Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden 3 (2012)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden 3 and its revised version, Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge. This was the first entry in the modern series without the involvement of Tomonobu Itagaki, who left Tecmo-Koei due to contract disputes. Ninja Gaiden 3 game was reviled on release and, while Razor’s Edge was generally considered a big improvement, it still was not looked on very fondly either. I remember finding Razor’s Edge enjoyable when I first played it, but how does it hold up in 2025? Read on to find out…

As I’ve already kind of spoiled, Ninja Gaiden 3 has had two versions released. Unlike other games with multiple versions in this franchise, the differences between Ninja Gaiden 3 and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge are quite drastic. We’ll get into the finer differences between them in the Love/Hate sections, but to put it simply:

  • First of all, there was the original release of Ninja Gaiden 3 for PS3 and Xbox 360. This was the game as originally intended and presented, with a combat system which has been changed significantly from the previous two games and with a bunch of trend-chasing “cinematic” moments.
  • Then there was Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge, which was first released as a goddamn Wii U exclusive launch title (although this version of the game would get ported to PS3 and Xbox 360 not long thereafter). The game would then be ported again in the Master Collection, identical aside from missing all online features. This overhaul of Ninja Gaiden 3 has the same basic structure, but the combat feels more in-line with the first two Ninja Gaiden games, remixes some mechanics for the better, and jettisons the more unpopular design choices which bogged down the original release.

For this Love/Hate series, I started playing through the original release of Ninja Gaiden 3 on Hard mode, but dropped to Normal halfway through chapter three (we’ll explain why later). I also played through Razor’s Edge on my Steam Deck on Hard mode. I had played Razor’s Edge on PS3 previously, but the original Ninja Gaiden 3 was a completely new experience for me, so it was interesting to get to compare them first-hand.

Also, one last thing before we get into the list: since certain points are specific to certain versions of this game, every Love or Hate bullet-point will specify NG3, RE, or both. This should keep things from getting too confusing and let me keep all my thoughts to one article. Got it? Let’s go.

Love

  • Steel on Bone (RE) – Steel on Bone was one of the flashier new additions in vanilla Ninja Gaiden 3, but its implementation doesn’t change up combat all that much. While it is apparently activated by sliding towards an enemy and making a strong attack, it seems to go off at random, so it’s not really something you come to rely on. Razor’s Edge completely overhauls the mechanic though, to the point where it’s easily my favourite part of the game. Ninja Gaiden 3 introduced the concept that enemies will glow red when they’re making an unblockable attack, but Razor’s Edge changes Steel on Bone so that this red glow signals an opportunity to instantly kill the enemy: land a strong attack on a glowing enemy and you will one-shot them, and then this can be chained to also kill several nearby enemies in the process. Each kill also heals you a little bit as an extra bonus! This makes for a great risk/reward system that feels so satisfying to get good at and helps to deal with the plethora of enemies this game throws at you.
    • In general, the combat system in Razor’s Edge feels quite good. That said, I’m not giving the combat system a whole section of its own, though: much of what makes Razor’s Edge feel good is that it just copies Ninja Gaiden II, with Steel on Bone being the most positive deviation from that template.
  • Dodge Slide (both) – Ninja Gaiden II made the dodge move into a short slide, but it was largely the same idea as the previous game’s dodge roll. Ninja Gaiden 3 indisputably improves this by giving you a fast and lengthy dodge slide. Not only does this let you cover more ground, but it can also be used offensively: if you dodge slide into an enemy, it can knock them off-balance, or even launch them into the air for an instant-kill overhead slash! It’s a pretty small change, but holy crap does it make Ninja Gaiden‘s combat even more fun.
  • Brutality (NG3) – The original release of Ninja Gaiden 3 is trying really hard to be edgy and serious. They really want to make Ryu seem like a monster as he tears through his enemies, and the game demonstrates that to visceral effect. Human enemies will eventually take so much damage that they pitifully stagger, crawl, bleed out from their wounds, scream in terror, surrender, and beg for mercy before you finish them off. This is supposed to make you question the morality of Ryu’s actions but, unfortunately, this is undermined by the fact that it feels awesome to destroy your enemies in such brutal fashion. Hell, the game incentivizes it: special attacks will instantly leave enemies in a dying state, and your ki bar fills faster if you finish them off yourself. It’s very in-your-face, but we rarely get to see games indulge in this kind of brutality, so it gives the game a special sort of identity at least.
    • This is actually one of the few things that Razor’s Edge scrapped that I kind of miss. Like, sure, I’ll take delimbing and obliteration techniques over Ninja Gaiden 3‘s brutality any day of the week, and finishing off these dying enemies can feel like a chore, but goddamn do you feel like an unstoppable beast when you’re in the heat of combat and see multiple enemies crawling in a pathetic bid to escape from you.
  • Upgrade System (RE) – Razor’s Edge adds an upgrade system where you spend karma points earned in-game to get new abilities, weapons, and ninpo (this effectively replaces the old Muramasa shops from the last two games and can be accessed at any time). While I’m kind of annoyed that this effectively paywalls some basic techniques from Ryu’s arsenal, there are some interesting new abilities which balance this out. Furthermore, it really allows you to personalize your playstyle, allowing you to avoid spending karma on abilities you don’t use, or fast-tracking the stuff that matters more to you (eg, my Razor’s Edge run went more smoothly than in vanilla Ninja Gaiden 3, in part because I was able to get a level two sword much earlier to expand my combat options). Ultimately, I’m happy that this system was added and its omission from the base game feels so glaring (especially in that one level where they troll you with the Muramasa shop theme).
  • Ayane is Just the Coolest (RE) – Look, you let me play as Ayane and I’m going to be happy no matter what, but that said, I really enjoyed her bonus chapters in Razor’s Edge! In my opinion, they’re easily the best bonus chapters in the trilogy, largely due to how well Ayane plays. She’s missing some of Ryu’s expertise and diversity, but she’s much faster than he is, without feeling any weaker in the process.
  • A Couple Good Bosses… (both) – Ninja Gaiden games aren’t exactly known for their boss fights (Ninja Gaiden II, in particular, has a bunch of bad ones). Ninja Gaiden 3 actually improves things on that front, giving us some franchise highlight bosses:
    • The first is the Regent of the Mask. While it is annoying that you have to fight him four times over the course of the game, the actual mechanics of the fight are a lot of fun. He’s got a swashbuckling combat style, so his attacks are precise and reasonably-telegraphed to allow you to react. He also gains new tricks with each subsequent battle, so he retains some freshness throughout. Plus it also helps that he’s a really charismatic antagonist!
    • The second is the prototype goddess. This transforming demi-god offers a diversity of combat styles and enjoyably-telegraphed attacks to make the battle feel fair. This fight is even better in Razor’s Edge, where the boss becomes vulnerable to Steel on Bone punishment. You fight a trio of them as Ayane later in the game, which is also quite fun!
    • The third is the doppelganger boss. We would get doppelganger fights on the higher difficulties in Ninja Gaiden Black/Sigma, but here they’re a full-on boss and make for a fun bout. My main issue with them is that the Izuna drop is fucking overpowered, but that’s kind of the point when facing an enemy with the same skills as you, right? It also helps that, if you’re familiar with the weapons it wields, that also means that you’re instantly familiar with its recovery times, so you will know when to go for the punish. Overall, a very tense, fair, and fun showdown with an equally-skilled opponent!
  • Fan Service (both) – Perhaps it doesn’t reflect so well on Ninja Gaiden 3‘s story that its biggest highlights are when it reminds us of better games. That aside, I was legitimately hyped throughout Day Five, which opens with Ryu preparing for the trials ahead of him by returning to the sword graves of the Black Spider Ninja clan to borrow Genshin’s sword. Things just get cooler as we get to explore the Hayabusa village in full-repair, seeing how people live, and getting to see some familiar faces that haven’t been seen since Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. We get to see Ryu pay his respects at Kureha’s grave once more. And, to top it all off, we then get to spend the second half of the chapter doing a tag-team with Momiji! It’s all meaningless to a non-fan, but my God was this chapter a joy for me specifically.
    • To my great surprise, Razor’s Edge does not change how this chapter plays! It’s definitely the most slow-paced, narrative-centered level in the game, but I love it as a bit of downtime from the dull main plot.
  • The Girls (RE) – So not only can you play two chapters with Ayane, but you can unlock Ayane, Momiji and Kasumi in chapter challenge as playable characters, all with distinct and unique playstyles. This effectively allows you to replay most of the game with whatever character tickles your fancy. This is, quite frankly, an incredible bonus that can essentially get you three additional playthroughs if you want to see everything on offer!

Mixed

  • Ninpo System (both) – One of the more fundamental changes in Ninja Gaiden 3 vs its predecessors is that the ninpo system has been changed pretty drastically:
    • There’s only one ninpo available to you in Ninja Gaiden 3, inferno, but it’s metal as fuck: Ryu summons a giant, flaming dragon, which grabs every enemy in the area and then violently devours them as they scream in terror! It’s designed to be very overpowered, but it comes with some drawbacks. For one thing, ninpo can now only be used if you fill a ki bar by killing several enemies first. You start a combat encounter with no ki and you lose all accumulated ki at the end of the fight (although at least any lost ki gets converted into healing). As a result of these changes, you can’t really use ninpo when you’d like to. In previous Ninja Gaiden games, you could always bank some ninpo uses for if you got into a tight spot, but in Ninja Gaiden 3 you kind of feel forced into using ninpo when you have it. Inferno also feels particularly deflating due to the way enemies spawn in: you’ll wipe out an entire screen of enemies with an awesome animation, and then the game cuts back to Ryu and you’re staring at a screen of enemies as if nothing happened; it’s legitimately deflating.
    • Meanwhile, Razor’s Edge shakes things up a bit by giving you multiple ninpo options, all of which require different amounts of ki to use, which adds some variety and strategy. The overpowered True Inferno is here as well, but only available if you find enough golden scarabs first and it requires a TON of ki to use. The ki meter also does not reset at the start of a combat encounter anymore, so you can bank ninpo for when you need it! However, I just don’t like this ki bar system as much as the essence/item refill system from its predecessors. Functionally, they’re fairly similar: you have to kill a bunch of enemies to get essence, so it’s not that dissimilar… but it just feels worse, and I cannot shake it. I also get really annoyed at some special abilities which use your ki, which I kept accidentally activating.
  • Ultimate Techniques (both) – Ultimate techniques were an aspect of the previous two games that I’ve always been kind of mixed on. On the one hand, they are really flashy and show off the game’s hyperviolence. On the other hand, you can break combat by spamming them, and it feels weird that the game’s “ultimate” move requires you to… just sit and watch for a few seconds. This was always mediated by making you have to charge up an ultimate technique to use it, but Ninja Gaiden 3 shakes this up by making the ultimate technique occur nearly-instantly. To offset this, it can only be done by killing several enemies first, which causes Ryu’s arm to glow, signalling that he can now use an ultimate technique once. I kind of like that this is now a risk-free, screen-clearing reward that you get occasionally… but I also kind of liked that risk that was inherent in the old system. Not being able to have an ultimate technique in your back pocket when you need it also kind of sucks. I dunno, this is a real “mixed” entry if I ever saw one.

Hate

  • The Health System (both) – One of the most fundamental changes made to Ninja Gaiden 3 is the way healing and damage works. The game has a similar sort of system to Ninja Gaiden II, where you automatically heal at the end of a combat encounter, but every time you take damage, a chunk of your health bar goes away until you can reach a save point. Ninja Gaiden II was pretty forgiving about this though: you could get blue essence in combat to heal passively (and even restore some of the lost health bar if you did well enough), and you had plenty of healing items to use in a pinch. Ninja Gaiden 3, on the other hand, has removed essence and healing items entirely. As you’d expect, this leads to a lot of frustration in a franchise this difficult:
    • Every bit of damage you take in this game feels so punishing, especially if it happens right after a save point. You have very little margin for error or forgiveness for making a mistake. You only get a couple saves per chapter, with lots of combat encounters in between them, so every bit of health bar you lose makes each subsequent encounter that much more difficult. This is especially true with boss encounters, who have much more health than previous Ninja Gaiden games and can instantly one-shot you if you have taken too much damage going into the fight. This is the main reason I dropped from Hard to Normal in vanilla Ninja Gaiden 3: I was having such a miserable time with the game, that the “challenge” wasn’t even worth it. Normal is certainly a lot easier, but at least it doesn’t leave you raging the entire time.
    • Also of note: Ninja Gaiden 3 is pretty generous with checkpoints, but this actually works against the healing system. The game doesn’t reset damage upon death, so if you made some mistakes and reached a checkpoint, then you now have to either reset from the last save, or persevere with your diminished health bar. This is especially bad during boss fights, since you’re trying to learn the boss’s patterns and are inevitably going to take damage during their first phase doing so.
    • In Ninja Gaiden 3, the only way to heal damage during combat is to use ninpo which, as I’ve said, can take a while to charge up when you really need it. As a result, the game often feels like this anxious race to fire off your ninpo attack or die trying. Ninpo is also in short supply during a boss fight, so you’re generally expected to get through a multi-phase boss fight with no healing at all. Suffice to say, this feels incredibly punishing at times, especially if you go into the boss fight already damaged.
    • Razor’s Edge is a little more forgiving: while you get less health back from ninpo attacks, ninpo is much more reliable since it doesn’t reset at the start of every encounter, and you now regain a bit of health when you successfully execute a Steel on Bone attack. If you find enough Golden Scarabs, you can also purchase up to five health upgrades, which fully heal you when used. These are incredibly useful for some of the bosses you’ll encounter towards the end of the game. That said, I’d prefer if they had brought back healing items, but the entire game was balanced around this health system, and I imagine that they didn’t have enough time to rebalance everything if this was implemented.
  • The Story (both) – The modern Ninja Gaiden games were never really known for their stories, so it can be kind of jarring to remember that the NES games were ground-breaking for their commitment to narrative. I think that that legacy made Team Ninja want to put a lot more emphasis on the story in Ninja Gaiden 3. To some respect, they succeeded: the narrative sure is a lot more involved and complex here… however, it also sucks, which makes it feel significantly worse than the simple and shallow stories of the prior two games:
    • First of all, focusing the entire narrative around accusing Ryu Hayabusa of being a murderer is just plain dumb. Metal Gear Rising had the same issue, and it largely stems from the same problem: we know that the protagonist is a killer, and we do not care. Every person Ryu has killed has been a kill-or-be-killed situation. Hell, he spent the entirety of the last two games stopping demons from taking over the world and killing everyone. Having the bad guys (who do forced experiments on humans and are trying to commit a global genocide) lecture me about morality is just fucking idiotic. It’s like they’re trying to pull off a big Bioshock-style twist, but lack anything substantial to say. If anything, Razor’s Edge‘s story actually feels even more half-assed since the over-the-top brutality and sequences where Ryu cuts down surrendering enemies have been removed – say what you will about the original Ninja Gaiden 3‘s approach, but at least it committed to its stupid story.
    • Secondly, the overarching narrative here makes little sense. The bad guys’ entire plan is, apparently, to draw Ryu Hayabusa out to get access to the blood of the dragon lineage, which they need to create a new god to remake the world. But also, they need him to get close to Canna, so that she can see him inadvertently kill her father (who has been brainwashed and is serving the bad guys), causing Canna to freak out and transform into their prophesied goddess… Oh, and all this was being orchestrated by a fucking nerd in the Japanese military who they knew was crooked, but let him do as he pleased so they could try to figure out what his angle is… also, that nerd wants to fuck his niece, fucking what?
    • Thirdly, I know I gushed about the fifth chapter and all its fanservice, but for a game that’s trying to tell a compelling narrative, it makes no sense to spend a substantial chunk of the middle-portion of the game going off on an entirely superfluous side-quest with a bunch of enemies and characters who have no bearing on the plot. Again, it’s probably my favourite part of the game, but that alone should be kind of damning for how poor the main plot is.
    • Lastly, one of the more controversial aspects of Ninja Gaiden 3 is how it changes how characters were established in the prior two games. Specifically, I’ve seen people complain that Ryu is suddenly being forced into being a father figure for Canna, he takes his mask off, Ayane is suddenly “a bitch”, amongst other things. For what it’s worth, I feel like these particular complaints are actually just Ninja Gaiden 3 caring more about fitting in with established canon with the wider Ninja Gaiden/Dead or Alive universe. Ryu has taken his mask off in Dragon Sword and the Dead or Alive games, not to mention the NES trilogy. Dragon Sword established that he gets along well with the kids in the Hayabusa village (and, honestly, it fills me with joy to see him so caring and respectful to them). The issue isn’t so much that he’s good with kids, it’s that they really force the idea of him really wanting to be a father to her. As for Ayane, her character in Razor’s Edge is far more in-line with her portrayal in Dead or Alive and is far more interesting than her nothing-burger personality in the first couple Ninja Gaiden games.
  • Spongy Enemies (NG3) – As I’ve said many times in the past, I hate games with spongey enemies. In general, it shouldn’t take more than a single combo or a few bullets to kill basic enemies. Well, because Ninja Gaiden 3 removed the delimbing/obliteration technique system from the previous game, you are almost always having to reduce enemies to zero hit points to kill them, which often takes more than a single combo for even a basic enemy. As if that wasn’t tedious on its own, they spawn in in staggered waves: I don’t know how many times I cleared an area after a lengthy fight, only to see more fucking enemies approach. I literally said “ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?” on two separate occasions due to this. Making matters worse, there’s little more deflating that firing off a screen-clearing ninpo move, only to see every single enemy you just killed respawned back in before the animation has even ended. It makes combat a total slog and is the number one reason why Razor’s Edge is a vastly superior game to the original Ninja Gaiden 3.
    • It’s worth noting that, in the last couple chapters of Ninja Gaiden 3, enemies suddenly lose their sponginess and start dying like flies (even previously-tanky enemies like the alchemists). You haven’t gotten any power-ups or upgrades to cause this, the game just suddenly decides that you do more damage now. Honestly, it makes the game far more fun since you no longer have to deal with its arbitrary, tedious bullshit anymore, even if it throws the idea of challenge completely out the window.
  • “Appealing to the West” (NG3) – A lot of this game’s issues can be traced back to the insecurity of the Japanese game publishing scene in the late 2000s to early 2010s. Capcom really spear-headed this idea of “appealing to the west” by discarding the quirks of Japanese culture in favour of more Westernized appeal. Bionic Commando, Dead Rising, Lost Planet, Dark Void, and Resident Evil 5 were some of the early examples we got of this, and they only got more generic and bloated as time went on, as this morphed into a bunch of trend-chasing which grew stale immediately: copious amounts of QTEs, slow walking narrative segments that grind the narrative to a halt, gimmicky stealth sequences (which show up twice at the start of the game and then never happen again), a fucking turret section, and bombastic set-pieces that look cool but take all control away from you. It’s all just a bunch of guff that adds nothing to the game and makes it more tedious to play through.
    • Of particular note, there’s a special place in hell for the person who forced kunai and rope climbing into the game. Having to alternate L1 + R1 just to move forward is annoying and legitimately starts to hurt your hands during some of the longer sequences.
  • …And Some Awful Bosses (both) – While Ninja Gaiden 3 does have some of the franchise’s best bosses, it’s a double-edged sword because it also has some of the absolute worst in the franchise:
    • First of all, there’s a fucking giant helicopter. This isn’t that bad at first, but there are three phases, so by the time you reach the third phase your health bar is going to be a sliver as you try to dodge missiles, bombs, swooping attacks and a bunch of adds spawning in. The only reason I managed to get through this is because I found out you can tap R3 while aiming your bow to slow down time to line up your shots, which the game doesn’t bother telling you.
    • The Giganotosaurus boss fight is also really stupid. If you go in having already taken damage, it will straight-up one-shot you. You have very little margin for error with this boss, which is why they made her incredibly stupid with a trivialized pattern – she’ll run around the arena, and then trip and fall on her own face, giving you a ton of time to get in easy damage. You basically have to do the entire fight in a very specific way to avoid dying, it’s more about trial and error than any actual skill.
    • Then there’s Obaba, who shows up in chapter five after getting her ass handed to herself in Dragon Sword and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. She’s honestly more of a God of War boss than a Ninja Gaiden one: she’s enormous, and you spend the entire fight battling basic enemies, occasionally firing a shot at her, and popping some pimples to kill her. This fight was honestly kind of embarrassing when I got to it in Razor’s Edge – having already learned the process in Ninja Gaiden 3, I breezed through it in a single try having barely taken any damage, despite being on a harder difficulty.
    • Then there’s the double spider tank battle. The initial spider tank battle at the start of the game isn’t too bad, aside from its spamming of missiles and shockwaves, which force you to endlessly dodge for the entire fight and make going on offense incredibly risky. However, having two spider tanks blasting away at you the entire time just gets ridiculous. To make matters worse, you then have another boss fight immediately after with no chance to heal. Thankfully, that boss fight isn’t very difficult, but you’ll likely have so little health left by that point that a single hit could kill you. On Normal mode I could just tank the damage, but on Hard mode it was incredibly frustrating.
    • Finally, there’s the Goddess, the final boss. Honestly, I didn’t find it too bad in vanilla Ninja Gaiden 3 on Normal mode… but in Razor’s Edge on Hard mode? Holy fucking shit this fight is stupid. The first (and hardest) part of the fight is immediately after the last Regent fight, so you come in without a full health bar. You then spend at least a couple minutes killing some of the most annoying enemies in the game while the boss spams you with projectiles and arm slams, all while you have to max charge your ki meter to pull off a special ninpo attack. If you survive this (and, if you have not packed at least one of your health bar upgrades, you probably will not), then the second half of the fight is not quite as bad. The worst part of it is that you will get spammed with even more projectiles, and the Goddess will occasionally swing a sword at you which you need to be very precise to dodge. Honestly, she wasn’t quite as bad for me as the giant helicopter was, but I totally understand why people fucking hate her.
  • Just… So Many NG3 Things (NG3, obviously) – Look, I can go on and on complaining about Ninja Gaiden 3‘s myriad of boneheaded decisions, but this article is long enough, so it’s time for a lightning round of smaller-scale bullshit: you only have one weapon for the entire game with zero upgrades, you only get one ninpo technique, the time-wasting grip of murder sequences, bosses don’t have health bars, no obliteration techniques, extremely linear level design… oh, and the fucking main menu. Yes, I’m serious here, I started this game and was immediately turned off by the main menu, which is sideways for no reason at all. What kind of idiot designs a sideways main fucking menu!??? Like, this sounds like nitpicking, and I wouldn’t care if the rest of the game was great… but when your very first impression of the game is bafflement over the ground-level basics like that, it says something about the idiocy behind this game’s design. (For the record, Razor’s Edge fixed the main menu, which told me right away that they understood the assignment.)

Ninja Gaiden 3 is a tale of two halves. The original release is a baffling and tedious experience, undermined by so many bone-headed decisions. Razor’s Edge, while still bogged down by the story, bosses, and a questionable health system, is a major improvement. It makes for a really interesting lesson on game design: Razor’s Edge is fundamentally the same game in many ways, but with some well-considered changes to the combat system, and cutting out a bunch of useless, trend-chasing guff, you can go from “one of the worst games I’ve played” to a really fun experience overall. I’d still agree that it’s easily the weakest entry in the modern trilogy, but Razor’s Edge is well worth playing! As for the original Ninja Gaiden 3? It’s nice to check it out as a curiosity, but it’s unquestionably an inferior experience. If you must try it, then just do it on Normal mode and save yourself the frustration.

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden II (2008)

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.
Look, I’m so excited about a new Dead or Alive character appearance in 2025 that I had to break my usual formatting rules for these articles so I could include a pic of Ayane!

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.

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden – Dragon Sword (2008)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series on IC2S! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, a curious little interquel released on the Nintendo DS. This game was very experimental, using the DS in unconventional ways to play the entire experience with the stylus rather than a traditional button layout. I’ve played enough gimmicky handheld experiences to be pretty leery about such experiments: would Dragon Sword turn out any better? Read on to find out…

Unlike many other entries in this franchise, Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword only had the one release, that being on Nintendo DS, with no subsequent revisions or re-releases. For this article, I played through the game on Normal mode on my 3DS… and thank God I did. I can’t even imagine trying to emulate this game on my Retroid Pocket 4 Pro or Steam Deck: this game is intrinsically designed around the DS’s hardware.

Love

  • Momiji!!! – Dragon Sword marks the franchise introduction of Momiji and, as you may have garnered from her S-ranking in my tier list of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden characters, that wins this game major points from me! I can distinctly remember when this game came out, as the preview images of Momiji’s bright and cheerful art contrasted with Ryu’s darker, more serious design started my love affair with her character. While she doesn’t get to do a whole lot in this game, there is a secret mode where, if you beat the first boss as Momiji (which you are supposed to lose against), then you’ll get to play through the game as her instead of Ryu (well, technically you’re playing an identical ninja called “Rin”, but it’s literally just Momiji so they don’t have to explain why she’s saving herself from the Black Spider Clan).
  • Fan Service! – I don’t even mean this in the usual way you’d expect from Team Ninja (in fact, Dragon Sword is very restrained in that regard). Dragon Sword is an absolute treat for hardcore fans of this franchise’s world, narrative, characters, and their relationships with one another. I was squealing with glee so often as we get new details about this strange setting that we just would not get from a more traditional Ninja Gaiden experience. Like, the game opens with Muramasa visiting Kureha’s grave, immediately rectifying one of my issues with Ninja Gaiden (2004)’s story. We get to meet a bunch of the denizens of the Hayabusa village and see how they go about their lives. We get to see more about the people, culture and methods of the rival Black Spider Clan (who, at this time, would have only been known to fans for their mysterious cameos in Ninja Gaiden [2004], and would get further fleshed out in Ninja Gaiden II). We re-visit several areas from Ninja Gaiden (2004), so there’s a sense of comforting familiarity when traversing the world map. The game also acts as the payoff for Rachel’s chapters in Ninja Gaiden Sigma: she spends some time hunting for the twin greater fiends, Ishtaros and Nicchae, and even gets captured by them after an unwinnable boss fight. In Dragon Sword, Ishtaros and Nicchae are the primary antagonists. If you’re obsessed with this world like I am, then this is all just awesome to behold.
  • Character Art – I love Mariko Hirokane, Hiroki Omote, Natsuko Kawakami and Shuichi Wada’s manga-style cutscenes and character art in this game! It’s easily some of the most memorable character art in the modern franchise and gives Dragon Sword a lot of charm. I just wish I had an artbook for this game so I could appreciate it at my own pace!
  • Left/Right-handed Options – As a southpaw, I just have to say: THANK GOD Team Ninja added in options to change the hand you use to play the game! It’s something that could easily get overlooked, but I appreciate that I was considered.

Mixed

  • Stylus Controls – Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword‘s big gimmick is that the entire game is played using the stylus and holding the DS sideways like a storybook. This sounds like a terrible idea, but the execution is pretty flawless, even if its implementation results in compromises to the overall experience. The gestures that you need to use to perform an action (tap to throw a shuriken, swipe up to jump, swipe to the side to do a sword slash, etc) are intuitive and specific, to the point where I was rarely performing a gesture I did not intend to. It also allows for some pretty unique and distinctive gameplay, since there are very few games with this kind of gimmick. So, yeah, you can play an entire Ninja Gaiden game using just a stylus, that’s cool! Would I want them to release another game with the same control scheme? Hell no. It works, but I would, without hesitation, prefer a more traditional and precise control scheme any day of the week. Hell, I’d be excited if they somehow figured out a way to rerelease this game with a traditional control scheme, which should really illustrate my feelings on this game’s gimmicks.
    • Also, on a related note: holding the DS one-handed this way starts to hurt after a while. Thankfully the game is not particularly long, so this is somewhat mitigated, but I was noticing some strain in my hands after each play session.

Hate

  • Reused Assets – Very early in Dragon Sword you end up back in the Hayabusa village. “Oh cool!” I said, recognizing the exact layout from Ninja Gaiden (2004). The game uses a prerendered isometric style like the PS1 Resident Evil and Final Fantasy games, so they had clearly took the Hayabusa village assets from the previous game and then used them to make the game’s backgrounds. This was neat the first time… but then we go back to the Vigoorian Monastery… and then the Underground Sanctuary… and then the fiend realm… and it just keeps going on from there, very few areas in this game are wholly original. I get that reusing assets is a great way to save time and work, but at a certain point, they become distracting. Not only that, but they also draw attention to all the other ways this game is reusing assets from Ninja Gaiden (2004) and Ninja Gaiden II: sound effects, music, animations, enemies, and nearly the entire boss roster from Ninja Gaiden (including the main antagonists of this game) are lifted wholesale.
  • Graphics – The Nintendo DS wasn’t exactly known for its 3D graphics, but Dragon Sword‘s 3D models just look bad. You’d hope that the pre-rendered backgrounds would help to be able to allocate more graphical horsepower to the character models with this, but no. Despite having the entire DS’s computing power at their disposal, the character models are so muddy that I can barely tell what I’m looking at. This is especially true for the reused character models (probably because, again, they weren’t intended to be seen at resolutions this low).
  • Combat is Dull – While using the stylus to control the entire game works a lot better than you’d expect, that’s not to say that it’s all that great an experience. The novelty wears off pretty quickly and combat soon becomes rather dull. While you can pull off specific techniques when you want, there’s only a few available, and your only weapon is the titular Dragon Sword. Enemies also don’t present much of a challenge, and you never have more than three NPCs on-screen at once, so you soon just get into the rhythm of trying to get combat over as quickly as possible. This means that you’ve got lots of encounters where you’re just mindlessly slashing enemies a few times over and over and over and over until they stop respawning. I just feel that this is an unavoidable issue with making this game only playable with the stylus: to keep the game easy to remember, you can only have a handful of commands implemented. Furthermore, as the stylus provides a less-precise control method, the game needs to be much more forgiving than with a controller, so you’re rarely in any danger of death. It just makes for a game where combat is a bit of a slog.
  • Dodge Rolls – One of the few commands in the game that involves any button presses, you can dodge roll by pressing any face button and then swiping the screen. You’d think that Ryu would go in the direction you swipe… but no, for some reason, if you just dodged in one direction, a second swipe in the same direction will often cause Ryu to go back to where he just was. I don’t understand why they’d do it this way, it makes zero sense. It’s especially infuriating when you’re trying to get past environmental obstacles and end up taking damage when Ryu rolls back and forth right into a bunch of spikes.
  • The Story – Okay, I shouldn’t expect much from a Ninja Gaiden game’s story, but Dragon Sword‘s narrative is pretty disappointing. It starts off intriguingly as Momiji is captured by the Black Spider Clan and then Ryu encounters the denizens of the Hayabusa village. However, it soon turns into a repetitive fetch quest until Ryu is able to rescue Momiji. While I do like some of the subtler moments (you can tell that Ryu feels guilty for Kureha’s death and is extra protective of Momiji as a result), the narrative is just far too shallow overall.
    • Making matters worse, the recycled assets certainly don’t help matters much. All the reused locations and bosses make the narrative forgettable.
  • Voice Commands – While the stylus controls work pretty well in this game, Dragon Sword gets a bit too cute with its gimmicks by asking you to speak into the DS microphone to wake up Muramasa or flush out hidden spirit birds. Unfortunately, the voice recognition is not great in my experience, and I was having to loudly repeat commands multiple times to get it to register, much to the confusion and chagrin of my family.

I was left a bit disappointed by Dragon Sword. I had always heard that it was a great game and had been excited for years to try it, but its gimmicky controls and repetitive gameplay wore thin pretty quickly. I was banging out multiple NES-era Ninja Gaiden games per day in spite of their difficulty, but Dragon Sword just felt like a slog to get through. That’s not to say it’s bad by any means, but I was hoping for so much more.

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (2004)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series on IC2S! It’s finally time for the entry you’ve all been waiting for: the 2004 reboot of Ninja Gaiden! This game was actually the second Ninja Gaiden game I had played, but I absolutely adored it, to the point where it made the top 25 of my all-time favourite games list. It has been more than a decade since I last played it and, in the time since, the action game landscape has completely changed. The character action game has basically disappeared and, in its place, the Soulslike has become utterly dominant. How does Ninja Gaiden‘s more old-school approach hold up after all these years? Read on to find out…

This is going to be a trend as we go through the 3D Ninja Gaiden games, but several different versions of Ninja Gaiden (2004) have been released over the years:

  • First off, there’s the original game on Xbox. While it does have a few unique quirks which would be ironed out or removed later, this is basically just the base experience of Ninja Gaiden with no bells and whistles.
  • Then there was Ninja Gaiden Black, which is largely a compilation of Ninja Gaiden and its DLC packs (minus one costume and one overpowered technique), plus some added weapons, enemies, bosses, difficulty modes, and small tweaks and quality of life improvements.
  • Then there’s Ninja Gaiden Sigma. This version of the game was made to be a PS3 port, although it made several changes which fans are pretty mixed on. Changes include: improved graphics, many platforming and puzzle sections have been removed to make it more action-oriented and to cut down on backtracking, remixed enemy placements, there are new bosses, a new weapon, and some quality of life improvements to make the game feel less clunky. The biggest change though is that three bonus chapters for Rachel have been added, but these are very divisive since these chapters break the pacing, spoil some areas that you’ll be going to later, and a lot of fans do not like how she plays.
  • Then there’s Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus. This was a PS Vita port of Sigma (and the way that I first played this game back in the day). It’s largely the same as Sigma, but it has some PS Vita gimmicky controls which hurt the experience at times and it has a lower framerate than its console counter-parts. That said, it’s perfectly playable and as fine a way to experience this game as any other if you don’t have access to a different version.
  • Finally, there’s the Ninja Gaiden Master Collection version of Ninja Gaiden Sigma. This is based on the Sigma Plus version of the game, sans Vita gimmicks, and is easily the most accessible version available today.

For this Love/Hate series, I played through Ninja Gaiden Black through Xbox backwards compatibility and Ninja Gaiden Sigma on Steam Deck. I played through Black and Sigma on normal mode (in part because normal is the only mode available from the start in Black). I also played some Sigma Plus to get a feel for that version’s particular quirks. 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

  • Combat – Ninja Gaiden has a very deliberate pace to its combat. Compared to its sequels, combat is much slower, more based around your defense and counter-attacking when it’s safe, and you rarely face more than a few enemies at one time. Furthermore, you can only heal by using items or by getting blue essence from slain enemies, which further incentivizes defensive play to survive (especially on the higher difficulties). However, as you learn to play and get deeper into the campaign, the pace of combat quickens – not so much because anything has changed (if anything, the game has gotten significantly harder by then), but because you’ve learned how combat works, when you can attack, and can afford to be more aggressive. This tangible sense of improvement as you go makes combat feel incredibly satisfying, and each new challenge you overcome feels all the more rewarding.
    • I also want to add that I rather like how Ultimate Techniques have been implemented in this game. Charging a UT is a fairly slow process, even if there is essence nearby when you do it, so you can’t just spam them to try to get an easy kill. You either need to be very deliberate about how you use them (like all the other aspects of this game’s combat), or you need to get really good at the timing of executing an immediate UT charge after jumping, which rewards skilled players. This game also causes UT charges to burn the essence that you absorb, so you need to make sure that you are willing to risk losing currency or health drops. This higher risk makes the greater essence dropped by enemies killed by the UT make more sense too.
  • Difficulty – Ninja Gaiden games are well-known for their high difficulty, but like I said in the combat section, this difficulty actually contributes to why this game is so much fun. For all its difficulty, Ninja Gaiden feels very fair from start to finish. Difficulty is handled in a very linear fashion: you have some pretty basic challenges at the start with very exploitable enemy types. Then the game will steadily introduce new enemy types and scenarios which will you have to learn how to overcome. By the time you’re a few chapters in, you’re fighting enemies and pulling off moves that that would have gotten you annihilated you at the start of the game. By the end of a playthrough, you’re then more-or-less ready to attempt the next difficulty level, which is where Ninja Gaiden‘s difficult reveals its next trick: the linear difficulty curve continues into the next difficulty level and each difficulty is clearly intended to be played after completing the one before it and mastering its challenges (in fact, Black does not allow you to choose difficulty at the start at all, which reinforces that this is the “intended” way to play). Higher difficulties will introduce harder enemies earlier in the game, entirely new enemies are exclusive to higher difficulties, there’s new enemy spawns, less health items, and various other surprises sprinkled in. If you love Ninja Gaiden and want a challenge, then this game does a great job of incentivizing multiple replays.
    • This also means that skipping to a higher difficulty mode (as you can do in Sigma) actually makes that playthrough exponentially harder, because the game’s operating under the assumption that you already beat the whole thing on Normal and are coming in with the accumulated skillset that would entail. I was having a pretty manageable time on Normal in Black, so I decided to skip to Hard on Sigma since I figured I could handle it… and I was getting absolutely wrecked. I soon learned how to fight the upgraded ninja enemies, but then, whenever I got faced with a new combat scenario or a new enemy was introduced, I’d get demolished. It got to the point where I just had to give up and go back to Normal mode (which I was breezing through, thanks to playing Black at the same time).
    • Oh, and on top of all this, Ninja Gaiden has some bonus challenges for those who really want to test their might in the form of Fiend Challenges. These encounters are generally hidden off the main path and have you fight several relentless waves of fiends. They can really drain your resources if you are not at the top of your game, but they usually have some sort of major reward at the end that makes it worth your while (plus, y’know, it’s fun getting to put this game’s combat engine to its limits).
  • Level Design – The original 3D Ninja Gaiden really stands out from its sequels due to its level design. Much of the game takes place in the city of Tairon, and you have a fair bit of freedom to explore, find secret areas, and figure out where you need to go next. It reminds me a lot of Resident Evil, where you’re finding keys and items to open up the next area, before looping back and giving you some kind of new shortcut to make navigation easier. Furthermore, this hub area changes over the course of the playthrough, with the city going under martial law at one point, meaning that you now need to deal with the Vigoorian military and LAVs in the streets hunting you down. I also love the bevy of secret areas which require you to platform using your ninja skills to find secrets and rewards (the Xbox easter egg that gives you the Windmill Shuriken and totally heals you for free is a particular highlight). Ultimately, Ninja Gaiden is set apart from its sequels because combat is just one part of the game: exploration and traversal are just as much a core tenet of the game design.
  • Graphics – As is often the case for Team Ninja games (especially in this time period), Ninja Gaiden is no slouch visually. It has some rough edges from a modern standpoint, but it looks and feels great in motion. However, as good as the game looks on Xbox, Ninja Gaiden Sigma still looks fantastic. The colour palette has been made more saturated and vibrant, and everything is much higher fidelity (as you’d expect from a next-gen update).

Mixed

  • The Story – The narrative of Ninja Gaiden is a real mixed bag. It’s extremely simple: Doku attacks the Hayabusa village and steals the Dark Dragon Blade. Ryu goes on a rampage to the Vigoorian Empire to get revenge against him. We do get introduced to some characters in the process, and there’s a bit of mystery and intrigue associated with this, but there is shockingly little narrative or character development beyond this initial setup.
    • On the one hand, the narrative presentation is amazing: the game will often feature gorgeous FMV cutscenes which are very slick and have striking direction that makes everything seem cool as fuck. This game’s presentation is told in a very serious way and it’s all about making everything and everyone seem like the coolest shit you’ve ever seen. In that regard, it succeeds in spades.
    • On the other hand, the narrative undermines itself in several ways. Like I said before, there’s next to no development once you arrive in Tairon: you want to kill Doku and get the Dark Dragon Blade, so you spend the next several hours trying to do exactly that. However, the game also fails to make its “big moments” land. For example, Kureha’s death is supposed to be this huge moment for Ryu: she’s one of his closest friends, and her death is a key reason why Ryu is so pissed throughout this game. However, when she’s killed right in front of him, her death barely even gets a response out of Ryu. The reveal of the game’s “real” villain is also really lame, especially after spending the entire game hyping up how much of a terrifying badass Doku is. But the real big issue with the narrative has to be…
    • Rachel. Really, I need to give her a whole bullet-point for herself, because the narrative fucks her over at every turn. She actually has a pretty interesting characterization and motivation: her family have fiend blood in their lineage, and this was used to turn her sister, Alma, into a greater fiend. Rachel then became a fiend hunter to try to kill Alma and free her soul. This is a legitimately interesting backstory and it gives her a bit more personality to latch onto than Ryu’s uber-serious stoicism. She also seems pretty competent initially and has a cool grappling hook to swing around on. However, she gets shat on by the narrative at every possible opportunity: immediately after talking shit about Ryu, she gets vored by a giant fiend, and she gets one-shotted by a bitch slap from Doku, necessitating a second rescue from Ryu. She fucks off as soon as you rescue her from Doku, only for her to immediately get captured again, fucking hell. She even fails to kill Alma when she gets the opportunity to (which is supposed to be her entire character motivation). Obviously, this could have been an interesting bit of character development, but when she doesn’t to do anything else of note in the story, it just makes her feel worthless. Oh and, to top it all off, at the end of the game she tries to fuck Ryu and he turns her down, so she’s just absolutely shit on from start to finish. At this point, does it even bear mentioning that her character design is ridiculous? Fighting demons in bondage gear makes her hard to take seriously, and her complete inability to do anything of note just reinforces that she’s clearly just here to be eye candy. At least in Sigma we get to see her beating down some fiends, but it’s far from redeeming her.

Hate

  • Clunky Systems – Even for a game released more than twenty years ago, Ninja Gaiden has some weird design decisions that make playing it more of a cumbersome experience than it needed to be.
    • For one thing, you’re going to be spending a lot of time pausing the game to dive through menus. Any time you want to change your melee/ranged weapon, or heal, or use some sort of item, you’ll have to cycle through menus and halt the game’s pace momentarily. Sigma improves this a bit since it does allow you to cycle through your healing items without pausing, although I personally would have preferred a way to quick-swap between weapons.
    • Black has some really weird camera controls. Most of the time, the right analog stick puts you into first person mode (with inverted controls!!!)… however, there are some areas where you can control the camera, but you won’t really know if this is in effect until you try it. Generally, you have to just press R2 to automatically re-center the camera and hope that that’s sufficient. Similarly, aiming with the bow happens if you press B + left analog stick, which can be annoying if you’re trying to shoot quickly and then immediately move. Sigma, thankfully, has added free camera control to the right analog stick and maps first person mode to L1. The bow controls are also mapped to their own button, and the game even adds a reticle for easier aiming.
    • The controls for running on water also suuuuuck in Black. You need to run into the water and then immediately start pressing the jump button. However, if you jump too early or too late, you’ll sink and need to retry it. Thankfully, this is a pretty insignificant technique in this game… and thank God, or I might have raged. Sigma just makes you run on water automatically without requiring any button input, which is a bit too excessively dumbed-down… but, then again, it’s leagues better than Black‘s take on it.
    • For some ungodly reason, Ninja Gaiden does not give you access to an options menu while in-game. Hell, you can’t even quit to main menu without restarting the game itself… WHY??? Making matters worse, this isn’t even something Sigma improved, so I sure as hell hope that you like how everything is configured when you start playing, because tweaking it to suit your liking is going to be an absolute bitch.
  • Auto-targeting – Ninja Gaiden does a fairly good job of making your attacks land where you want them to without a manual lock-on option, but there are times where your attack will not go where you want it to. This is especially prevalent when you use a single-target ninpo attack when there are multiple enemies on-screen, and it’s an utter crap-shoot which one will get hit.
  • Grabs – So, like, I get why grabs are a thing in this game: if you are relying on blocking attacks for long periods of time to stay alive, they punish you severely. As a result, you quickly learn how and when to go on the offensive and limit your time spent blocking. That said… this game’s grabs are so fucking annoying. You get barely any time to react to an enemy’s grab, so when one goes off, you feel like you get stuck with unavoidable damage (and these things hit HARD).
  • Random Auto-Blocks – Easily the worst aspect of this game’s combat engine is that enemies will randomly auto-block your attacks at times. This is especially noticeable with the Flying Swallow technique, and particularly when fighting bosses. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, they’ll just randomly, instantly block attacks sometimes, presumably to nerf certain techniques or make bosses seem “harder”. This basically forces you to just make your attack and then react based on whether the game lets you do damage or not, although it can be particularly annoying against the hardest bosses (looking at you, Alma).

Ninja Gaiden is a fantastic game. I love how it balances combat, exploration, and traversal. You can tangibly feel the meticulous design that has been put into every encounter, which helps make it difficulty feel fair and satisfying to get to grips with. My “hates” here are really gripes in comparison to this game’s strengths. I heartily recommend Ninja Gaiden (any of its versions!) to anyone who loves action games and is up for a challenge!

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (Master System) (1992)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Master System! Once again, this is an entirely new entry in the franchise, despite sharing a name with (by this point) three other games released in a four year timespan. I was not too keen on the previous Sega-exclusive Ninja Gaiden game, would this attempt on the Master System fair any better? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Graphics – Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is, hands-down, the best-looking classic Ninja Gaiden game. In fact, the graphics are so crisp here that I was legitimately shocked when I found out that the Master System was an 8-bit console like the NES. The graphics here are so much better than any other Ninja Gaiden game of the era that I legitimately thought that this game was designed for a 16-bit console! I adore the art style of 16-bit consoles, so this game is all the more impressive to me for looking this good on such aged hardware! This praise for the graphics and pixel art also carries over to the cutscenes, which are easily the most detailed of the classic era of Ninja Gaiden.

Mixed

  • Control Complexity – One of the most notable new additions in Ninja Gaiden on Master System is that you now have a bit more control over when you grab onto platforms and walls. This is actually kind of nice: in Ninja Gaiden III and Shadow, you would occasionally jump and unintentionally grab onto a platform above you, which could cause you to get hit by an enemy in the process. With that in mind, having some control over whether you want to grab onto a platform is a good idea and it allows the developers to design levels in more interesting ways. However, this decision lays bare the hardware limitations these games are operating under, and how they struggle to deal with additional complexity.
    • Like the NES games, you’ve got a d-pad and two buttons to work with, and the game controls pretty similarly, but now you have to hold the up button while jumping to grab onto a platform. This is a problem for two reasons: 1) It’s annoying to have to hold a button to do something that used to be automatic, even if I can understand why they’ve added this. But, more importantly, 2) It makes it way easier to accidentally activate your ninja arts if you need to attack an enemy mid-jump, which wastes your energy and can leave you without any later if you need it.
    • Similarly, jumping onto a wall has gotten more complicated, for better or worse. You used to just grab onto the wall automatically. Now you need to jump into the wall and continue holding the d-pad in the direction of the wall. This will cause Ryu to turn around, and then you need to press jump quickly while still holding the d-pad in the direction of the wall to jump in the opposite direction. In essence, you’re pressing the d-pad in the opposite direction you want to go in, which gets really confusing. On the plus side, this can allow you to leap back and forth off of walls, opening up new platforming opportunities, but my God is it confusing in execution. I honestly think that this game would have been better off on an actual 16-bit console with more buttons – having a dedicated “grab” button would have made this all so much simpler and with no drawbacks.
  • Difficulty – The people who designed this game are fucking bastards. The NES games are brutal, but their difficulty feels reasonably fair most of the time and the spikes come when they want to test your limits. Meanwhile, the Master System Ninja Gaiden wants to kill you, full-stop. Many enemies move so quickly that you barely have a chance to react to them. The fucking birds are back, and this time they’re even faster and more erratic than ever before! WHY??? And that’s not even getting to the level designs. In the very first level, you complete one area and the next one immediately puts you on a tiny platform over a pit of spikes, so if you were still moving forward absent-mindedly, you would die instantly. It was at that point I went “oh, so that’s the kind of game you’re playing”. What sadistic bastard thought it would be a good idea to have four bird spawn in mid-jump over an instant-death pit? What idiot thought that what an ice level needed was platforms that send you careening forward if you move even a single pixel AND these icy platforms are covered with spikes? Oh, and then they spice things up even more by adding lightning-fast jumping ninjas and piranhas as an extra “fuck you”. Ninja Gaiden on the Master System is a bastard of a game, but I… kind of enjoyed it? Admittedly, most of this comes down to the modern conveniences of emulation mitigating a ton of frustration, but it was to a point where I was starting to predict the next dickheaded move the game would make, prepared myself for it ahead of time, and would have a laugh after each new development. On top of that, the game is pretty generous with its checkpoints and continues (no “oh, you lost to the final boss? Back to the start of the level” bullshit from the previous games). I actually managed to beat this game, which is more than I can say about any of the NES titles with their “fairer” levels of challenge!
    • Oh, and as a bonus regarding the difficulty, there’s a game-breaking bug that makes it significantly easier. If you can get your ninja arts stockpiled up to 999, then you will actually have unlimited uses of your art. Suffice to say, being able to create unlimited rings of fire to intercept every enemy and projectile (not to mention being able to walk on spikes without getting hurt!) was overpowered as fuck and is a pretty big reason why I was able to reach the end of the game in spite of all the bullshit it threw at me.
  • The Story – I kind of view the Master System Ninja Gaiden as the apex of the classic era: sure, it’s got some design flaws that mar the experience, but it’s the flashiest and most refined version of the classic era’s gameplay. However, one notable area in which it falls short compared to the NES games is that its story is significantly less effective. It retains the cutscenes that made the trilogy so famous, but the actual narrative here is disappointing. The NES trilogy were simple, but a lot of effort was put into its characters and wringing drama out of their reactions to the games’ events. Here, they’ve taken a step back – it’s now just about Ryu doing cool shit until the bad guys are defeated. It’s too bad, you can see how this franchise’s emphasis on narrative just dropped off until Ninja Gaiden stories became… well, what we’d new expect out of a modern Ninja Gaiden game.
    • Also, the game has some questionable localization, so you’ll occasionally get a chuckle out of some badly translated line of dialogue.

Hate

  • Multi-hit Enemies – This game introduces lots of basic enemies who require multiple hits in order to kill. Call me old-fashioned, but this feels like it goes against the fundamental design ethos of these games. Why does some mafioso in a suit take two hits to kill, while a nearly-identical one dies in one? I don’t get it, I don’t really like it, and it just feels like an unnecessary extra step to kill an enemy who is almost-certainly dead anyway when you landed that first hit; the second hit just feels like an unnecessary formality at that point.

In spite of itself, I actually quite enjoyed Ninja Gaiden on the Master System. I don’t think it’s quite as good as the first couple games on the NES, but it’s very close, and gives us a glimpse into a potential future where these games continued into the 16-bit era. As a close to the classic era of Ninja Gaiden, it’s a pretty great time and well worth checking out!

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (Game Gear) (1991)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden for the Sega Game Gear! Despite what its title would suggest, this is not a port of the NES Ninja Gaiden, nor is it a port of the arcade game, but an entirely new game that just happens to have the same name as the others (get used to this, this isn’t even the last game called Ninja Gaiden that we’re going to be covering in this series). To make matters even more confusing, it’s unclear if this game is even considered canon, having an entirely self-contained narrative that sees Ryu Hayabusa having to save the world once again. How would this portable entry on superior hardware hold up in comparison to Ninja Gaiden Shadow? Read on to find out…

Love

…nothing. For the second time in Love/Hate history, there’s nothing particular about this game that I liked, let alone would consider worth mentioning. If I had to say anything even tangentially positive: it’s got Ryu Hayabusa in it, it’s portable, and it’s on the Game Gear, I guess?

Mixed

  • The Graphics – The graphics in this game look like ass. Yes, they are technically more detailed than they were on the NES, but the art style looks so much worse in comparison. That said, I’d be kind of an asshole if I did not put this into perspective: this was a handheld game released in 1991 on the Game Gear. In that context, Ninja Gaiden would have looked pretty damn impressive for its time (especially compared to the Game Boy, whose significantly more limited hardware was still being used into the 2000s). Still… in a modern context where the totality of gaming history is available to us, Ninja Gaiden on the Game Gear looks very unappealing.

Hate

  • Game Feel – The moment you start playing Ninja Gaiden, you get the sense that something is off. Gone is the quick, precise action of the NES trilogy, replaced with a jump which goes very high and is unbelievably floaty. As a result, you’re going to overshoot nearly anything you try to jump to, and then have to wait for Ryu to float down to the enemy or orb to slash it. The pickup orbs, by the way, are tiny in this game, so you’d better hope you don’t miss your slash, or you’ll have to waste a couple more seconds trying again. It sounds really nitpicky when I describe it, but my God does this game feel terrible to play, and it largely stems from the way they’ve designed the jumping/falling mechanics.
  • Enemy Placements are BULLSHIT – Ninja Gaiden on Game Gear is not a particularly difficult game, especially compared to its NES counterparts. However, in an effort to make the game “difficult”, the developers have made most enemy encounters utter fucking bullshit. You will have enemies spawn in, immediately attack you, and you have a fraction of a second to register this new information and respond or you will take unavoidable damage. This happens the moment the game starts and goes on throughout the entire playthrough, it’s utter dogshit design. To get through a level unscathed, you end up needing to have the reaction time of an athlete, or you memorize the entire level and trivialize the entire thing (or, y’know, enjoy the benefits of modern emulation and get through the game stupid-easily).
  • The Skyscraper Level – Whoever designed the skyscraper level needs to be tried in the Hauge for crimes against humanity. What a fucking bullshit level: you’re climbing up the side of a skyscraper while it auto-scrolls upward and have to jump between two buildings to avoid falling objects and kamikaze martial artists. Not only does this mean that you have to react instantly to every incoming object, but if you get hit, you also have to immediately grab back onto the building, or you will fall to an instant death. It’s a cool concept for a level, but the execution here makes for one of the most unenjoyable sequences in the entire franchise.

Ninja Gaiden on Game Gear isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played, but it’s certainly not enjoyable either. I really was not expecting Ninja Gaiden Shadow to be the superior 8-bit handheld experience, but at least I got some fun out of that game in spite of its shortcomings. Perhaps it’s a mercy then that Ninja Gaiden is so short, clocking in at barely over thirty minutes of runtime (hence why this list is also short… there’s only so much you can say about a game that I beat in less time than it took me to write this article).

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden Shadow (1991)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden Shadow, a prequel to the NES trilogy released for the Game Boy! I’m always super leery about Game Boy spin-offs of console games: the handheld was extremely under-powered, so the idea of playing an ultra-precise and difficult Ninja Gaiden game on one sounds like a nightmare. That said, how does Ninja Gaiden Shadow actually play in practice? Read on to find out…

Love

  • New Platforming Tricks – You’d think that Ninja Gaiden Shadow would be content to just coast of the gimmick of being a handheld Ninja Gaiden game, but it actually has a couple fantastic additions to the 2D side-scrolling formula. First of all, you can now press down + jump to hang and/or drop from the platform you’re standing on, which is super useful and opens up new platforming options. The flashiest new addition though is the grappling hook, which has a surprisingly long range that allows you to reach platforms above you that are out of your reach. I love this thing, not only is it useful for the platforming, but it’s so cool being able to dodge an enemy attack by throwing the hook and climbing to safety in the nick of time!
  • Reasonable Level of Difficulty – It’s no secret that I haven’t really enjoyed the extreme difficulty of these old-school Ninja Gaiden games, but I feel like Ninja Gaiden Shadow strikes a pretty reasonable level of challenge. For the most part, it’s not too bad, and there’s enough health pickups that mistakes don’t feel excessively punishing. The last couple bosses are tough, so it’s not like the game is excessively easy either!
  • The Wrestler Boss – Most of the 2D Ninja Gaiden bosses have been pretty forgettable, but Ninja Gaiden Shadow has a boss who is, hands-down, the best boss in the series thus far. It’s a pretty simple fight against a wrestler, which plays out like any other boss in the series… except that this guy has a little minion who you cannot damage. This little bastard will flip around the arena and grab onto you, slowing your movement and making it so you can’t get away from the boss. The resulting fight is still not particularly difficult, but it’s hilarious trying to dodge this gremlin and shake him off before the main boss beats you down!

Mixed

  • Strips Out Most of What Makes Ninja Gaiden Good – Ninja Gaiden Shadow has had to make some heavy compromises in order to function on Game Boy. The platforming is much less precise than on NES, you only get one ninja art that you can use, the narrative is practically non-existent, and the game’s performance is quite poor. That said… I can’t put this in “Hate”, because I got some enjoyment out of my time with Shadow, so there must be some fundamental strength here that they’ve retained which is keeping things fun.

Hate

  • Boss Health Feels Excessive – While Ninja Gaiden Shadow is a pretty easy experience, it does have one particularly frustrating flaw. Due to the hardware limitations, there’s no display showing how much HP a boss has remaining. This would be fine, but I swear that the bosses feel like they take more hits to kill than they did on NES. This gets particularly annoying on the last couple bosses, who require precise maneuvers to avoid getting hit, and you won’t be able to do enough damage to them without dying if you do not perfect your jumps and dodge timing. This is particularly relevant for the goddamn genie boss, who flies around out of reach for 80% of the fight. You might only manage to get in one or two hits at a time before he becomes invulnerable again, making the entire fight an absolute slog.

Ninja Gaiden Shadow makes me question how much I can take hardware limitations into account when judging a game. Taking into account the Game Boy’s limitations, this is a pretty good game. However, by the standards of the Ninja Gaiden franchise, this is a pretty lackluster experience. And, judged entirely on its own merits, Shadow is an incredibly short and mediocre curiosity. It’s a bit of a weird situation overall. I got enough fun out of Shadow that I’d at least recommend checking it out if you’re into 2D side-scrolling action-platformers, but it’s far from a must-play experience.

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden III – The Ancient Ship of Doom (1991)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at the final entry in the NES trilogy, Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom! With the NES era coming to a close, Tecmo wanted to get one last Ninja Gaiden game out. This game would have a different creative team who wanted to make changes to the formula and attempt to tell a different sort of story than its predecessors. Would these changes improve the overall experience, or would it cap off the original trilogy on a down note? Read on to find out…

For this article, I played the NES Ninja Gaiden III, as well as the re-released version of the game in Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (the reasons for this will become clear later). Having played both versions, I can confirm that the Trilogy release’s altered graphics, bizarrely, have desaturated a lot of the brighter colours for God knows what reason. This is actively detrimental to the experience: for one example, streams of molten metal in the NES version end up looking like fountains of literal shit in Trilogy. In addition, the soundtrack has been downgraded significantly, reminding me of the hack job they did on Resident Evil Director’s Cut: it’s that level of crap.

Love

  • Further Refines the Ninja Gaiden Formula – You’d be surprised that they could find more ways to refine Ninja Gaiden on NES hardware after the second game, but they sure managed it here. The flashiest new feature would have to be the ability to grab onto overhanging bars and then move forward while hanging, or jump up onto the platform above. This adds an entire new dimension of strategic platforming whenever it is implemented. However, I think my favourite refinement is that you can now see what power-up is inside of each orb before you smash it. This makes it a lot easier to manage your ninja art of choice and know whether it’s worth it to go out of your way for an orb in a dangerous area.
  • Sword Power-up – Ninja Gaiden III adds a new upgrade which extends the range of your sword swing. It should go without saying that this is extremely handy for a game of this sort, but I also like the way that they’ve executed the idea. The upgrade only lasts until you die or reach the end of the current act, whichever comes first. This seems very fair to me, whereas Ninja Gaiden II‘s shadow ninjas were a bit too good and made the game feel so much worse when you died and lost them. Plus, with the aforementioned ability to see what’s inside each orb, you really get excited when you spot one up for grabs!
  • Enemies Don’t Respawn! – OH MY GOD, FINALLY! No more cheesing the game by manipulating enemy spawns, and no more frustration caused by endless respawns, if an enemy is pissing you off, just swing your sword at them. This “Love” is really self-evidently great, need I say more?

Mixed

  • Level Gimmicks – For the most part, Ninja Gaiden III jettisons the level gimmicks which plagued Ninja Gaiden II‘s runtime, and it’s a much less frustrating experience for it. However, they do come back all at once in act six: you suddenly have slippery platforms, foreground obstructions, and quicksand. On the one hand, thank you Ninja Gaiden III for confining this to a single act. On the other hand, the execution of these level gimmicks is at its absolute worst here, with excessively-slippery platforms, foreground obstructions making it impossible to see where the platform ends, and areas where the entire ground is quicksand, forcing you to jump constantly (including after defeating a boss, you still have to remember to jump or you’ll die and get forced to replay the entire boss fight and the run-up to it)!

Hate

  • ABSURD Difficulty – Look, I’m sure that I’ve made it abundantly clear by this point that I do not enjoy old-school difficulty and don’t have the patience to see these games through to the end. I don’t hold that against the games too much though, because they seem like they’re reasonably achievable with patience and practice. However, Ninja Gaiden III takes this to an even more absurd level, where I feel that it’s actively detrimental to the experience. For the first two games, I was able to struggle through to the last act before the challenge just got to be too much. With Ninja Gaiden III, I made it to the start of act three before I rage-quit. This game is, without a doubt, the hardest of the trilogy for one reason: even basic enemies do an idiotic amount of damage. You need to be damn-near perfect to survive this game, because it is incredibly punishing. Making a mistake and taking a couple hits will leave you with a sliver of health, so even tanking a hit to land a jump is an incredibly costly move. Oh, and the game only gives you a limited number of lives with which to complete the game. Perhaps the biggest piss-off though? The game wasn’t even designed this way: Tecmo decided, for the North American release, to just make the game harder, so they increased the damage of enemy attacks, gave you a life limit, and removed a password system to be able to “save” your progress…
    • …which brings us to Ninja Gaiden Trilogy. The version of Ninja Gaiden III in this compilation is based on the original Japanese release, which features the game’s originally-intended difficulty. The differences are like night and day: I could barely get to act three in the NES version, but in Trilogy I actually reached the final boss (the only NES Ninja Gaiden game I could do that for)! So, for all its faults, at least Trilogy makes Ninja Gaiden III reasonably playable!
  • Narrative – Compared to the previous two games, Ninja Gaiden III‘s narrative feels like a step down in quality. While its predecessors had b-movie narratives, Ninja Gaiden III‘s story is intensely bizarre. So, for some reason, the game is an interquel between the first and second games, but it doesn’t bother to tell you this until the very end of the game… There’s a rogue US Agent, Foster, who has created these clone-mutants (called bio-noids, lol) using lingering power from the demon Ryu defeated in the first game. The bio-noids were used to kill Irene, but it turns out that she’s not actually dead, because she knew what Foster was up to and was working with the US army against him. Anyway, the bad guys have cloned Ryu, so he now has to stop this imposter and figure out who killed Irene (but actually didn’t). Got all that? Good, because I haven’t even gotten to the titular Ancient Ship of Doom, which one of the bio-noids has claimed possession of, is going to use it to destroy the world and then replace it with a new one sculpted in his image. Suffice to say, it’s utter nonsense. Worst of all though? Even with the weird things going on, the narrative is not even particularly interesting. The first couple games were pretty simple, but the characters kept things interesting and the abundance of drama made things feel like there were some actual stakes.

Ninja Gaiden III is a weird case. When I was doing well, I found the game to be pretty enjoyable. However, if I made any mistake, I was punished so hard that it made the next mistake I made near-certain death. That just… isn’t fun. I’d be remiss if I did not mention that the version of Ninja Gaiden III in Trilogy is at a level of challenge that feels reasonable, even to a modern audience, so it might be worth a look. When you can actually enjoy playing the game, Ninja Gaiden III is a pretty good time!

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden II – The Dark Sword of Chaos (1990)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be looking at Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, the direct sequel to the NES Ninja Gaiden! With the revolutionary success of the NES Ninja Gaiden, Tecmo set about making a grander and even more ambitious follow-up to try to eclipse it. Could they achieve this lofty goal, or would familiarity and aging hardware result in diminishing returns? Read on to find out…

Love

  • More Ninja Gaiden, But Refined – For the most part, Ninja Gaiden II is more of the good stuff that we got in the original: precise controls, satisfying platforming, and fast combat. The platforming abilities especially have been improved for the better. Being able to to climb up and down any wall you grab onto is super helpful. In addition, jumps feel a tad floatier than the first game. A floaty jump can be annoying, but they’ve tuned it well here. This makes it easier to jump off of a wall and then immediately turn around to get “up” onto a platform, and can make it a easier to land a strike at the peak of your jump. If anything, combat has become even more precise. You need to time your sword strikes just right to land a hit: even a fraction of a second too early can result in you getting hit instead.
  • More Emphasis on Story – While the actual narrative of Ninja Gaiden II is very simple (the secret bad guy behind the first game has kidnapped Irene, go take him out), the emphasis on cinematic storytelling is even greater than it was in the first game. Cutscenes are interspersed a bit more frequently to tell the game’s story, and really do a good job of making you feel like you’re part of an epic quest. As far as NES narratives go, this is about the best you could look for outside of a JRPG.
  • Graphics – Ninja Gaiden was already a pretty good looking game for the NES, but the 8-bit pixel art in Ninja Gaiden II is downright gorgeous at times. In particular, the sun-soaked approach to the demon altar is jaw-dropping stuff and really gets you in the mood for an epic showdown!
  • Difficulty – The difficulty in the first Ninja Gaiden felt downright unfair towards the end, throwing so much at you that you had to either memorize the entire level, or manipulate the game’s hardware limitations to make it through with enough health to survive the boss encounter. Ninja Gaiden II seems to strike a somewhat fairer balance: most enemies move slower and more predictably, giving just enough time to figure out how to deal with them without feeling like you’re going to be overwhelmed. I also found that health items drop more frequently than they did in the first game (to the point where I didn’t know that the first game even had health drops at all!). Sure, this is still an old-school hard game with its own levels of bullshit, but it feels significantly more manageable than the first game or Ninja Gaiden (arcade) did… That said, I did end up giving up in the last level again, but I got a lot further and felt a hell of a lot more motivated to get better than I did playing the first game, so that’s a plus.

Mixed

  • Shadow Ninjas – A new feature of this game is that you can get up to two “ghosts” of Ryu which will follow you and attack whenever you do (including using your sub-weapons!), potentially killing nearby enemies or dealing bonus damage to a boss. On the one hand, I’ll welcome anything that makes these games’ difficulty a bit more manageable for me, and lining these shadow ninjas up to damage an enemy while you’re safely off to the side can be pretty satisfying. On the other hand, they feel borderline overpowered, especially since they can clone your ninja arts and just wipe the screen clean of enemies. This also results in a general sense of screen clutter. I’ve had several enemies rushing at me that I never noticed because of all the crap my shadow ninjas were doing at the same time. Finally, when you die, your shadow ninjas go away until you find more item pickups for them. This, frankly, just makes you feel like crap when it happens, leaving you significantly depowered and invariably making the run back to whatever killed you even harder than it was the first time. As cool as they can be, I’d honestly just prefer a game balanced around the player character taking on everything themselves.

Hate

  • Stage Gimmicks – By far the worst addition in Ninja Gaiden II is this game’s obsession with filling most of the levels with some sort of new gimmick… and they all suck.
    • First of all, there’s the gusts of wind that blow you around uncontrollably. You have to actively push against them, or they’ll blow you right off of platforms. This would be fine, but the main issue is that you simply cannot make a jump if the wind is against you. Winds change direction after a few seconds, so this can get you hit and/or killed if it happens at an inopportune time.
    • Then there’s the level where it’s pitch-black night and you can only see the path forward during the occasional lightning flash. Honestly, this gimmick was my least-hated one, despite being potentially lethal to have to make a jump while blind. I think that this frustration was mitigated by the sheer fact that Ninja Gaiden II‘s platforming controls are stellar, and this stage has been mercifully designed in a way that you aren’t dealing with this while simultaneously being overwhelmed by multiple enemies (also, y’know, emulation conveniences help too).
    • Then there’s the icy platforms. Is there a single person out there who loves ice levels in platformers? As you’d expect, these ice platforms cause you to slide, and standing still on one will take a couple seconds to build up momentum to be able to move again. This sort of imprecise platforming goes against the entire reason I enjoy these NES Ninja Gaiden games in the first place, why would you ruin a level like this?
    • Then there’s the level where large ruins in the foreground block your view of Ryu, platforms and enemies throughout the level. What idiot thought that it would be a good idea to have an action platformer level where you can see neither the action, nor the platforming!? I don’t think I even took a hit because of this, but it’s the principle that counts!

Overall, I found Ninja Gaiden II to be a more fun experience than its predecessor. Tuning down the old-school difficulty just a smidgen makes its challenges something that I actually feel motivated to try to overcome. It’s basically just a more refined version of its predecessor, but that’s all it really needs to be!

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (1988)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be going back to the “true” beginning of this franchise: the other 1988 Ninja Gaiden game released on the NES! Despite sharing a name, publisher, and a release year, the two games share nothing in common. While the arcade game was a side-scrolling beat ’em up in the vein of Double Dragon, this NES game was a side-scrolling action-platformer in the vein of the original Castlevania. That said, the arcade Ninja Gaiden didn’t exactly hold up to the test of time, would this console attempt fare any better? Read on to find out…

For this playthrough, I used the original NES Ninja Gaiden. There is also a SNES re-release of the first three games in the trilogy, fittingly-titled Ninja Gaiden Trilogy, which slightly improves/alters the graphics. However, this re-release is generally considered inferior for how it fails to translate some aspects of the original experience (eg, missing parallax scrolling, altered graphics affecting the tone of certain scenes, much worse music, etc), and the controls are noticeably less-precise, which makes it a more frustrating experience. In general, it’s considered a rushed, low-quality re-release, so most fans recommend playing the originals instead. For this Love/Hate series, I played the NES originals unless otherwise noted.

Love

  • Precision – If there’s one word you could use to describe Ninja Gaiden on NES, it’s “precise”. The game’s controls are immaculate, giving you very fine control over your jumps and near-immediate feedback when you attack with your weapon. This core strength just makes the rest of the gameplay feel very satisfying as you learn to expertly line up your jumps and time your attacks.
  • Combat – Compared to Ninja Gaiden (arcade)’s extremely sluggish combat system, Ninja Gaiden on NES is incredibly snappy. Sword strikes are fast, one-shotting all regular enemies and destroying most projectiles. Despite having only two buttons and a d-pad to work with, the game also features several special weapons and techniques that you find and equip in the overworld (again, which operate like Castlevania‘s sub-weapons). They’re mapped to up + attack, which is good enough to pull off when you need it, while not accidentally using them when you weren’t intending to.
  • Platforming – Ninja Gaiden is as much a platformer as it is an action game, and those precise controls really help in this regard. Jumping feels very intuitive and landing where you want to rarely presents a problem. Any deaths from falls will almost always be down to enemy attacks or your own errors rather than the game’s controls. The game’s platforming also is enhanced due to Ryu’s ability to grab onto walls, which allows him to cling to them and then jump off. This ability provides some really creative and fun platforming opportunities that you wouldn’t expect from a game this old.
  • Narrative Presentation – Ninja Gaiden was revolutionary at the time of its release for featuring fully-fledged, animated cutscenes. Some games had experimented with this concept, but Ninja Gaiden was one of the first on NES to showcase it and to make story presentation a core part of the experience. These animated cutscenes are actually pretty lengthy too, totaling around twenty minutes of runtime! While the story itself is still just b-movie level stuff (the bad guy steals the demon statues to summon a slumbering demon and Ryu needs to get them back), it takes this plot more seriously than its arcade contemporary and lacks that campy tone as a result. I dare say that the ambition on display here arguably makes this game’s narrative a bit more compelling than some of its 3D-era successors.

Hate

  • NES Difficulty – NES-era games are notorious for their ridiculous and downright unfair levels of difficulty, and Ninja Gaiden is known for being one of the toughest of the bunch. While the game’s great controls and combat mitigate the frustration, surviving in this game often comes down to a matter of luck, or memorization of enemy placements through trial and error. It gets so bad that you end up having to manipulate the game’s spawn system, moving back and forth in specific ways to de-spawning enemies to clear a path forward. Beating the game is certainly doable with practice and skill, so it is somewhat satisfying to get to grips with, but it’s asking for a lot of commitment up-front to deal with that frustration. Thankfully, modern conveniences, such as save states and rewinds, also help to mitigate this frustration, but by the time you face off with Bloody Malth and then move into act six, the game’s difficulty goes into overdrive. You’ll have to navigate an overwhelming number of enemies, make near-frame-perfect jumps to avoid certain attacks, and you don’t even have a way to heal any damage you may end up taking. As the ultimate piss-off, the game ends with a triple boss gauntlet, where you get thrown all the way back to the start of act six if you fail. It’s just punishingly difficult and merciless, demanding perfection if you want to see the end credits. Even with save states as a fallback, the frustration wasn’t worth it for me: I gave up in act six and just Youtubed the finale.
  • FUCKING BIIIIIIIRDS!!! – This ties into the previous section, but fuck birds. These flapping bastards will spawn in as you go to jump, nailing you mid-air when you cannot react and sending you to a cheap death. Even if you know they’re coming, they move erratically, potentially landing a hit on you that you simply cannot stop with an attack of your own. I am not exaggerating when I say that these dickheads are the most annoying basic enemy in the entire franchise.

In spite of its ridiculous level of difficulty, Ninja Gaiden is well-worth trying out, even today. Given that the NES was the most popular console of its day, Ninja Gaiden‘s narrative presentation was nothing short of revolutionary, influencing all future games that would adopt more involved and cinematic narratives. The gameplay is quite fun too, although the signature old-school difficulty means that this is a game that you’ll go in to with the understanding that you probably will not see the end.

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Love/Hate: Ninja Gaiden (Arcade) (1988)

It’s time for the long-awaited Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series here on IC2S! This series has been a long time coming, largely down to me being an obsessive psycho: it wasn’t enough to play nearly every version of the modern Ninja Gaiden games, I had to go back to play the originals for the first time too! As a result, we’re kicking this series off with the 1988 arcade game, Ninja Gaiden (which is going to get confusing fast, because this is not even the only game named “Ninja Gaiden” which released in 1988)! As a rural child of the 90s, the arcade boom completely passed me by, so I was completely unfamiliar with this game going in. How does it hold up, both as a game and as a part of the Ninja Gaiden franchise? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Old-School Charm – Ninja Gaiden feels like a relic of the 80s, which gives it a lot of sincere charm that cannot be replicated. The game’s setup is pure 80s ninjasploitation B-movie cheese, with Ryu coming to America to beat up an assortment of weirdos dressed like Jason Voorhees and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The graphics are pretty rudimentary, but they would have looked pretty good in the arcades in 1988. While I didn’t experience that era myself, they still illicit some nostalgia from me, reminding me of the style and palette of MS-DOS games from the 90s. The end-level screens where you get an image of Ryu doing some comedic activity (ordering sushi in an extremely serious manner, gambling in a suit while still wearing his mask and flanked by a couple bunny girls, etc). Best of all though are some of its hilarious and memorable sequences, such as the infamous “CONTINUE?” screen which sees Ryu tied to a table as a buzzsaw lowers towards him (better put in those coins quickly!). For all its shortcomings, I can at least see how someone can enjoy the little hit of nostalgia this game brings with it.
  • Homoeroticism – This is the most 80s-gay game I’ve ever played. The game’s opening cutscene has a lingering shot of Ryu Hayabusa’s lusciously-rendered pixel art ass. You’ve got a bunch of shirtless muscle-bound men, leather daddies, and bears beating you down for the entire game. There are muscle men sea serpents… which would be weird enough, but the fact that you encounter them in the fucking Grand Canyon makes it all so much more bizarre. The final boss has a painted mural showing off his goddamn ass in his boss room! I’m not gay myself, but I found it very funny once I noticed how unusually homoerotic this game was. Honestly, it’s kind of refreshing: this is the kind of representation that the video game industry took away from us in the 90s when it began catering only to teenage boys!
SEE? I’M NOT KIDDING!!!

Mixed

  • The Sword – When you have a sword, this game’s combat is actually fun. You can kill all enemies in 1-2 hits and you knock them back, which gives you some crowd control options. Unfortunately, this is short-lived, because the sword is a random weapon pickup that only lasts for ten hits before it breaks, what the actual hell!? Why would you develop fun gameplay and then intentionally limit it to a matter of seconds? It makes it feel worse than if it was not there at all!
    • Side-note: this is the one game outside of the Dead or Alive series where Ryu Hayabusa is using his martial arts primarily. Dude is literally choosing to save the world with a handicap.
  • The Jump Throw – By jumping and then pressing the X button when landing near an enemy, Ryu will grab them and throw them across the screen. Not only does this damage them, but it also knocks them down and stops them from doing anything for a couple seconds. This kind of breathing room is crucial in this game’s combat, so you end up spamming the hell out of it for the entire game. By the way, I do mean the entire game, as every single boss can be jump-thrown as if they were a regular enemy. It’s to the point where it actively feels overpowered in a way that’s detrimental to the combat gameplay, since you’re putting yourself at a disadvantage unnecessarily by not using it.
    • Also: they literally recreated this move in the 3D games with the guillotine throw! I love those kinds of callbacks to the classics!

Hate

  • Arcade Game Design – Arcade games are inherently flawed due to their business model requiring them to be frustrating and unfair. Ninja Gaiden is no exception. Sure, emulation and modern re-releases have given us unlimited credits and save states, but their design is still infected to the core to be bullshit. Ninja Gaiden will throw you into fights with so many enemies that you can get stun-locked to death. You end up surviving, not by skill, but by exploiting the enemy AI to get cheap kills (ie, standing in a corner and spamming the X button to hit them the second they step into your reach, jumping to a lower level and then attacking them while they’re stuck in their climb animation). This bullshit got to its absolute worst in the last level, where most of the enemies you encounter will take off 66% of your health in a single hit! How are you expected to beat this, even with unlimited credits!? I got to the last level, but it was such a piss-off that I said “fuck it” and quit.
  • Hardware Limitations – Some of Ninja Gaiden‘s issues seem to stem from the very hardware it was forced to use:
    • There’s only three buttons and a d-pad for them to design the gameplay around, and one of those buttons ends up getting wasted on a “hold” move to grab onto platforms. It rarely gets used, and the cynic in me believes that it’s only here to make players forget about it and get some cheap deaths on the few occasions where it’s needed.
    • The 2.5D layout makes it hard to tell whether you will be able to hit an enemy who is right beside you or not. Judge wrong, and you will inevitably get hit instead.
    • There is very little variety to the enemies, and all the bosses are recycled wholesale multiple times (remember, this is a ~45 minute game with only six stages, so you’re going to notice how repetitive this is).
  • The Combat – Combat in this game somehow manages to be slow and tedious, despite simultaneously swarming you with enemies. This is largely because landing a “hit” is done with a three-strike combo animation (this goes for your attacks and your enemies’). As a result, every single fight is taking three times longer to complete than it needed to. It also makes taking a hit feel even more punishing and demoralizing as you sit there for a couple seconds waiting for the animation to play out.
  • FUCKING CLAW TRIO MOTHERFUCKERS – I WAS ABSOLUTELY RAGING WHILE FIGHTING THESE SONS OF BITCHES. This boss is what it sounds like: a trio of guys with claws. What makes them truly rage-inducing is that, when you hit them, they’ll usually dodge and then perform a counter-attack. The only way you can avoid damage is if you side-step immediately. This was bad enough the first time we fought them, but they show up again in the final stage and they now will one-shot you!!! It’s so overly-punishing and spiteful, I hate these bastards with the core of my being.

Ninja Gaiden arcade is a relic of its time. As far as side-scroller beat ’em ups go, it’s very basic and would be quickly eclipsed by much faster and more complex contemporaries. As a result, it just feels so slow, tedious, and repetitive. On its own merits, it does not hold up today at all and any enjoyment you’ll get out of the game will be more down to nostalgia and curiosity rather than any actual compelling design. That said, it only takes about an hour to beat and modern emulation stymies its most egregious design choices, so at least it’s a curiosity that won’t take up too much of your time.

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Halo: Final Thoughts (BONUS)

And with that, we have completed another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! I’m so glad that I managed to finally get through the Halo games – like I said at the start, I’ve had a lot of enthusiasm for this series, long before I got a chance to play them for myself. As you can see with my Top 100 Video Games of All-Time list, Halo 3 was such a well-crafted shooter that it made the list, and Halo 2 even cracked my top 25, which is pretty wild for a game I played for the first time only a few months prior! Funnily enough, my son has somehow found himself interested in Halo after getting some of the Mega Bloks figures. During the course of these playthroughs, we had a few magical evenings where he would sneak down past his bedtime and excitedly watch me play some Halo for a little bit, delighting in seeing Master Chief kick some ass before being sent back to bed. Hopefully I’m instilling in him some of that same wonder that first made me fall in love with this franchise.

As a bonus, I started 2025 with a throw-back session of Halo 3 multiplayer with friends. It was absolutely glorious, we all had a blast fragging each other. I honestly think that these games’ multiplayer modes might be even better today than they were on release – it’s so refreshing to play a multiplayer shooter that doesn’t have any battle passes, live service bullshit, paid cosmetics, daily/weekly challenges, etc. It’s just pure, unadulterated fun, tuned just the way you like it, thanks to Halo‘s fantastic custom game options!

Halo Games Ranked

Here is how I would rank the mainline Halo games’ campaigns:

If you read all of my Love/Hate articles, then I feel like these rankings should be pretty self-explanatory. However, these rankings would be a bit controversial in the Halo fandom, so…

  • S-tier: Halo 2
    • Halo 2 is simultaneously the most unabashedly fun game in the franchise, and expands the narrative scope to a far grander and cinematic degree. Is it more linear? Sure, but I do not particularly mind when we get linear games like this (also, I think people overstate how open the original Halo was). Halo 2 is a fantastically-curated injection of fun.
  • A-tier: Halo 3
    • Gameplay-wise, Halo 3 is probably the tightest, most well-balanced, and best-developed campaign in the franchise. However, its narrative is pretty weak for a trilogy-closer, especially in comparison to its predecessor, which makes me less-enthusiastic about it. I love a satisfying ending, so Halo 3‘s weaker narrative is a legitimate mark against it for me.
  • B-tier: Halo Infinite, Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo: Reach
    • Halo Infinite at the top of B-tier and ahead of Combat Evolved is probably my most controversial opinion on this list, but I loved its gunplay that much. If not for the open world hurting the game’s level design, this could have had a serious shot of hitting A-tier, that’s how much fun I had with it.
    • For a lot of Halo fans, Combat Evolved is their favourite game in the franchise, so seeing it rank below Infinite is probably infuriating them right now. I’ll reiterate what I said before: the level design is just not fun to play. Between confusing levels with reused assets making it difficult to tell where you’re supposed to go, and repetitive encounter design, I spend way too much time in Combat Evolved not enjoying myself to truly love it. That said, it laid a rock-solid foundation and I really have to give it credit for how revolutionary it was on release.
    • Halo: Reach was somewhat disappointing to me. Its narrative and characters just didn’t resonate with me, and the fairly substantial changes to the series’ gameplay makes it less fun to play than Halo 3 was for me. It just kind of plodded along and then, suddenly, it was over. It definitely gets better as it goes, but I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I wanted to.
  • C-tier: Halo 4, Halo 3: ODST
    • Halo 4 operates kind of like fridge logic: you enjoy yourself when you’re playing it, but when it’s all over and then you think back on it, you decide that you enjoyed it less and less. It’s decent, but definitely a step down after one of the greatest game trilogies of all-time.
    • Halo 3: ODST down this low is probably the second-most controversial opinion on this list. Some people will say that this is their favourite campaign in the franchise, and claim it’s so deep and emotional: what game are you people playing that I missed out on? I cannot stand the characters’ dialogue, the semi-open world sections are dull, and the combat encounters are poorly-balanced.
  • D-tier: Halo 5: Guardians
    • Halo 5 was obviously going to be at the bottom of this list, to the point where I almost considered putting a tier between C and D and calling it “comically empty space to emphasize how much Halo 5 sucks”. It’s a bad Halo game in particular, but it’s not even a good co-op shooter either.

Halo Weapons Ranked

There are a lot of weapons over the course of this series, so naturally I wanted to rank them. Note that I am not ranking each individual weapon for each time it appeared in a game; rather, I am only using the best version of each weapon, which will be noted on the image. Some weapons are technically “different” weapons in subsequent entries, but if it’s just “_____ with a different name”, I’m just going to cover the peak version of that gun. Some weapons don’t really have a “peak” version, so I’ll go with the game that introduced them instead (eg, the sniper rifle is great and basically the same in every Halo game, so I’ve assigned it to Combat Evolved). Finally, Halo 5 and Infinite have “upgraded” versions of each weapon, which I’m ignoring entirely, since they would throw off the entire list.

Okay, got it? Here’s my ranking of the weapons:

There’s no way in hell that I’m explaining all these individually, so I’ll let this list speak for itself. However, I will break these down by game to see which one has the best weapons! There are 60 weapons on this list, but I’m going to exclude the 7 grenades since they can’t really be associated with one particular game, for a total of 53 weapons across 8 games to look at. Points will be awarded with the first place (M90 Shotgun) getting 53 points, the second place (Beamrifle) getting 52 points, and so on.

So, with that said, here’s how the points broke down:

  • Halo: Combat Evolved: 169 points (42.25 average)
  • Halo 2: 253 points (36.14 average)
  • Halo 3: 255 points (23.18 average)
  • Halo 3: ODST: Literally fucking zero, lol.
  • Halo: Reach: 151 points (16.78 average)
  • Halo 4: 249 points (27.69 average)
  • Halo 5: Guardians: 67 points (33.5 average)
  • Halo Infinite: 287 points (26.09 average)

Some observations from this data:

  • Halo: Combat Evolved has only a few weapons that have stood the test of time compared to its sequels, hence its fairly low point total. However, those weapons that have continued to stand out are top-tier (literally, that game’s shotgun is insane and topped this list without question).
  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, Halo 2‘s weapons have also really stood out for being great, with the second highest overall average and a very high point total. I would say that, arguably, this would make it the strongest overall roster (if not for the completely outclassed Brute Plasma Rifle, this game’s overall average would be nearly identical to Combat Evolved).
  • Halo 3 is, unfortunately, brought down by its glut of very mediocre weapons, which tank its overall average. It’s probably got the best-balanced weapons of the entire franchise, but it doesn’t really reflect well on this list, because many of its weapons end up getting poached by other entries in the franchise where they performed better.
  • Halo 3: ODST getting zero points doesn’t surprise me much. No weapon in that game really stood out to me, and it plays worse than Halo 3, so this was kind of inevitable.
  • Halo: Reach has a lot of unique weapons, so it was inevitably going to get some points here, but having the lowest overall average and a very low point total shows just how “good” these additions were. If not for a series-best Needler, things would be pretty dire.
  • Halo 4 also introduced a lot of new weapons, four of which ended up being personal favourites, which give it a solid overall average. The guns here are pretty good, what else can I say? Oh, one thing to note though: if I was counting grenades, then Halo 4‘s average would get tanked, because Splinter and Pulse grenades SUCK.
  • Halo 5: Guardians only had two entries on this list: the most overpowered Plasma Pistol in the franchise, and the Splinter Turret. All of the other Promethean weapons were more interesting and fun in Halo 4, so this game gets absolutely screwed as a result… which is good, because it’s what it deserves.
  • Like 4, Halo Infinite introduces a glut of new weapons to the franchise, but most of these are incredibly fun to use, hence its highest overall point total. However, it has a fairly low overall average due to the really generic UNSC rifles and the awful Disruptor pistol.

Halo Enemies Ranked

Like the previous category, I’m taking into account only the “best” version of any particular enemy type across the series. I’m also not differentiating the sub-classes of enemies (Elite Zealots, Brute Chieftains, etc), each ranking has taken them all as a whole. The main exception to this are Jackals, which have a few very distinct variants, which I have given their own entries:

And, just for fun, we’ll do the same scoring system as last time (out of 21 total entries):

  • Halo: Combat Evolved: 96 points (10.66 average)
  • Halo 2: 27 points (9 average)
  • Halo 3: 0 points… ouch.
  • Halo 3: ODST: 9 points, both total and average.
  • Halo: Reach: 15 points… again, both total, and average.
  • Halo 4: 18 points (9 average)
  • Halo 5: Guardians: 18 points (9 average… I’m noticing a pattern here)
  • Halo Infinite: 27 points (13.5 average)

I definitely need to give some observations from this data since, now that I have it call collated, it’s skewed pretty badly by the small sample size:

  • It should really go without saying that Halo: Combat Evolved skews these numbers significantly, claiming 9 out of the 20 enemy types on this list. This game established how the core enemy types play (Grunts < Jackals < Elites). In nearly every subsequent game, they’ve either functioned identically, or they’ve been notably worse. It’s amazing how well they captured the fundamental essence of these enemy types right out of the gate, and the game deserves all the accolades for it. However, the Flood enemies drag the total down somewhat – they’re decent as a way to shake-up the core gameplay, but they are very repetitive to fight and you quickly tire of dealing with pod infectors and bursters, not to mention all the ones firing rocket launchers at you. The Sentinels are also really dull and ineffective enemies.
  • Halo 2 mostly continues the formula established by its predecessor, but it does introduce a couple new enemy types. Most notably are the notorious Jackal snipers. They are potentially lethal, but they’re handled fairly in my opinion and are a pretty ingenious addition to the formula. The Drones are also a fairly unique and underutilized enemy type, but they’re at their best here in this game. Unfortunately, this game also has the Sentinel Enforcers, those annoying-ass, large, shielded sentinels that you have to blow apart piece by piece to defeat. Every time I had to fight these things, it was a total slog. The only thing keeping them from the bottom of the list is that they’re at least an uncommon enemy type.
  • Halo 3 had zero enemies make the list… which, I guess, isn’t too odd, since it’s basically a trilogy-closer and isn’t introducing anything completely new. In my opinion, its enemies aren’t doing anything particularly new or notable compared to its predecessors or successors.
  • Halo 3: ODST, on the other hand, actually gets some points this time, for the Engineers. These guys have been very under-utilized through the series, mainly because they aren’t impactful by themselves and have the potential to be annoying when they buff all nearby enemies with an overshield. I didn’t find them that annoying in my playthroughs, hence their fairly middling placement.
  • Halo: Reach is another game that basically just has the same enemies as before, although it does introduce one new enemy type: the Jackal Skirmishers. These guys aren’t as fun as regular Jackals, but they do shake-up their playstyle substantially – instead of being slow with a big shield, they’re fast with a could small shields. A solid, late-game introduction to the series.
  • Halo 4 introduced the Prometheans… which doesn’t help it too much, because there were only a couple different types of Prometheans, and they aren’t as fun to fight as the Covenant are. In particular, the Watchers are known for being really annoying, due to running away and resurrecting Knights. I did not have much issue with them in my playthroughs, but I could see them being lower in some peoples’ estimation.
  • Halo 5: Guardians, we actually have a couple interesting notes here. The Knights are significantly more fun to fight than they were in Halo 4, hence their fairly high placement in B-tier. However, I really disliked the Armiger Soldiers, which are kind of like mini-version of the Halo 4 Knights, which dragged the game’s overall score down.
  • Finally, we have Halo Infinite, which pulls off a coup by finally perfecting the Brutes. These guys have been a questionable enemy type for so long in the franchise, and have seen so many re-designs to try to get them to work, but I actually really enjoy fighting them in this game. Infinite also features the Skimmers, which show up on occasion and sort of act like the Drones. They don’t make a huge impact, but the Brutes were so good that, funnily enough, they manage to give Infinite the second highest average. Obviously, this is due to the tiny sample sizes, and due to Combat Evolved hogging most of the best enemy types, but funny to note nonetheless.

What Does the Future Hold For Halo?

The future is pretty uncertain for Halo. Halo Infinite‘s launch went well, but it very quickly bled players due to monetization and content issues, and the game has underperformed as a result. 343 Industries has also suffered mass layoffs on both the management and developer level, the studio itself has been rebranded as “Halo Studios”, and they will be using Unreal Engine for any future games rather than Halo‘s traditional, proprietary engine. So… honestly, no one really knows what will happen, but at this point, Microsoft has mismanaged the franchise so badly that there’s no sense in getting too excited for the future.

Personally, what would I like to see for a future Halo game? Well, as much as I enjoyed Infinite, I don’t think it’s the blueprint for the franchise’s future. You can’t just keep making Master Chief fight the Covenant on a Halo ring over and over again. You can get away with a throw-back once in a while, but when that’s done, you’re stuck in the same place you were at before.

I’d also prefer a more curated, linear level design again, but I am fine with the games remaining open world if they can refine the formula and make it more interesting to avoid modern-day open world fatigue. If we can keep the gunplay as good as it is in Infinite, then they’ll already be a long way towards success.

Aaaaaand that’s it for another Love/Hate series! I already have my next one in mind and will begin playing/writing it soon. Writing this one took me a couple months, so don’t expect the next one any time sooner than that. In the meantime, I’ll continue writing and posting here whenever the mood strikes me. (Also, I will continue/finish the Resident Evil Love/Hate series at some point in the future. I have not forgotten it or shelved it for good! I’m just having fun enjoying other things right now!)

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Love/Hate: Halo Infinite

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the most recent game in the franchise Halo Infinite. After all the shit 343 Industries had put the fanbase through, expectations were really low for this game, and then got even worse when people saw the reveal trailer, which necessitated a delay to polish the game up for launch. Since then, I’m aware that the game has been through some major highs and lows, so I wasn’t really expecting a whole lot going in. Could 343 finally right the ship and deliver a worthy follow-up to Bungie’s trilogy? Read on to find out…

Love

  • The Gunplay – As far as I’m concerned, Halo Infinite has the best gunplay of the franchise since Halo 3. Shooting enemies just feels so good. This is largely because your shots feel like they have real impact when they land and there’s some really satisfying feedback that goes along with it. This is best exemplified with the big power weapons, which impact with a massive explosion of fire and colour and a satisfyingly loud bang. Even smaller, standard weapons like the Mauler pack a punch and are really satisfying to blast away your foes with. It feels like they took a cue from Doom (2016) and put a ton of effort into making sure that combat makes you feel like a total badass.
  • Enemies Have Personality Again! – The Covenant in the first couple Halo games had so much personality, making them into some of the most fun video game enemies to fight. Grunts screaming and running when you started killing their comrades, contrasted with the tactical, honourable combat of the Elites made the game feel like it wasn’t just a simple shooting gallery. This was eroded away over the course of the series, with them eventually just feeling like regular video game bad guys that you need to shoot to win the game. In Halo Infinite though, the Covenant soldiers have so much personality again. This is largely due to them being extremely chatty – you’ll hear Grunts acting arrogant, only to immediately start squealing and freaking out when they see you, Jackals obsessing over collecting your bounty, Brutes yelling taunts, and Elites steeling themselves for battle, etc. All this chatter almost makes me feel sorry as I mow them down by the dozen.
    • Also, on a somewhat related note, the enemy variety in this game is fantastic. There have been different tiers of each Covenant troop in all previous games, but they’ve been expanded here and are more notably differentiated in my opinion. For example, let’s look at just the Brutes: we’ve got the standard Brutes, multiple variants in heavy armour, guys with jet packs and heavy weapons, chieftains with various weapon configurations, and even melee-only berserkers who rush head-long at you. Oh, and any one of these can have shields and various weapon combinations, making the variety of combat scenarios even among one enemy type truly vast. Good God, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I actually really enjoy fighting Brutes in this game!
    • On another related note, I love the UNSC banter in this game. They spout all sorts of cheesy one-liners which perfectly capture the feel of early 2000s video game writing.
  • New Weapons – As usual, Halo Infinite introduces a bunch of new and remixed weapons and, due to this game’s emphasis on fun gameplay, there are some truly awesome additions. My personal favourites are the Skewer (which fires a massive, impaling spear which one-shots most enemies), the Hydra (which is kind of like a Halo version of the 40k boltgun, with an alt-fire mode that homes in on enemies!), and the Heatwave (a shotgun that allows you to set its spread to go horizontal or vertical, making it much more accurate at longer ranges). Making things even better, most guns have special upgraded versions which you can get, which make them even more devastating to use. Legitimately, the only weapon I don’t like is the Disruptor Pistol, but everything else I will gleefully pickup and mow down the enemy with.
  • Grappling Hook – Ever since Halo 3 introduced equipment pickups, these games have really struggled to introduce an equipment ability which really sticks with you. The Grappling Hook is easily the best addition to the core formula, bar none. I (perhaps notoriously) hate open world games with dull traversal, but the grappling hook makes swinging about this world quicker and more entertaining, while also opening up space for creative mobility during combat. Making things better, the grappling hook has offensive abilities too, allowing to you grab distant weapons and items, and you can also hook an enemy to swing in for a melee strike. It can also be upgraded to stun enemies, which can be really helpful when you’re getting beat down by a particular guy with a power weapon and need to close the distance to them quickly.
  • The Story – Halo Infinite‘s narrative is definitely an improvement on the previous two 343 Industries games. While Halo 4 was bogged down by lore and Halo 5 was vapid and rushed, Infinite takes a more cinematic, character-driven approach that makes it feel more akin to Metal Gear Solid 5 than its two predecessors. The overall story here is basically a throwback: you’re on a Halo ring and the Covenant Banished are trying to activate it, so you have to stop them. The villains also have a fairly large role in the narrative and often show up to taunt you directly. So, while they are fairly generic and melodramatic, at least they leave more of an impression than, say, the Didact or Eternal Warden did. It takes a while to get there, but this story does end up being fairly entertaining by the end.

Mixed

  • Scan Pulse – Halo Infinite introduces a “scan” button, which will send out a pulse which briefly points highlights all weapons, enemies, and interactable objects in the vicinity, and will display where your objectives are. It’s definitely handy, but it also just feels like a crutch: I constantly want to press this button to make sure that I’m not missing anything. The only reason I don’t do it is because that’s really fucking annoying to keep up, so I just resign myself to missing things. That said, there are times where you actually do need it, because you can’t find some random panel where you need to press a button to advance the mission, and it won’t make that clear to you. Maybe it’s just like this because modern games have gotten so big and detailed that it’s way too easy to miss anything important, but it feels like an inelegant solution to the problem.
  • The Characters – A character-driven story needs its characters, and while they are a bit of a mixed bag, what we get here is an improvement on the last couple games overall. First of all, Master Chief is back to being the effortless badass he was in Halo 2, and those Doom (2016) influences have helped make his dry humour even more awesome. Where things get a bit more mixed is in the supporting cast:
    • The Pilot is a coward trying to flee, but gets caught up with Master Chief and becomes exasperated as he gets dragged into danger again and again. He can be somewhat annoying as a result, but he does grow on you as the game goes, and at least I can understand and sympathize with him.
    • The Weapon, on the other hand… I’m really mixed on her. She’s our new AI companion, who is an incomplete copy of Cortana that was supposed to find Cortana, destroy her, and then delete herself. However, upon Cortana’s deletion, the Weapon finds herself still operational, much to her confusion. Her personality is noticeably different compared to Cortana; the Weapon is much more childlike and inquisitive. While she is fairly well fleshed out as a character and I’m glad they’ve gone to the effort to differentiate her from Cortana, she just ends up being kind of annoying to me. Some of this is down to her dialogue, which can be fairly cringey. She’s also our objective-giver, so after every single objective you complete, she’ll say something along the lines of “oh hey we need to go find ____ to advance the story, lets go do it!” This bothers me, because I can just feel the developers prodding me every time she says something like this (which is a lot). Like… it’s an open world, I’ve got camps to capture and soldiers to rescue, I can see my objective markers, just let me do what I want to.
  • Open World Structure – I am fairly burnt out on open world games, so I was pretty concerned about how Halo Infinite would fare as a result. Luckily, it works out fairly well I’d say, although there are some pretty big caveats to that. One of the most revolutionary aspects of the early Halo games were their massive, open sandboxes, so going fully open-world just feels like an evolution of that concept. I think it’s best summed up this way: playing Halo Infinite is like playing Combat Evolved the way you imagined it in 2001. That said…
    • Big caveat #1: Halo Infinite is basically a carbon copy of the Far Cry open world structure which has become very tired in the past decade. For most of this game’s runtime, you’re just capturing bandit camps and dealing with a bunch of filler side quests which provide very little incentive to complete them, other than checking off some boxes on your mini-map and allowing you to spawn more powerful weapons and vehicles at captured bandit camps. Surprisingly, this didn’t wear thin for me (perhaps because the game has a fairly reasonable playtime), but if you’ve been playing more open world games than I have, then this may be a bigger issue for you.
    • Big caveat #2: Halo Infinite has the worst level design of the entire franchise, bar none. Since 343 Industries cannot curate encounters or force you to complete missions in a certain order, objectives are absolutely swarming with enemies, and your missions are extremely generic: press X buttons to expose power cores that you need to blow up, kill all bad guys in the area, blow up X objectives, etc. This would be unacceptable in any previous Halo game, but for some reason, being open world makes this less of an issue for me, even though in the back of my mind I know I prefer a more curated, creative, and diversified approach. The gunplay in this game is just so good that it props up issues like this which would have sunk a weaker game. I think this is why, as much fun as I was having playing the game, I just didn’t find myself wanting to play it as much as some of the other games in the franchise, and my play sessions end up being shorter and more spread out than for, say, Halo 2 and 3.

Hate

  • Skipping Over the End of Halo 5 is Cowardly – As much as I enjoy this game’s throw-back to classic Halo and its fantastic gunplay, I just cannot get over the fact that it skips over the end of Halo 5 and basically soft-reboots the entire franchise to not have to bother dealing with the consequences of it. For all my problems with Halo 5, the ending was downright bold. Only a handful of humans managed to escape Cortana before she fires EMP bombs at all worlds resisting the AI takeover, blasting them into the stone age. This hinted at a future game that’s scrappier and lower-tech, where we have to scavenge for better weapons and armour, akin to The Terminator. Plus, Halo 5 barely even started to deal with Cortana as our new main villain, so having her die off-screen before Halo Infinite begins is borderline insane and makes this entire extended universe of continuity feel like a joke. Instead, it’s back to the ol’ status quo: Chief fighting the Covenant on a Halo ring. Is that all this franchise will ever be? Because that’s a depressing future if it is…
    • Granted, Infinite does touch on this storyline in its final hours, but it’s done in such a way where it feels like we skipped over an entire game’s worth of plot and consequences… like, imagine if Star Wars went from Attack of the Clones to A New Hope. It would feel kind of weird and disjointed, right? That’s kind of what playing Infinite is like.
  • Load Times – Halo Infinite has some of the longest load times that I’ve seen in a game since the PS3 era. The first time I loaded up the game, it legitimately took at least a minute just to get to the main menu. Thankfully, it loads quicker from there on, but if you’re like me and are playing this game for the campaign, there’s an extra “fuck you” in store: the game always loads into the multiplayer menu, so you have to then select “Campaign” and then go through another lengthy loading screen to play that. Thankfully, once you get in-game, there are basically no more loading screens, but it’s still enough friction up-front that I sometimes didn’t even want to bother starting the game up.
  • The Other Equipment Choices Suck – If there’s one big issue with the grappling hook, it’s that it’s arguably too good… which is actually kind of a problem, because you have other equipment you can use. However, they are so inferior in comparison that they aren’t worth using at all. Like, the first equipment you can switch to is the Threat Sensor, which… highlights nearby enemies. Big fucking whoop. The only time you might want to use this is when an Elite pulls out an energy sword and uses its active camouflage. However, I would literally rather blindly fight an invisible enemy that can one-shot me than go through the convoluted sequence of button presses to switch from the grappling hook to the threat sensor… so that’s exactly what I did. I legitimately never used any piece of equipment other than the grappling hook the entire game, and never felt like I missed out for this.
  • Rough Around the Edges – Halo Infinite is a game that ended up needing to be delayed for a full year in order to get it into a shippable state… and thank God they did, because the game we got is still pretty rough at times, so I can only imagine what it would have been like if it released in 2020! I’m talking some pretty stiff animations, questionable optimization (substantial frame drops are not an uncommon occurrence), random bugs, weird ragdolling (especially when you die), guns turning into unintelligible blobs that stretch infinitely across the game world, etc. Oh, and there’s one mission where you will be told that you need to visit four beacons, which will be marked on your map and everything. However, these beacons do not allow you to progress until after you’re told about the mission, at which point you are expected to walk forward a little bit to actually trigger it. On two separate occasions, I fast travelled away before the mission triggered without even realizing it, and was then left completely confused about why I couldn’t do anything at these beacons. This could be a minor annoyance, but the area you need to go to to trigger the mission is far away from any fast travel point you will have unlocked up to this point, which turns it into a giant, confusing headache which is far too easy to find yourself mired in.
  • Overpowered Weapon/Vehicle Spawns – As you complete objectives in Halo Infinite, you will get “Valor” points which allow you to spawn a chosen weapon or vehicle if your Valor is above a specific threshold. Initially this will allow you to call for an assault rifle or a mongoose ATV, but you quickly start getting the ability to call in upgraded versions of the game’s strongest weapons, or even goddamn Scorpion tanks! It’s cool that they give you the choice, I guess…? But, at a certain point, you have to actively choose not to trivialize the game if you want to have fun. It also robs that feeling of excitement in the tank sections in previous games, as it was no longer this surprise awaiting you, and I just kept finding myself starting every mission with the exact same overpowered guns.
  • Worst Vehicle Physics in the Franchise – You can spawn in any vehicle you want at forward operating bases (FOBs) that you capture. This sounds great, especially since it can take a few minutes to get where you’re going in this open world… however, I usually just hoof it on foot, because the vehicle physics in this game suck, particularly for the warthog and mongoose. Like, they control about as well as ever, but they crash, flip over, and get stuck on the terrain constantly, which I can only assume is due to the open world structure and a lack of polish.

Halo Infinite really surprised me. I had heard that its campaign was decent, but I’m so sick of open world games that I was not expecting much at all. Its gunplay was so immediately fun though that it sucked me in. It may look like there’s a lot of things I hated about this game, but honestly, these are all nitpicks. For literally every single one of these complaints, you can add onto the end “…the gunplay sure is fucking great though”. I had an absolute blast with Halo Inifinite, to the point where open world bullshit and a cowardly plot reset couldn’t even dampen my enthusiasm for the game.

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Love/Hate: Halo 5 – Guardians

Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over Halo 5: Guardians. I’ve been well aware of this game’s reputation long before I played it: stories about the marketing being deceptive, the game being full of repetitive boss fights, being downed constantly in co-op, and a despised story. Honestly though, I didn’t dislike Halo 4 as much as some people, so I’m going into this with an open mind. Maybe it can shake-up the series formula in some interesting ways? Maybe all the shit people sling at 343 Industries is unwarranted? Read on to find out…

Love

  • Meridian – Halo games haven’t really bothered to explore the wider cultures of humanity. That sort of thing is generally relegated to the EU novels. As a result, it was fascinating when the game heads to the human frontier world, Meridian, and we get to see the tension between the UNSC and the colonists. In the Halo universe, the SPARTAN program was developed to crush dissent from separatist colonists. The animosity that the people of Meridian hold towards the SPARTANs is palpable, and the way that the SPARTANs have to be extra polite to avoid pissing them off makes for some legitimate tension. Perhaps the most interesting thing here though is that Meridian’s governor, Sloan, is an AI. This took me by surprise, but it’s kind of brilliant: of course humanity would have AI politicians, it makes so much sense to implement. Making this even more interesting, Sloan is in the early onset of rampancy, making his actions somewhat erratic and making the whole situation even more tense, since he could go off the deep end at any moment.
  • Quality of Life Improvements – In its efforts to modernize the franchise, Halo 5 has some nice quality of life improvements. One that I particularly liked was that you can now swap seats in a vehicle by pressing A instead of having to go through an animation to leave the vehicle and then manually move to find the seat you want. The game also allows you to give simple commands to your squadmates, which they will follow fairly reliably.
  • More Movement Options – In line with Halo 5‘s QoL improvements and modernizations, movement has been overhauled to be much faster and more in-line with the FPS games of the day. You can now grab ledges while jumping, do a charging attack or a ground pound, do a quick rocket thruster dodge, aim in mid-air to float momentarily… oh, and you can just sprint endlessly now too. As you would expect, this shakes-up the series’ core game feel and pace substantially.

Mixed

  • Modernized Controls – When I was playing through Combat Evolved, I kept getting tripped up by its old-school control scheme (R1 to reload and pickup items? L3 to crouch? B to melee? L2 to throw grenade?). FPS control schemes have become so standardized that it’s weird going back to an older game and trying to get acclimated. However… I just played through six Halo games that all retained that control scheme. Going into Halo 5, I was used to that traditional scheme and was completely thrown off when it played exactly like a modern shooter (B to reload/pickup items, L2 to aim down sights, L1 to throw grenade, etc). I didn’t like this at first… but, honestly, this is just me complaining about the game being different. Changing the controls to be more familiar to modern gamers is fine and does not take away from anything. It’s not even like Resident Evil‘s tank controls, where you’re being nostalgic for a fundamentally different way to experience those games: you could remap the controls if you wanted to and it would play the exact same.

Hate

  • Fucking Loot Boxes – This game has paid loot boxes in it. Do I even need to say more than that? That, by itself, should give you an idea of the sort of bullshit you’re going to be subjected to in this game. Strap in, we’re just getting started here…
  • It’s a COD Clone – The back half of the PS3/Xbox 360 era was a graveyard for FPS games trying to emulate the success of Call of Duty. Every franchise was bending over backwards to change or dilute its core tone and gameplay systems in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator COD fan. Here’s the thing though: every one of those games that went all-in on mass appeal failed. By the time that the new console generation was rolling around, this was pretty well known and we were getting far less COD clones. Hell, with the dawn of the PS4 and Xbox One, even COD had outstayed its welcome and was facing some pretty heavy backlash. So, I can only imagine that 343 Industries looked at all these failed COD clones and said “We can do worse”. I could feel the influence of Call of Duty on this franchise since at least Reach, but in Halo 5 it is blatant (even down to the aforementioned modernized controls, which basically just bring the franchise into parity with Call of Duty). Nearly every bit of gameplay that was distinctly “Halo” has been stripped away in favour of appealing to the Call of Duty crowd.
    • The biggest impact of this approach is that the combined arms, open sandbox structure that most Halo games employ (to varying degrees) has been largely eliminated in favour of much more linear shooting galleries. In their place, 343 Industries have instead inserted several bombastic, scripted set-piece action moments that Call of Duty campaigns are famous for. These moments just feel vapid, the sort of noisy light shows that we had largely tired of years earlier. Meanwhile, the linear levels are painfully mediocre, with every level being a series of “kill all enemies in this room to unlock the door, then move onto the next room and do the same, etc”. These moments were always the weak, filler portions of the previous Halo games, so seeing that be the core gameplay loop here is pretty dire. That said, if this was the only problem, then Halo 5 would just be mediocre. However…
  • Co-op Focus Screws the Game Design – Halo games are famous for their campaigns which can be played through entirely in co-op. I actually was unaware that you could play up to four-player co-op in these games as early as Halo 3, but you honestly would never realize it: the campaign was clearly designed for single-player and is balanced as such. Halo 5, on the other hand, is designed from the ground up with four players in mind, which means that things have changed quite a bit…
    • Pity Halo 5‘s level design: not only is it getting fucked for being a COD clone, but then the four player co-op comes in to fuck it from an entirely different angle. To accommodate entertaining four people at once, combat encounters are far less focused. Each area feels like a miniature multiplayer arena, where you start the encounter by picking a lane and then clear out all the enemies there until everyone has cleared out their zone. You end up getting swarmed by enemy forces from all angles, including occasions where you have enemies spawning behind you. The game ended up reminding me way too much of Operation Raccoon City, although the core gunplay was good enough that it’s not quite that bad at least.
    • Since you can be revived now, Halo 5 is simultaneously more forgiving and more punishing than other Halo games. Sure, you can get revived by your partners if you play sloppily, but you also get a lot more overpowered enemy attacks that will either one-shot you (such as the Eternal Warden’s melee attack), or which have splash damage which is difficult to negate (such as incineration cannons, the Hunter fuel rod cannon, etc). Naturally, you are going to hear “I’m down, need assistance!” a lot.
  • The Story – Halo 4‘s story was a mess, but at least it had a solid emotional core that you could latch onto. Halo 5 ditches much of the sci-fi gobbledygook that plagued its predecessor, but it’s no less confusing for it…
    • First of all, the narrative is poorly conveyed. The actual plot here is pretty simple: Cortana is back and evil now, Master Chief goes AWOL to try to find her, SPARTAN Locke is tasked with apprehending Master Chief, and they all get caught up in Cortana’s plot to resurrect the Guardians – giant Forerunner robots which were used to enforce order in the galaxy. Good luck keeping track of what’s going on though, because Halo 5 just assumes you already know what’s happening at any given time. Like… to give you an idea of how bad the storytelling in this game is, the game just suddenly assumes that Cortana is evil before we actually have any reason to believe that to be the case. You’re just expected to go along with it, but that’s a massive change that needs some time to breathe. Or how about the Guardians: they’re supposed to be the big threat that the game revolves around, but we never really get a sense of what they do or why they’re so scary. Again, the game just assumes that you already know what’s going on.
    • Then there’s the inciting incident which puts this entire plot into motion: Master Chief gets knocked out, hallucinates about Cortana, who gives him some mysterious directives, and then he just decides to do what she told him to (to the point of disobeying his superiors to do so). Like… what the fuck? I get that Halo 3 and 4 had weird hallucinations with Cortana, but they never really came across like they were “real”. This here in Halo 5? It’s full-on space magic, I don’t know how else they can really justify it.
    • Maybe the worst part about this story though is what it does to the Master Chief. He spends this entire game chasing after Cortana instead of dealing with the existential threat of the Guardians… in fact, by chasing after Cortana, he’s actually kind of complicit in everything that happens. You could argue that he was pursuing Cortana, because she was the source of the threat and he needed to eliminate her to stop the Guardians… but that never happens. He encounters her and then they have a chat instead of trying to eliminate the problem. It’s also not like this is the Cortana we knew before; she is clearly an entirely different person now, so it should be easier for him to do what’s needed. Is… is this what 343 Industries were trying to convey from the whole “you’re not a machine” theme in Halo 4? Are they saying that he needed to be way more selfish and damn the rest of humanity for his own interests? Guys… are these tech bros a bunch of libertarians…? Fucking insanity.
  • The Characters – Related to all the previous issues we’ve already discussed, the characters in Halo 5 suck. Theoretically, it’s kind of cool that 343 Industries brought Master Chief’s squad mates from the Halo novels into the games. Having ODST‘s Buck become a SPARTAN is also a pretty cool move. However, none of this ends up mattering, because none of them have any development, interactions, or characterization beyond “is a soldier”. Even Arbiter’s return isn’t particularly interesting, because he basically does nothing (although I do find it hilarious that they make a point of telling us that he’s a feminist, because he breaks Elite tradition and allows females into his ranks, LOL).
    • The Eternal Warden is, apparently, supposed to be this game’s main “bad guy”. He’s a Promethean construct who occasionally shows up to oppose you. You end up having to kill the guy like seven or eight times across the course of the game and it becomes tiring very quickly. I also don’t get his part in the story at all. He’s like a rival to Cortana, but she slaps him around like a bitch at every turn. When she vanquishes him at the end, you’d think it would be a big “oh shit, she just killed the powerful bad guy!” moment, but I didn’t feel anything. Dude sucks.
    • Also, probably goes without saying, but having multiple SPARTANs in your story is lame. Master Chief’s cool, largely because he’s the only man capable of saving the day. When you have an entire squad of SPARTANs, it dilutes that importance and your squad doesn’t feel exponentially more powerful than you did when you were solo.
  • Technical Issues – Okay, we’ve gotten through the big problems, now onto some smaller fish… This game has some really weird technical issues, the most obvious of which is that enemies will render at a lower frame rate if they’re more than a few meters away and you’re not looking directly at them. I can only assume that this was implemented to keep the game running smoothly and to deal with optimization issues (it reminds me of similar issues in Pokémon Violet). However, this game doesn’t look that good, so I assume that it’s probably a combination of having to accommodate four players and general development incompetence. Oh, and speaking of incompetence, the NPC AI is worthless. You can give commands, sure, but your squad mates will struggle to kill anything, and their pathfinding makes having AI operate vehicles an exercise in frustration. I saw my squad mates get themselves killed constantly, including one particularly funny moment where we had to escape a massive Covenant vehicle. I escaped in a Banshee, only to turn around and see that my squad was still fucking around inside before the whole thing blew up and took them all with it.
  • Interactive Cutscene “Missions” – Halo 5 has three “missions” which can only really be described as interactive cutscenes. In these sequences, you and your companions are tasked with finding an NPC, talking to them, and then finding another NPC and talking to them. These sequences legitimately last anywhere from thirty seconds to two minutes at most, and make absolutely no sense to me. They even count as full-on missions for the achievements! I’d get it if all cutscenes in the game were done this way, but no, the game has plenty of cinematics, so I honestly do not understand what the hell they were doing with these things.

Halo 5: Guardians was a fucking experience. Moments after the game started, I just sat there and went “Oh. Oh no.” Taken on its own, Halo 5 is a mediocre-at-best co-op shooter with a weak narrative. In the context of this franchise though, Halo 5 is straight-up insulting. As you can see from all the “Hates” listed here, the game was fundamentally compromised on a design level and these issues cascaded to make by far the worst game in the entire franchise. Halo 5 gleefully packs so much of the stuff I hate about the past decade of gaming into its runtime, shedding everything you might have liked about Halo in the process. Oh, and making matters even more annoying for me, in particular: I just made a list of my 25 Worst Video Games of All-Time, and it’s already outdated. Halo 5: Guardians definitely deserves a spot on that list. Is this a bad time to announce that I’m intending to update my best/worst-of lists in about five years time to see how much they’ve changed in that time? Because, unless I play a lot of shit games between then and now, Halo 5: Guardians is sure as hell gonna be on there.

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