carry up to six healing items on you, so you have options to mitigate mistakes if needed. It’s a great system, easily the best implementation of healing items in the franchise, in my opinion.
• Volf – This greater fiend is an absolute chad. First of all, he’s a demon werewolf, which instantly makes me love him. However, what really makes him great is how much respect he has for Ryu Hayabusa. He relishes a challenge and is legitimately excited to face off against us in one-on-one combat. His boss fight is easily one of the more enjoyable ones in the game too, and it all culminates in this great moment where we defeat him and add his special scythe to our arsenal.
• Genshin – Speaking of great bosses, Genshin is also a fantastic rival for Ryu Hayabusa. As a leader of the rival Black Spider Clan Ninjas, he gets to show off his strength a few times in the story. We discover that he harbours a hatred of the Hayabusa clan after his brother was killed by Murai… which, honestly, is a really fair justification for his actions. When Ryu finally defeats him, he reveals that his actions came from a legitimate conviction that he was doing what was best for his clan’s future. In turn, Ryu shows him a ton of respect, taking his sword to honour him and kicking Elizébet’s ass when she disrespects the fallen warrior’s corpse. He’s just a solid antagonist and a great foil for Ryu, helping to provide some depth to both characters. Hell, you fight the guy four times over the course of the game, but it doesn’t get old at all.
• Flying Fortress Daedalus – While I enjoyed most of the chapters in Ninja Gaiden II, I have to give special shout-out to Flying Fortress Daedalus, which sees Ryu and Sonia infiltrating a massive flying ninja fortress and then dismantling it from the inside out. This seems like it should be pretty difficult to pull off from a level-design perspective, but the layout of the level makes enough sense to be believable, the enemies are relentless, and there’s so much bombastic action that the entire thing would make Michael Bay jealous. In a game that is all about making you feel like the ultimate ninja badass, Flying Fortress Daedalus was the absolute pinnacle of that for me.
• The Story – Look, don’t get me wrong here: Ninja Gaiden II‘s narrative is extremely simple and utter nonsense. In fact, it’s somehow even more dumbed down than the first game was, with zero character development or twists: the fiends and Black Spider ninjas have stolen the demon statue and are trying to resurrect the Archfiend, it’s up to Ryu to stop them. However, this narrative does exactly what it needs to do, and shuffles Ryu off from new locale to new locale, keeping things fresh and interesting as it goes. There’s a very campy and fun tone, which works much better than the original game’s much more serious tone did. It’s trash, but it’s the most exquisite trash you could ask for, and really cements Ryu as the ultimate ninja badass.
• Black Spider Clan Ninjas – By far the most fun enemies to fight are the standard Black Spider Clan ninjas. They die fast, their limbs and viscera are flying everywhere as soon as you start fighting them, and you mow them down by the dozen… but if you’re playing sloppily, then they can melt your health bar uncomfortably fast. They’re a great standard enemy type and every time they show up, it’s a treat.
• The Staircase – There’s a legendary sequence in the return to Hayabusa Village level near the end of the game which fans of the series just refer to as “the staircase” or, more affectionately, “the staircase of doom”. Put simply, it’s a seemingly endless, straight staircase which leads directly up the mountainside. By the time you get to it, you’ve already been in a couple substantial fights, so you’re itching to get to a save point. Luckily for you, there’s one at the top of the staircase. Unluckily for you, you’ll just have to fight your way through dozens and dozens of ninjas swarming you to get there. It’s an exhilarating fight to experience, as you struggle to deal with the barrage of enemies attacking you from all angles, managing your health and resources to endure the onslaught, while the music just gets more and more hype the further in you get, all while under the knowledge that you are desperately needing to get to that next save point. It’s everything great about Ninja Gaiden II, distilled into one small slice of gameplay.
  • Note: this sequence is kind of nerfed in Sigma due to the lower enemy count and higher health pool of enemies. OG and Black though? Glorious.

Mixed

• Linear Level Design – Honestly, if Ninja Gaiden games were always linear experiences, I wouldn’t even complain about the level design in this game. However, one of the best aspects of Ninja Gaiden 2004 was its exploration and hub-based level design, which has been completely jettisoned in Ninja Gaiden II in favour of a bunch of purely linear corridors. This does play into this game’s sole focus of throwing hundreds of enemies at you at a relentless pace, but it sucks that an aspect of the previous game’s formula is just gone entirely. Not only that, but it also renders most of your cool ninja moves, like wall running, mostly useless outside of a handful of sequences where you are forced to use them to progress.
• The Girls’ Chapters – Considering how mediocre Rachels’ chapters were in the original Sigma, it should probably come as no surprise that Ninja Gaiden II‘s bonus chapters where you get to play as Momiji, Rachel, and Ayane aren’t particularly great. They are basically asset flips, reusing levels and bosses from the main game, and overall they just aren’t as fun as the main chapters. However, as a big fan of this franchise, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that these levels were really exciting regardless. Sure, they completely halt the game’s pacing and I still don’t even particularly like how Rachel plays, but goddamn is it great to see Momiji and Ayane in action (especially in crisp, ultra-detailed HD in 2 Black)! I also appreciate how differently they all play from Ryu, which helps make these chapters short, enjoyable distractions, rather than a slog. I legitimately felt their absence during my playthrough of the OG game and missed the little break and freshened gameplay they would provide.
• Sigma 2 – Don’t get me wrong: all versions of Ninja Gaiden II are fun and perfectly playable, and there are some good changes that have been made to the base game… but, my God, Sigma leaves me with a real sour taste in my mouth. Like I said before, I hate spongey enemies in any video game, so making enemies arbitrarily have to take more hits to kill just sucks. Even then, the lack of gore removes a major component of what makes combat feel so satisfying. Honestly, it’s no so different that it ruins the entire experience. Likewise, if it’s the only version of the game you’ve ever played, then it’s close enough that you don’t necessarily need to try a different version. But if you’ve sampled any other version of Ninja Gaiden II, you can’t help but feel that it’s a fundamentally compromised vision. I’d definitely recommend checking out OG or Black at this point rather than Sigma if you have the opportunity.

Hate

• The Bosses – Unfortunately, while the pre-Souls era action combat is one of the best aspects of this game, it also means that Ninja Gaiden II carries over that era’s terrible boss design philosophy. Bosses in the first Ninja Gaiden weren’t exactly amazing, but they were enjoyable enough to fight and felt reasonably fair (even with their auto-blocks). Most bosses here are a joke, spamming a handful of moves and taking a ton of damage with every hit. However, there are a few bosses which are just bullshit:
  • Basically any boss that you have to use the bow to kill is incredibly tedious (looking at you water dragon, the Quetzalcoatls and, egregiously, the Archfiend – what idiot makes the final boss of their hack ‘n slash ninja combat game only able to be hurt by the bow?!).
  • Perhaps the most notorious boss in the game across all of its versions, the Fire Armadillo is fucking bullshit. When it gets low on health it rains down a constant barrage of flaming meteors which will hit you if you stay still for even a fraction of a second. Oh, and this is an endurance fight as well, so good luck dealing with that while also doing damage. It got bad enough that I just had to try to cheese the fight. The armadillo’s head takes more damage than anywhere else, so you can spam the Flying Swallow technique with a level 3 Dragon Sword to get decent damage in on the boss at least relatively safely… and I say “relatively” here, because this move will occasionally open you up to a bite attack that erases half your health bar in one go. Still, it’s better than slogging through this fight any other way.
    • OG has an extra “fuck you” in store as it is the only version with a bonus double fucking fire armadillo boss fight. It’s about as bullshit as you’d expect that to be.
  • Oh and special shout-out to the last couple chapters, where you go to the underworld have to re-fight every major boss again (only this time with a bunch of adds that you need to deal with). These sorts of boss rehashes always feel like transparent attempts to extend the game’s runtime just a bit longer, and it really hurts the pacing in the final levels as a result.
• Claw Ninjas – This is just me venting here, but goddammit I hate the guys that I like to call “claw ninjas”. They are very fast, constantly on the move, have more health than most other ninja enemies, and they can decimate your health bar before you even realize it, especially on higher difficulties. They get even worse in the latter half of the game when they start spamming incendiary kunai faster than you can react… oh, speaking of which…
• Explosive Spam – The explosive spam in this game gets ridiculous. Enemies will constantly bombard you with rocket launchers and explosive kunai, which become so oppressive that you can barely even see what’s going on due to all the explosions. It is, quite frankly, stupid. Making matters worse, if you get hit by an explosive, it stuns you momentarily, but there are so many projectiles getting launched at once that you can easily get stun locked without realizing it due to the screen-filling explosions.
  • Note: this problem is better or worse, depending on the version of the game you’re playing and the difficulty mode chosen. OG is probably the worst for this, with even the standard difficulties featuring the aforementioned claw ninjas and enemies firing rocket launchers that fire a half dozen rockets every couple seconds, only to spawn even more of the fuckers out of nowhere from behind you. Sigma and Black tone it down significantly to save that sort of shit for the highest difficulties.
• Xbox 360 Version-specific Bullshit – The OG version of Ninja Gaiden II is probably my preferred version of the game, thanks to its more chaotic and fast combat. However, I can’t deny that it has some particular bullshit that I’m glad its re-releases improved upon and make me dread the idea of a replay…
  • First of all, the camera is constantly causing you trouble. I saw people complaining about the camera in Black, but it rarely bothered me. In OG Ninja Gaiden II though? All the time. It’s sluggish to control and doesn’t seem to be able to keep up with you at times. It’s at its apex towards the end of the game when you have bosses that the camera locks onto, causing the hordes of adds that they spawn in to be constantly attacking you from off-screen.
  • Enemy projectile spam is prevalent in this version of the game, which, for a hack ‘n slash game, is about as annoying as you’d expect it to be. It’s so bad that even the fucking werewolves in this version have a ranged attack (which, hilariously, involves them chucking the eviscerated torso of one of their comrades at you). This just gets worse in the later levels when the ranged projectiles start turning into the aforementioned constant explosive spam. Chapter 8 in particular is damn-near ruined due to the incessant explosives.
  • This version of the game clearly wanted to make water combat a thing. However, they didn’t account for one thing: fighting while in the water SUUUUUCKS. Not only is your movement much more difficult, but one wrong button press and you get thrown underwater, where you will inevitably take multiple hits with no way to defend yourself.
  • Ninja Gaiden II was the last game released by Dead or Alive creator and Ninja Gaiden director Tomonobu Itagaki, who left Tecmo-Koei prior to the game’s release and was feuding with upper management. It is speculated that Ninja Gaiden II was not fully completed as a result of this, which would explain some of the really questionable design choices in this game. In particular, chapters 8 and 9 (Russia and the first South America level) are just fucking bullshit. Chapter 8 is a pain in the fucking ass thanks to the endless explosive spam. Meanwhile, Chapter 9 has some of the most blatantly unfinished level design and boss fights this side of Lost Izalith. I was extremely close to just giving up on the chapter 9 boss fight, but I persevered and, thankfully, the game improved significantly again. That said, the boss rush gauntlet in this version of the game gets really infuriating, with the aforementioned double fire armadillo fight at the very start making me want to rage (especially because, if you forget to backtrack to a save point, there’s three pretty challenging encounters after it until you are able to find your next checkpoint, so if you die, you have to redo the entire fight again…).

Ninja Gaiden II is a fun time. It’s unfortunate that there are so many disparate versions of the game, all with their own unique qualities, but at the end of the day, they’re all Ninja Gaiden II: you’re going to enjoy yourself one way or another. While I do think that the linear level design is disappointing, and the last couple chapters are a bit of a slog, this is still a very solid and fun game that is well worth experiencing.