Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! Yeah, that’s right, we’ve got a special little addendum to last year’s big Love/Hate project. At that time, I mentioned that I wasn’t able to play Dead or Alive Xtreme 2. This was because the game is not backwards compatible with modern Xbox consoles, I did not have a Xbox 360, and I could not get past the title screen when I tried to emulate it. As a result, it was basically unplayable, much to my disappointment.
So, funny story: I sold a bunch of my old Warhammer 40,000 codices a couple months ago and, as a result, had some fun money in my Paypal account. I was browsing for a copy of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 for my physical game collection, and I found one for a decent price. I figured that I’d get it just for collecting purposes… But then, when I got it, I immediately started browsing for a decent price on an Xbox 360… uh, suffice to say, I can now review the game properly.
DOAX games tend to be fairly dull experiences for me. Even then, I was especially cautious about DOAX2 for a couple reasons. First of all, its PSP port was fuckin’ shit. I can also recall that this was the first DOA game that reviewed poorly. I’ve always found this really curious, because the first game reviewed well… isn’t this just that game, but with more to do? Was there just a rapid maturation of the the games journalism industry in that three year period? Or did adding a bunch of content actually screw up the formula? Read on to find out…
Love
Marine Race – The flashiest new addition to DOAX2 is the marine race activity, which allows you to straddle a jet ski and race up to three other girls around the islands. As you’d expect, it plays like a, err, stripped-down version of Wave Race, but it makes for a fun and challenging activity. I don’t enjoy it nearly as much as the volleyball, but it’s pretty close. The various jet skis also have their own stats and specialties, so they also give you something to work towards, as the really good ones are expensive. Marine race is also by far the most ambitious activity in the entire Xtreme franchise, taking you all across the Zack Islands and showing off some pretty good water physics for the early Xbox 360 era. The fact that it has never returned really gives DOAX2 a unique selling point that makes it worth revisiting.
More Xtreme – Look, we all know what you’re looking for from a Dead or Alive game that’s promising “Xtreme” content, and DOAX2 is definitely pushing the envelope compared to its predecessor. For one thing, there are significantly more revealing swimsuits available, the most revealing of which are just impractically ridiculous. The added power of the Xbox 360 has been put towards important things, namely, modeling pokey nipples onto nearly every outfit (you can’t even see them in-game, but you sure as hell cannot miss ’em in the sports shop). The boob physics are insane, approaching the ridiculous levels of floppiness we saw in the original DOA on PS1. “Butt battle” has been added, which makes for a pretty poor mini-game, but if you’re just looking for an excuse to make the girls clap their cheeks, then it works. Oh, and the coup de grace is undeniably the pole dancing sequences, which require so much grinding to unlock that I doubt most players have even seen them in-game. Say what you will about all this, but the game is certainly living up to its namesake, while towing the line of tastefulness.
Improved Volleyball Camera – The first DOAX had this weird camera which would follow the ball around the screen. This would often cause your character to be moving around off-screen, which can make setting up to return a serve difficult. DOAX2 fixes this by making sure that all four girls are on-screen at all times. It’s a pretty small improvement, but it’s the sort of thing that should have always been there, and makes going back to the first game feel worse as a result.
“Be Friendly” – One of the new activity options in this game is that you can now choose to “be friendly” with your chosen partner. This is a pretty minor addition, but I really like it! It’s basically a standard gravure sequence, but with two girls hanging out together instead of just one. I think that this makes for a clever way to work in the partner mechanic, which otherwise gets completely ignored outside of volleyball. I also just like it from a roleplay perspective: win a bunch of volleyball games with your partner and then reward them with a gift and some relaxation time together!
Mixed
Graphics – While the graphics here are of a higher fidelity than the original DOAXBV, they run into the same issue DOA4 did: they just aren’t that much of an improvement on the previous game. Some of this is probably down to the cartoony art style reaching its limits on HD hardware, but there is clearly a ton of asset reuse going on as well. Not bad, but could be a lot better.
Hate
Dating Sim Bullshit – Maybe I was too harsh on DOAXBV‘s dating sim mechanics, because they are orders of magnitude worse in DOAX2. It’s not like the systems are all that different, but they’ve added several layers of additional bullshit which make getting new bikinis, sending gifts, partnering up, and managing the other girls affection levels an infuriating affair. In addition to having to know which gifts each girl prefers, you now have to make sure that you wrap it in the right colour of wrapping paper, give it to her at the right time of day, and then cross your fingers that she’ll actually accept it… because, yeah, on top of all of this, there seems to be some RNG at the end of the day that governs whether they’ll actually do what you want. It all adds up to make the actual act of engaging with this game’s systems a fucking chore.
That’s not enough though, no: next, you have to hope that your chosen girl is actually available at the time of day you need her to be. This is actually harder than it sounds: at each point in the day, there are usually a couple girls who are just gone doing God knows what. Even if they do show up, you cannot give them gifts or ask to partner with them if they are in the marina. This was actually a legitimate problem for me at one point: I had lost my partner and was desperately trying to recruit Kasumi because I had no partner and had been sending gifts to her for a couple days, but she then spent a full two days in the marina (that’s fifteen percent of your entire playthrough pissed away for nothing).
On top of all of this, the entire dating sim mechanics are mercurial as fuck. In my first playthrough, I lost one volleyball match, and then my partner ditched me about halfway through the vacation. I then spent the rest of the vacation having a miserable time unsuccessfully trying to recruit a new partner, but no one was interested, despite following the gifting guides perfectly. For the aforementioned attempt to partner with Kasumi, I had given her three gifts which she enthusiastically accepted, but she still would not partner with me. Meanwhile, on my second vacation, I was ditched by my partner after only one day (lol), but I managed to max out affection with Kasumi and Hitomi after only a couple gifts over the course of a couple days, and Hitomi even accepted an expensive bikini from me… but then I had a third playthrough where I did the same things and she fucking left the island after I tried to give her a bikini… I have no idea what made these outcomes so different, but I hate how this system is such a chore to try to manage. Would some more transparency about how each girl feels about you really hurt the experience? Would cutting out the bullshit make the experience worse?
There’s another, overarching issue with the dating sim elements of this game: it makes volleyball matches legitimately stressful. Every time you lose a point, let alone an entire match, you feel a creeping dread… Is my partner going to ditch me now? Do I need to start giving them gifts to keep them happy? Do I need to start getting a backup partner ready, just in case? This is a DOAX game, I just want to chill and not worry about this bullshit.
Poker – I usually really like the poker minigame in the casino, because I’m good enough at it where I can win big with some regularity, negating some of the grinding that is endemic to these games. However, poker is absolutely busted in DOAX2 for one glaring reason: if you cannot match the maximum bet at your table, then you automatically fold and lose all the money you’ve already bet. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the best hand, if you don’t have 500,000 Zack bucks in the bank, then you risk losing everything if one of the girls starts raising you. I double-checked the other DOAX games and this is an issue entirely unique to this particular entry, but it absolutely sucks. As a result, I just avoided the casino in general, choosing instead to just grind volleyball matches, since this was safer and, by the time I had enough to even gamble with, I’d just buy a swimsuit and start the process over.
New Activities – While marine race provides an experience nearly on-par with the first game’s volleyball, most of the new activities are really underwhelming and do little more than dilute the core gameplay systems:
DOAX2 is also the game which introduced Beach Flags, Butt Battle, and Tug-of-War. As I’ve stated in the past, these minigames suuuuck. Beach Flags in particular is terrible, whereas Butt Battle and Tug-of-War are basically just boring, unengaging guessing games. While it is kind of nice to have them there as a distraction or an option to earn some money if your partner ditches you, they also come with the caveat that you have to buy tickets in order to unlock them. They aren’t super expensive, thankfully, so getting them is nowhere near as grindy as it was in Paradise, but still… am I really going to spend my Zack bucks on fucking Beach Flags?
The other minigame that is exclusive to DOAX2 (other than the marine race) is the water slide. This sees your chosen girl go down a slide for about 30 seconds and you have to avoid falling off of it. Unfortunately, the controls are very finnicky and it’s extremely easy to fall off course. Failing results in no payout and the characters are going so fast, are so high up, and go flying so far that it legitimately looks like they die every time you fail. That’s at least kind of funny, but the risk/reward of water slide is so bad that it’s not even worth engaging with after the first couple tries.
On top of all of this, none of these activities involve your partner. I’m pretty sure that part of the reason why my partners would ditch me was because I was trying out these other activities, and therefore not doing anything for their affection rating with me (or, worse, maybe you even lose affection if you fail… the game is super obtuse about how this works). If you do too many of these solo activities, I’m fairly certain that it’s actively detrimental to your vacation experience, because having no partner really limits what you can do and how much money you have to work with.
The Grind – If you play DOAX2 just to have a relaxing vacation with some eye candy, then you probably will have an alright time. However, if you are looking to accomplish anything, then prepare for an ungodly amount of grinding. Let’s put it this way: you want to get one character’s expensive swimsuit gifted to another character. To do that, you can’t just buy it and give it to them: you have to make sure you max out affection with that character (which will take days of gifting), play enough games of volleyball that you can afford the $1 million price tag that most expensive suits have (which will take you a few days to do), and then pray to God that they actually accept it. I don’t even want to imagine the number of playthroughs it would take to 100% this game, you’re probably looking at hundreds of them in a game that is, may I remind you, extremely thin on content to begin with.
Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is a weird case for me. On the one hand, it’s arguably the definitive DOAX game: it’s got all the characters in the franchise up to that point, it’s got the most activities of the entire franchise, and it feels like there was still some ambition that went into the making of it. However, the amount of added tedium really does explain why this game reviewed so much worse than its predecessor. Having to engage with the dating sim bullshit makes playing this a grindy slog that gets in the way of any sexiness you might have tried to mine out of it. Is it worth spending ~$100 to track down a copy of the game and a used Xbox 360 just to experience it? Ehh, I’m happy that I finally got a chance to experience it, but I’m a massive DOA simp, so I’m definitely in the minority on that.
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And with that, we have completed another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! As soon as I finished Burial at Sea – Episode II and realized that I had no more Bioshock games left to play, I was just struck with how much I love this franchise. Sure, Bioshock 2 and Infinite could never live up to the original, but that first game was such a singular experience (and its sequels are still good games in their own right). In particular, I’m glad that I gave Bioshock 2 the second chance it deserved. I have my issues with it, but it certainly deserved more than the hour I gave it back in 2010. I’m also glad that I got to try out the DLCs for the first time!
Bioshock Games Ranked
Here is how I would rank the Bioshock games and their story DLCs:
S-tier: Bioshock
Duh. It’s legitimately one of the greatest games ever made.
B-tier: Bioshock Infinite, Minerva’s Den, Bioshock 2
Yeah, that’s right, Bioshock is so great that it’s got an entire empty tier between it and the next best entry in the franchise. Bioshock Infinite is the sort of sequel I love to see: one that builds on the original’s story while trying out completely new ideas. For what it’s worth, I enjoy Infinite for what it is, rather than what differentiates it from the prior two games.
Minerva’s Den is the perfected slice of Bioshock 2. As a much more concentrated experience, it lacks most of Bioshock 2‘s weaknesses, twists the gameplay in fun ways, and has a pretty great twist.
Bioshock 2 is a good game, but it cannot help but feel derivative and tired.
C-tier: Burial at Sea – Episode II
I really like the core gameplay of Burial at Sea – Episode II. Stealth works surprisingly well in the Bioshock Infinite engine! The story I’m much more mixed on: it’s got some cool moments, but a lot of the plot points are questionable to say the least.
D-tier: Burial at Sea – Episode I
Man, the more I think about this DLC, the more sour I get about it. The DLC is not paced well, so it just feels like it ends abruptly. Furthermore, while resource scarcity can result in some intense moments, it more often is just frustrating.
Bioshock Plasmids/Vigors Ranked
S-tier (aka, “you will never unequip these”): Electro Bolt, Telekinesis, Summon Eleanor, Gravity Well
Electro Bolt is just straight-up mandatory to play Bioshock with. It stuns and damages enemies, giving you the opportunity to hit them with your best weapon. That’s really all it needs to do, but it also has really powerful interactions with the environment which make it a default choice every time.
Telekinesis is super useful. For one thing, it uses barely any EVE to activate, so you get to have a lot more fun with it. Reaching distant objects is great, and being able to pick up and throw items at your enemies is a blast (especially when fully upgraded, which allows you to just straight-up hurl living enemies around).
Summon Eleanor is just plain broken, hence why it’s so high on this list. Summoning an incredibly powerful NPC basically for free who will mess up any enemy you come across? Umm, yes please.
Gravity Well is just a real power trip, allowing you to create this fairly large black hole which sucks anything not bolted down in and then collapses in on itself. It’s beyond the level of what normal plasmids do, and is all the more fun for just going for it.
A-tier: Murder of Crows, Incinerate!, Winter Blast, Target Dummy
I loved Murder of Crows in Bioshock Infinite. Not only is it the coolest vigor conceptually, but the game has multiple equipment that directly boost its power, making it absolutely devastating. Any big combat I got into, I’d sent out a Murder of Crows and it would devastate enemies, and then the next wave of them who set off all the trapped corpses.
Bioshock Infinite‘s version of Hypnotize comes with a major bonus: it can now auto-hack turrets and robots. This one change alone makes Hypnotize a staple of your arsenal, especially in Burial at Sea where your ammunition is more limited.
Incinerate! is my preferred combat plasmid (after Electro Bolt). The damage is decent, the way it causes enemies to panic is really useful for getting some breathing room, and its occasional use as a utility tool to access frozen areas makes it a borderline mandatory plasmid.
Shock Jockey ranks lower than Electro Bolt for one major reason: it’s nowhere near as important to Bioshock Infinite‘s gameplay. There are very few situations where you can use Shock Jockey to interact with the environment, and there are less large enemies that you need to stun while fighting. Still very useful, but no longer god-tier.
Peeping Tom is incredible in its appearance in Burial at Sea – Episode II. They’ve literally just turned “detective vision” into a plasmid… and I love that idea. My problem with detective vision in games is that you always want to have it active to make sure you don’t miss anything. However, tying it to one of your central resources makes sure that you keep its use limited and judicious. They’ve really gotten the balance right, because I never unequipped it and was always happy to have it. Hell, they’ve even made it so you can turn invisible so you can sneak around, it’s great!
Old Man Winter takes the top spot for “freeze-themed ability” by simple virtue that it has some environmental interactions that you can use it for. Otherwise, it’s basically the same as…
Winter Blast is also a fine secondary combat plasmid, opening up the potential to get really easy kills on enemies by freezing them solid and then smashing them to pieces. It’s a perfectly fine strategy, so while I give Incinerate! the edge, Winter Blast definitely would be my next go-to.
Target Dummy deserves this spot for the sheer fact that it will draw Big Daddies away from you, allowing you to get free hits in on them. If you are strapped for resources, then Target Dummy can be a lifesaver.
B-tier: Devil’s Kiss, Scout, Sonic Boom
Devil’s Kiss is basically Incinerate!, except that it’s a thrown projectile now. The main thing ranking it lower though is that, once again, it has far less environmental interact than it did in the first two Bioshock games.
Scout is limited at first, and the degree to which it slows down gameplay can make it an unattractive option. However, once upgraded, it can be incredibly useful and open up a more stealthy playstyle.
Undertow is one of the cooler vigors, which gets it some points. However, it isn’t all that useful in this game’s combat system, and it makes me long for Telekinesis.
Sonic Boom is cool as a physics show-off, but having your loot get blown away by it isn’t exactly the definition of “fun”…
C-tier: Insect Swarm, Return to Sender, Bucking Bronco, Charge
I really want to like Insect Swarm. It’s easily the coolest plasmid in concept, but in execution… well, it’s a swarm of bees that slowly find an enemy and then kind of damage and annoy them for a little bit. It’s really underwhelming, especially compared to several better options. It can be a bit more useful once upgraded, and I found that it was a decent option when you are on defense, but this isn’t a plasmid that I’m using for any serious reasons.
Return to Sender is a decent idea for a plasmid, but because we already have the shield in Bioshock Infinite, I never felt the need to use this thing.
Bucking Bronco is alright in Bioshock Infinite, largely due to the upgrades that you can get for it and the more protracted combat making it more likely that an enemy will activate it.
I can see Charge being a fun vigor if you’re doing a melee-focused run, but getting into my enemies’ faces just isn’t something I was interested in.
Ironsides could be good. You’re very limited on ammunition in Burial at Sea – Episode II, so I can see you getting into a situation where you replenish yourself using a vigor. It’s just not something I ever felt like I needed though, especially compared to just Hypnotizing an enemy instead.
Considering the amount of security systems on Rapture, I guess that being able to turn them against your enemies with Security Command is useful? There’s three obvious issues though: 1) there’s not always going to be a security system when you need it, 2) you might just break or hack these security systems anyway, and 3) it’s just not as fun to watch the game kill enemies slower than if you just went in there and did it yourself.
Hypnotize is a bit like Security Command, but even more narrow. This only worked on Big Daddies in the first Bioshock. These were, obviously, the best thing to hypnotize anyway, but it made it really rare for you to actually be able to use this plasmid at all. Bioshock 2 extended this to splicers, but… like, do you really gain much by making a single, very fragile splicer fight with you briefly…?
Cyclone Trap is… interesting. Like, not only do you have to hope that an enemy actually steps on the trap, but your reward is that they get launched into the air and take a bit of damage. The main benefit is that it stops the enemy from shooting you for a few seconds… but this is just a super underwhelming plasmid.
F-tier: Enrage
Enrage is just the worst. Throw it at an enemy to cause them to attack the nearest target… even if you are that target (which you probably are). This also makes it actively detrimental if there aren’t any other enemies around. Hey, in that case, why not… just fucking Hypnotize the enemy instead? Sure, Hypnotize is a pretty underwhelming plasmid in its own right, but it’s a strict upgrade over Enrage, since it doesn’t risk backfiring on you.
What Would My Ideal Bioshock Sequel Look Like?
Oh man… I mean, I’m perfectly happy never getting another Bioshock game if we’re being perfectly honest. It feels like Bioshock Infinite set the stakes as high as they could go and any follow-up will inherently feel smaller. Plus, let’s be honest, a new Bioshock would inevitably be one of the following:
An Unreal Engine 5 remake of the first game. This just feels pointless to me. The original game still looks great, and higher fidelity isn’t going to make that look better enough to be worthwhile (and it also risks “cleaning” the art style up like Bioshock 2 did, which erases some of the weird charm of Rapture). I guess there’s a potential benefit that the gunplay could be tightened up, but I just don’t see this being all that exciting.
An open world take on the Bioshock formula. C’mon, we know that this is the direction it would go if they made a Bioshock game today. This could work: just imagine exploring an open world version of Rapture or Columbia! However, I’m burnt out on open worlds and how their inclusion affects gameplay and design. You have to wonder how far 2K would go to push in recurrent spending and various other modern gaming trends that would also corrupt the experience.
That said, if we had to get a new Bioshock game, I would prefer if the game goes back to a more “immersive sim” design philosophy (like the first two games). Plasmids (or whatever the game’s term for them would be) would have environmental interactions again to make them more useful and open up some more playstyles. I would also like if they could give more of the plasmids environmental interactions, as it makes a lot of the other plasmids feel inessential. I’d take cues from Infinite for its shooting: the speed and feedback are just about ideal, although I would add in Bioshock 2‘s “dual wielding” system.
As for the setting? Well, we’ve had an art deco Objectivist city at the bottom of the sea and a turn of the century Christian nationalist city in the sky, so it depends if you want to do a new variation on that concept, or if you want to go in a completely new direction. I can see benefits of both approaches: it’s been long enough that “just another Bioshock-style city” would still be fresh, but it could ultimately end up feeling overshadowed by Infinite‘s expansive scope. I feel like any sequels would probably need to address the meddlesome Luteces, who are a loose end that Infinite did not wrap up.
What Does the Future Hold For Bioshock?
The future is actually looking pretty interesting for Bioshock fans. As of the time of me writing this, 2K have been teasing some sort of announcement about Bioshock. I am not exactly hoping my breath for a new game (especially considering that publishers don’t directly hint at an announcement that big), but I’m curious to see what this announcement is for.
However, the bigger news is that Ken Levine has finally revealed his next game, Judas, which looks reasonably Bioshock-esque. The trailer is all over the place, and the behind-the-scenes reports I’ve heard of its development are not promising, but even if it’s a train wreck, I’m super curious to see a AAA game that looks truly original. It’s definitely a game I’ll be keeping my eye on!
Aaaaaand that’s it for another Love/Hate series down! I was actually alternating between playing the Bioshock games and the Ninja Gaiden games for a bit, so I had most of these articles written before I even released the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series, hence why this came out so quickly after! It’ll probably take me a while for my next Love/Hate series: the previously-announced Splinter Cell series will be coming at some point, but it’s taking longer than anticipated. I have another franchise in mind as well that I want to do, so Splinter Cell may come after that one as well… we’ll see! And, in the meantime, I’ll have new articles up here about whatever crosses my mind (and believe me, this mind has some really stupid ideas it wants to write about).
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Welcome back to the Bioshock Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be covering the final game in the franchise (thus far), Bioshock Infinite. Disappointed that Bioshock 2 had been handed off to a different development team, Ken Levine and Irrational Games set out to make a more ambitious and revolutionary sequel that wouldn’t just rehash the ideas of the first game. The game ended up going through one of the most protracted examples of development hell of its era, although it was heralded as a masterpiece upon release. However, time has not been kind to the game, with it having gained a pretty muted reputation in recent the years for its writing and its changes made to the Bioshock formula. For my part, I really enjoyed Bioshock Infinite back in the day, but I was extremely curious to see if it would hold up as well as the original did for me. You know what I always say: read on to find out if it succeeded…
Elizabeth – It’s not exactly a hot take for me to say that Elizabeth is up there with Andrew Ryan competing for the top spot of “best Bioshock characters”. The entire narrative revolves around her, so we get to see her go from a naïve and hopeful young woman, to someone who is much more world-weary and remorseful by the time the credits roll. Her journey is well-written and Courtnee Draper’s performance really brings her to life. This would be good enough on its own, but Elizabeth is also unusually helpful for an NPC companion. She can alter the battlefield to give you cover, new ways to maneuver, automated turrets, and even weapons and supplies. She gives you items that she finds at regular intervals (usually just when you needed it). She can pick locks to access secret areas. She’ll point out items of interest. She isn’t a burden and never gets in your way. These all come together to make her one of the most memorable and iconic companions in gaming history.
Tighter Shooting Controls – Bioshock Infinite further iterates on the franchise’s core shooting gameplay, to the point where it finally feels good enough that it could carry the game on its own. While it’s still not quite on par with the best first person shooters of its era, lining up shots is intuitive, blasting away enemies feels good, and the weapons have a satisfying, punchy feel to them.
Sky Rails – The sky rails are one of the flashier new additions to Infinite‘s gameplay formula, allowing you to leap above the battlefield to get a higher vantage point and to reposition quickly as needed. On the negative side of things, they’re arguably under-utilized and can be easily ignored if you don’t care to use them. However, I really like them overall, mainly because riding on sky rails is breathtaking. Irrational have perfectly captured the speed and scale that you’d want out of a system like this, and some of the most exhilarating moments in the game come when you zip around on these things, popping enemies as you go. Speaking of which, enemies will also use the sky rails to chase you to or get to higher ground, so even if you choose to actively ignore them yourself, they bring with them new gameplay possibilities. It’s also really funny to snipe an enemy when they’re riding the rails and then watch them plummet to their death.
Anachronistic Music Covers – One of the coolest implementations of Bioshock Infinite‘s ideas is that it has a bunch of old-school covers of modern songs. The reasons for this are pretty cool: the city’s experiments with quantum mechanics are inadvertently causing windows to alternate dimensions to open up throughout the city. Jeremiah Fink, a scummy businessman who controls the workforce in Columbia, sees this as an opportunity to plagiarize the next big radio hit, so the city is awash with strangely familiar music, redone in a turn of the century style.
Hacking Is Gone – One system I’m actually glad has been changed from the previous Bioshock games is hacking. It was a pain in the ass feeling obligated to hack everything in sight in the previous two games. Most hacking situations have been removed entirely, although you can now use the Hypnotize vigor to “hack” turrets to shoot your enemies. I rather like this change, it makes hacking immediate and ties it into the main gameplay systems without having to staple a whole new mechanic on top of everything else. It’s use is also limited by your salt bar, so you aren’t spamming it endlessly.
Mixed
Politics – I’m super mixed on this game’s politics, because they are simultaneously one of the best aspects of the game, and also one of its biggest disappointments…
First off, the good stuff: this game is incredibly bold for confronting core issues at the heart of America: radical Christian nationalism, white supremacy, racial hierarchy, and capitalist oppression. The original Bioshock was pretty bold in its own right, but Objectivism and libertarianism are pretty niche philosophies compared to the shit Infinite is targeting. Hell, the game is even more relevant in 2025 than it was in 2013 (where this stuff would have just been seen as an uncomfortable vision of the past, rather than the current hellscape we have to navigate). We get to see the horrors of this radicalization, how it’s tied into the idealized past of America, how the people of Columbia despise Lincoln for freeing the slaves, and you end up fighting literal Klan members on occasion!
Finkton is also capitalist hell, echoing the evils of American history where business owners enriched themselves through extreme exploitation of their workers. We see the residents of Finkton barely clinging to life through long hours of work, no safety precautions, low pay, and worthless scrip currency (and this is on top of the racism they were enduring to boot). I love how the game visually represents this, with Finkton being dark, gloomy, and smog-ridden, while the rest of Columbia is bright and glamourous. Booker and Elizabeth both remark that the awful conditions of Finkton justify the actions of the domestic terrorist group, the Vox Populi. Under the leadership of Daisy Fitzroy, the Vox are attempting to break the shackles of oppression, which brings us to…
Unfortunately, the game completely fucks itself over by trying to “both sides” its politics, but it just does not work. Like, lets lay this out: the Vox are subject to institutionalized oppression and dehumanization on a social, political, and economic scale. Reform is not going to happen as long as Comstock lives, so violence is their only reasonable option to change this system. Again, Booker and Elizabeth both say that the Vox are justified, but when their revolution starts, suddenly Booker says “The only difference between Comstock and Fitzroy is how you spell the name”… uhhhhh no, that is a load of horseshit. Look, I get what they’re going for here: violence is bad and the leaders who use people to commit violence in the name of their movement are bad, but Fitzroy and Comstock are not equivalent in the slightest. Comstock is trying to create a white supremacist state to conquer the world and establish his notion of racial hierarchy. Fitzroy’s goals begin and end at violently rejecting and eradicating this hierarchy. The game tries to convince us that she and the Vox are bad because they scalp the Finkton bosses, kill Fink, attempt to kill his son, kill civilians in Columbia, and try to kill Booker (because him being alive undermines his role as a martyr for the revolution). Does this make them in any way equivalent to Comstock? No, and it’s not even close. While trying to kill Booker is just dumb, I don’t even care about them killing civilians here: the game opens by showing you that the citizens of Columbia participate in the racism against non-whites, so them getting caught up in this revolution isn’t even unjustified. Revolution is nasty business, no one wants to engage in it… but killing the hand that’s beating you does not make you just as bad as the people who were beating you down and insisting that you deserved it because their ideology said so.
The Narrative – I’m also pretty mixed on the overall narrative of Bioshock Infinite. It’s interesting, fairly compelling, and unpredictable, but it suffers for the same reason that so many major media properties do these days: multiverse shit. Unfortunately, the concept of the multiverse is at the absolute core of Infinite, and while it presents some really interesting ideas and developments, the handling of it is just so transparently stupid at times.
About halfway through the game, you make a deal with Daisy Fitzroy to get some guns from a gunsmith in exchange for a means to escape the city… but, oh no, the gunsmith has been interrogated to death! So you hop into an alternate dimension where he’s still alive… but, oh no, his machines have been confiscated! So you have to hop to an alternate dimension where they weren’t confiscated… but, oh no, now the Vox have the guns and the revolution is underway! Meanwhile, this entire time, Booker and Elizabeth are just assuming that they still have made the same deal with Daisy in each new reality, despite the pretty substantial changes that happen each time they travel to a new world.
On top of this, the game establishes that dying in one dimension has consequences on alternate versions of yourself, causing you to absorb the memories of your various selves. This is can be especially problematic for you if you remember that you died in another reality, which can cause you to go insane. The game is very vague about how this works, but it seems to only occur when Elizabeth travels between dimensions. That said, there are infinite Elizabeths travelling between infinite dimensions, so shouldn’t people be inheriting the memories of their other selves all the time? Again, time travel/multiverse stories are kind of inherently complicated by these sorts of issues, and Infinite is absolutely no exception to it.
Perhaps my most sour note about the game though is that the entire ending revolves around a twist that comes out of nowhere and doesn’t make a lot of sense. So, it turns out that Booker is an alternate-universe version of the villain, Comstock. Comstock accidentally made himself infertile, but required a blood heir to his legacy as a part of his big plan to conquer the world. He make a deal with an alternate version of himself (Booker) to acquire his daughter. However, Booker ends up regretting the decision and makes a deal to travel to the other dimension and get her back. As you can imagine, this plays out with infinite Bookers and infinite Comstocks across the multiverse. That’s a pretty interesting idea, but the issue for me is that this universe-hopping causes Booker to… forget what happened and just make up a new reality for himself to justify why he’s trying to rescue Elizabeth? It’s unclear why this happens, but it honestly makes no sense within the established narrative and I believe that it’s the main reason why this ending was considered so confusing.
Resources – While I do love Elizabeth as a companion, she’s is too helpful at times, which messes with the game’s resource economy. If you’re ever low on some resource (health, salts, ammo, or money), Elizabeth will almost immediately “find” exactly what you needed. When you realize that you’re rarely going to actually run out of a resource, it craters the game’s tension. As a result, I died maybe three or four times across my entire playthrough (on Normal difficulty), because I just never was in any actual danger. Similarly, I spent about 75% of my playtime with the goddamn hand cannon and shotgun. The game would just keep stocking me up with ammo, so why bother trying anything else?
Burial at Sea – Episode II – I’m pretty mixed on this DLC. On the one hand, the gameplay is great: the stealth system they’ve put together here works surprisingly well in Infinite‘s engine. I also like the new plasmids it introduces and how the emphasis on stealth makes existing options more useful. What I’m much more iffy on is the narrative. It’s fine for the most part, but it is so reverent of the original Bioshock that it almost feels like bad fan fiction. Like, you’re telling me that the most important thing in the multiverse that Elizabeth can be getting up to is ensuring that the events of the first Bioshock play out…?
Hate
COD-ification – I’ve got a bunch of issues with Bioshock Infinite, but nearly every one can be boiled down to “COD-ification”. This was the trend during the PS3/Xbox 360 era where developers would try to make their game “more like Call of Duty” to try to win some of their market share (thisneverworked).
First of all, the small things: you can’t dual-wield weapons and plasmids at the same time anymore (granted, this was only a thing in Bioshock 2, so it wasn’t guaranteed to return). You can’t carry extra healing items or salt, so every single encounter has to have a vending machine somewhere that you can run to in an emergency, or you loot the supplies you need off dead enemies, or you get topped up by Elizabeth. To compensate, the game also adds a shield/regenerating health system akin to Halo.
Infinite makes it so that you can only carry two guns at a time, which I can only speculate is because “that’s what Call of Duty players expect”. Like I said before, the game showers you with ammo, and you’ll still be able to collect ammo for the weapons you aren’t actively using, so it isn’t exactly disruptive… but goddamn is it kind of lame that you can easily play through the whole game with only one or two weapons if you really want to. It’s obviously not even a technical issue either, because you get access to all of your vigors at all times and there’s even a weapon wheel for them, so why not the guns too?! The only other reason I can think for why they did this was to make the sniper rifle and RPG more “special”, but I don’t think it is justified.
Then there’s the “gear” system, which replaces the gene-tonics from the previous games. You could equip up to eighteen gene tonics, which really let you customize your abilities to fit your preferred playstyle. They also helped you feel that you were progressing towards something with each new unlock, with most being rewards you spent your ADAM on. Gear, on the other hand, is limited to only four slots total (again, this is probably alluding to Call of Duty‘s perks system), and you have to find them at random in the overworld. Personally, I found most gear options to be underwhelming. I managed to find my ideal gear loadout near the start of the game, so everything I found thereafter was very disappointing.
The game also plays more like a conventional shooter. Vigors add some pretty interesting abilities, but they feel kind of superfluous. You can play through this whole game without using a single vigor and you won’t feel like you were putting yourself at much of a disadvantage for doing so. Vigors also feel less creative, with Murder of Crows being the most exotic of the bunch. Worst of all though, the ways that vigors interact with the environment is extremely limited compared to the previous two games. You will occasionally be able to use Elizabeth to spawn in a puddle or an oil slick that you can use a vigor on, but this is an extremely rare occurrence, and prevents you from being able to use the other options Elizabeth may have for you.
As for the moral choice system, Infinite has really dumbed this down as well. You get to make two choices in the entire game, and neither of them have any effect on how the narrative plays out. If you really want to stretch this category, Infinite does have a couple walking sim areas where you can get into optional combat scenarios if you commit theft. This doesn’t feel like much of a moral conundrum though, since there’s no real consequence. This does, kind of, play into the narrative, which suggests that the characters have far less free will it may seem, but it doesn’t make this any less disappointing.
The levels of Bioshock and Bioshock 2 were twisting and branding hub areas with lots of secrets and rewards you could find if you were thorough. You also really got to know these areas, as you often pass through certain locations multiple times over the course of the level. In Bioshock Infinite though, the levels are much more linear. You will rarely return to the same area more than once before moving onto the next level. Exploration also ends up feeling less rewarding due to this. I think that this also is why I don’t find Columbia as compelling as Rapture. Since these levels are so short and linear, you don’t really get a chance to get to know them before you’re rushed off to the next set-piece moment. More than anything else, this really seems to be the biggest change made in Infinite. It makes the game feel like it’s an atmospheric FPS instead of an immersive sim.
Burial at Sea: Episode I – I was pretty excited to try out Burial at Sea, because I always found the DLC’s noir aesthetic to be super appealing in its return to Rapture. Unfortunately, this first episode was very disappointing. Like, imagine if Bioshock Infinite suddenly cut to the ending cutscene right after you meet Elizabeth: that’s basically how this DLC plays out. You’ve got the same sort of gameplay, exploration rewards, and upgrade systems as the main game, but it ends so abruptly that you barely even get to use them. Another thing I really don’t like about Episode I is that your resources are extremely scarce. It’s the opposite problem from the main game: I was running out of ammo constantly, your shield feels like it breaks after one or two bullets, and Elizabeth is a lot more conservative about giving you items. This makes the game much more difficult, which is exciting at times, but not having the resources you need to deal with this game’s challenges is frustrating more often than not. What made this truly terrible though is that I could not pick up weapons off fallen enemies. I hated the carbine, but I got stuck with it for most of the playthrough, because I could not switch it with any other weapon. You get one chance to pick up a weapon the first time you encounter it, and then it’s gone forever. Maybe this was a bug on my end, because I do not understand this decision if it was intentional. Regardless, even if it is a bug and you don’t encounter it in your own playthrough, Episode I feels far too insubstantial to be truly compelling.
All-in-all, I like Bioshock Infinite, but it is nowhere near the classic that the original game was. It has a few glaring flaws which hold it back from true greatness. That said, I don’t think it deserves the soured reputation it holds today, and I think it deserves a reappraisal, especially considering how relevant parts of it are in today’s political climate. It’s a game that deserves to be enjoyed for what it is, rather than what it is not.
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Welcome back to the Bioshock Love/Hate series! In this entry, we’ll be covering Bioshock 2, a sequel commissioned by 2K Games while series’ creator Ken Levine was off working on a more ambitious follow-up. I have a bit of an interesting history with this game: I had always felt that Bioshock 2 looked like it was hewing a bit too closely to its predecessor, which had benefitted from its fresh setting and innovative design. Despite that, I bought the game around the time it came out… and I just could not get into it. I must have played for about an hour at most before I just gave up and moved on to other things. However, since then, Bioshock 2 has grown quite a cult following, with many series’ fans declaring that it’s the best entry in the entire franchise. While replaying Bioshock, I got really curious to finally give this sequel its due, which really solidified for me that I needed to make this Love/Hate series a reality. So, how is Bioshock 2, then? Is it indeed better than its predecessor, or are people just warming up to it after its more muted reception on release? Read on to find out…
Love
Major Quality of Life Improvements – A lot of the first game’s rough edges have been ironed out in this sequel. In particular, hacking is now done in real-time and takes seconds to complete, which helps the pacing immensely. Levels have also been designed to be more navigable, and the in-game map is easier to read. Basically every complaint about the first game has been smoothed out here. If gameplay’s all you care about, then I can see how some people could say that it’s the series’ best entry.
Improved Combat – Combat feels much better in Bioshock 2: most of your weapons feel heftier, more accurate, and combat has a snappier pace to it. In addition, allowing you to use both plasmids and weapons at the same time to dual-wield abilities is fantastic.
Playable Little Sister Section! – Bioshock 2 features a short, but incredibly memorable sequence where you see Rapture through the eyes of a Little Sister. It echoes what I said about the first game: the best parts of these games is when you just get a chance to piece together more about this world. Seeing how the mental conditioning Little Sisters go through has affected the way that they see the world is fascinating and definitely one of the best parts of the game.
Minerva’s Den DLC – Released in the peak era of obligatory DLC expansions, Minerva’s Den plays out like a super-concentrated version of Bioshock 2 condensed into three levels. This does mean that combat encounters happen far more frequently than in the base game, which can get a bit tedious at times, but the pace at which it gives you upgrades to plasmids, gene tonics, and weapons makes you constantly feel that reward dopamine rush. In addition, the research camera is gone entirely, so that means that you never have to waste your time juggling a damn camera to get special upgrades. The damn thing has always sucked and its absence here makes me realize that the stupid thing should never have existed. It adds nothing and serves only to nerf your damage against all enemies for no reason. Perhaps best of all, the DLC has a narrative which is conveyed quite subtly, until it reveals a very clever and satisfying twist at the end.
Mixed
Sophia Lamb – So I wrote a whole damn article about my disappointment with Bioshock 2‘s weak critique of collectivism, but at the end of the day, Sophia Lamb just isn’t as compelling as Andrew Ryan. That’s not to discredit Fenella Woolgar’s performance (on the contrary, she’s doing a great job), but Lamb is so transparently trying to be “this game’s Andrew Ryan” that it ends up being disappointing in comparison. She’s still a decent villain, hence why this just in “Mixed”, but I can’t help but wish they had found a way to make her more distinct than “female collectivist Andrew Ryan”.
Graphics – Despite feeling so familiar to its predecessor, Bioshock 2‘s graphics have noticeably increased in fidelity. While this is technically more impressive than the first game, I can’t help but feel that 2K Marin have accidentally lost the first game’s beautiful imperfections: its stylized and grotesque character designs, its dark and moody lighting, its slightly hazy look to everything… it just makes Bioshock 2‘s vision of Rapture feel too clean in comparison. The first Bioshock feels weird and grimy, which lends the setting so much of its creepy charm. Bioshock 2, on the other hand, feels way too… normal.
I will say though that the Minerva’s Den DLC improves this quite a bit, as the levels are in a far more decrepit state than the main game. These much more lusciously-designed levels make you long for a full game where the rest of the city is in such disrepair.
Morality – Once again, I’m kind of mixed on the moral choices in Bioshock 2. Once again, we have the Little Sister ethical dilemma, but now that we’re familiar with it, it takes away any ambiguity about what the “right” choice is (especially when your character is a Big Daddy who is supposed to protect the Little Sisters). However, the game also lets you decide the fate of three NPCs. The writing for these moral choices is far more subtle, with compelling arguments that could be made to kill or spare any of these three NPCs. However, where I get really mixed is the way that your choices play into the finale, because there was basically no way for you to anticipate that a particular character was watching and judging you this entire time. Like… obviously there has to be some ambiguity to the end of a moral choice system, but Bioshock 2 feels like it’s pulling a fast one on you.
Hate
CRASHES – Your mileage will definitely vary on this one, but good fucking God, Bioshock 2 crashed to desktop on me on four separate occasions mid-game. That would be completely fine if Bioshock 2 did regular auto-saves like every other game of its era. However, Bioshock 2 only auto-saves at the start of each chapter, so it’s on you to remember to manually save every once in a while. Over the course of my four crashes, I lost around two hours of gameplay (with one crash coming an hour and a half into a level, and another coming literally five minutes before the end credits). It got so bad that I started anticipating them: while playing the Minerva’s Den DLC, I got pretty far into the first level and thought “man, I would be pissed if the game crashed right now”, so I immediately saved… and then the game crashed five minutes later as expected. On top of that, you can’t really do anything to avoid it: it seems to happen at random immediately after you fire a weapon in combat after playing for at least half an hour… good luck avoiding that situation.
ADAM Harvesting – While Bioshock 2 does fix most of the first game’s issues, it unfortunately adds a new one of its own: in order to maximize your ADAM harvested, you’re going to have to not only kill the Big Daddy, but then you have to defend the Little Sister as she harvests from corpses… twice. There’s three Little Sisters in each level, and each time you not only have to find the appropriate body, but harvesting it takes a few minutes in its own right (assuming you don’t die in the process and then have to redo it)… you can see how this gets old fast, right? It’s not even fun gameplay either, it’s just making you wait ten minutes to get your ADAM when the original Bioshock gave it to you immediately as a reward.
Now, I will say that the one “upside” of this system is that it makes harvesting the Little Sisters a more tempting option, but inducing players to take a certain option through frustration is not great design…
Drill Fuel – Look, I get why they made Drill Fuel a thing: giving the player a giant motherfucking drill at the start of the game could make all future weapons useless. So they have to choose between making the drill powerful, but limited-use, or make it unlimited use, but give it some sort of crippling flaw that makes it worse to use. Logically, making it so that you can only use the incredibly powerful, giant motherfucking drill briefly is probably the best answer… but I’m playing Bioshock 2. 99% of the reason you want to play as a Big Daddy is so you can use that giant motherfucking drill. And you burn through that fuel FAST. So I, very realistically, will constantly get into situations where I want to use my giant motherfucking drill, but cannot because it’s out of fuel, leading me to just avoid using the giant motherfucking drill so I won’t run out of fuel for it for when I need it…
Big Sisters – Big Sisters look cool and the game does a fantastic job hyping them up, but when you actually face them, they’re kind of a nothing-burger. They show up after you clear all the Little Sisters out of a level, but their appearance doesn’t really tie into the game’s story or themes… they’re just “here”. That might be fine if they were fun, but the actual fights with them are just a grindfest where you blast them with all of your guns for way too long.
Just An Overwhelming Feeling of Familiarity – Yeah… unnecessary sequel that’s trying to be “more of the same” fails to really step out of its predecessor’s shadow. Hell, even Bioshock 2‘s “new” ideas are just riffs on the previous game’s (objectivism swapped out for collectivism, Big Sisters are just “new Big Daddy” with even more health, etc). Bioshock 2‘s a good game, but its inability to differentiate itself and failure to live up to the expectations of its predecessor make it feel kind of disappointing.
Bioshock 2 is, ultimately, a good time. I had a lot of fun with it, but I just can’t get over its disappointing art direction, narrative, and themes when compared to its predecessor. Taken on its own, it would probably be really well-regarded, but it’s so familiar and beholden to the first game’s ideas that it ends up feeling stifled. Still, I’m very glad that I gave it the chance and finally got the opportunity to experience it in full.
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Oh hey, it’s time for another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! After writing the list of my 100 favourite games ever, I had an overwhelming itch to replay Bioshock. The last time I played it was around 2008 or 2009, back when it was ported to PS3. Obviously, I really enjoyed it back then, but I remember having some issues with it, which really made me curious how it would hold up on a replay more than a decade later. This soon turned into a desire to replay the other games in the franchise, hence the development of this Love/Hate series. These are games that demand your attention, and boy did I have plenty of thoughts while playing. Well, y’know what I always say: would you kindly read on to find out what those thoughts were?
Love
Unmatched World Building and Design – Every corner of Rapture is fascinating and intricately designed. The art direction and overall design of this game is absolutely unparalleled. The art deco aesthetic combined with turn of the century diving suits is just so iconic. Really, my favourite parts of the game are when you’re just roaming around an area after all the enemies have been cleared out, appreciating the bits of environmental storytelling while vibing out to an audio diary that you just found.
For that matter, I cannot neglect to mention the legendary opening sequence. The way that the game organically lays out the premise and then introduces you to the city of Rapture is awe-inspiring… before then suddenly showing you that something has gone seriously wrong. Not only does it get you hooked and curious to explore, but it’s also incredibly immersive and showcases the genius game direction which was groundbreaking on release in 2007.
The Writing – While the story of Bioshock is fairly mundane by video game standards (you’ve become stranded in a hostile city, try to overthrow the tyrant running the show), the actual writing is uncommonly smart, especially for a videogame of this era. The entire game plays out as a critique of objectivist philosophy, showing that a society built around self-interest above all else will inevitably crumble into terrifying chaos. It’s fascinating to see play out and they’ve even weaved these themes into the gameplay mechanics, where you are encouraged to make decisions which aren’t in your self-interest. Plus, y’know, there’s the famous, earth-shattering narrative twist at the end of the second act. This sequence is so good and expertly directed that it legitimately managed to pull some of its tricks on me, even though I had already played the game and knew they were coming.
Plasmids! – Mechanically, plasmids are basically just your magical powers, but the way that they’ve been implemented makes them so fun to use:
First of all, there’s some really creative abilities here: Cyclone Trap, Enrage and Target Dummy open up some creative gameplay options, and then Electro Bolt and Telekinesis are full-on staples in my arsenal.
Secondly, the way that plasmids have been implemented makes them a true highlight. Many of the plasmids will interact with the environment or cause enemies to act in ways that you can then exploit to your benefit. For example, Electro Bolt is really useful for stunning enemies, using Electro Bolt on a pool of water will damage, stun, and sometimes even kill all enemies caught in it. Similarly, Incinerate! will light enemies on fire, damaging them and causing them to try to put themselves out in a pool of water (which you can then Electro Bolt for some real shenanigans), but it can also be used to melt frozen sections of the world.
Exploration – Bioshock‘s levels are packed with optional, substantial, explorable areas that always have some sort of reward at the end for your effort. I absolutely love this kind of level design in a game: those who want to get through quick can just stick to the beaten path, but those of us who want to see all that there is to offer will be spoiled for choice, and our reward for it is always worth it too!
Andrew Ryan – It’s kind of wild that Andrew Ryan cemented himself as one of the greatest villains in gaming history, and he only has like two minutes of screentime. His influence looms large throughout Bioshock, and getting to hear his audio diaries (which are basically just Ayn Rand philosophy told verbatim) really makes you hate the guy. Subsequent games really go to lengths to make him a more transparent villain, but I prefer how this game allows you to connect those dots yourself.
Big Daddies – THESE GUYS ARE SO FUCKING COOL. Hulking monstrosities armed with giant drills and guns are such amazing character designs. The fact that they aren’t even inherently hostile makes them so much more interesting. Taking on your first Big Daddy is one of the most intimidating experiences in gaming for good reason, they hype them up so much throughout the first couple levels. Battling them gets a bit too “normal” towards the mid-point of the game, but they’re always a nice challenge compared to the standard splicers.
Sound Design – I do not appreciate sound in videogames nearly enough, but when I do notice it, it’s usually because it’s so good that even I can’t miss it crowbarring me in the face. Bioshock‘s sound design is spectacular, from the art deco soundscape, to the eerie moaning of the Big Daddies, to the inane babbling of the enemies.
Fun fact: I played the remastered version of this game on PC and this version has a bug which causes some audio to sound like it’s coming from the wrong direction. As a result, I could often hear enemies moving and speaking in directions which made absolutely no sense. Like, I was either in an empty room hearing people around me, or they were making noises in directions that made no sense (like outside in the ocean). Funnily enough, this actually made the whole feel of the game more unnerving, like the game had more enemies lurking around in it than it was ever going to show me.
Mixed
The Gunplay – Shooting in Bioshock is functional at best (much like its contemporary, Fallout 3; I always associated the two games due to their shared lackluster gunplay which is offset by their many other strengths). It doesn’t feel great, but it’s passable. However, I can’t really hate this too much because of the way combat works with the inclusion of plasmids. Mixing and matching guns and plasmids is great fun and more than makes up for any complaints I may have about the general feel of the weapons. Morality – Bioshock presents you with a very famous moral choice: do you harvest the Little Sisters to get maximum upgrade points, or do you save the Little Sisters and get less points, but get a reward later? This was fairly compelling stuff in 2007, but in 2025, the game is so blunt with the way it handles this. Rescuing the Little Sisters is so transparently the “right” choice and the game hammers you with this, to the point where it feels like it’s actively talking down to you if you chose “harvest”. Funnily enough, I didn’t notice until this playthrough that this choice is basically the anti-Randian altruism vs selfishness argument in action. Interesting, even if the implementation feels very heavy-handed in retrospect.
Hate
Hacking Mini-game – I enjoyed playing Pipe Dream as a kid, so the actual gameplay of the hacking mini-game isn’t an issue to me. However, even I got sick of Bioshock‘s hacking minigame quickly. There are two main issues here:
It halts the game’s pace every single time you hack something… which could be very often if you are getting spotted by security systems. However, if you want to play the game optimally (ie, not paying more at every item station), then you are going to be hacking constantly.
Harder difficulty hacks can be literally impossible to complete (if you are using a controller). This is because you can find yourself in a situation where you find that all possible routes for the pipe to reach the goal are blocked, meaning that you lost before you even started. The only way to avoid this is if you immediately changed the direction of the starting pipe on a complete guess, but this would also require you to randomly find the right piece to make that change immediately, so you’re fucked either way. Thankfully you can find auto-hacks for these situations, but these sorts of hacks basically force you into investing in hacking gene tonics to be able to progress.
Level Design is Confusing – Granted, this issue is partially due to my “Love” for the game’s optional areas, but Bioshock can be a difficult game to navigate at times. The levels feel like a maze, causing you to constantly refer to your in-game map to make sure that you haven’t missed anything and that you’re going the right way… but even this can be a pain, because the map is really difficult to read due to the confusing way it connects staircases to each level.
Looting – So much of Bioshock‘s runtime is spent going up to every box, garbage can, desk, and locker just to see if it’s hiding a bottle of alcohol, or a snack cake, or a bandage, or a pack of cigarettes… all so you can get a tiny bit of HP and/or EVE back. Not only is the image of your character running around and throwing everything he sees in his mouth ridiculous, but it also is just annoying. Like, I get that this fosters exploration, but there’s got to be a more elegant solution. Just having less rewards, but each one is more substantial would save a lot of the anxiety that comes with worrying you’re missing any loot in the area.
Now, as much as I hate the looting system, I will admit that it is integral to making the WYK room work, because you see the items before you even enter the room, so you’re primed to enter with your back already turned to the wall. Then, when you turn around, you slowly go “hey wait a sec…”
Alarms SUUUUUCK – The security systems are cool in concept, and it’s really fun to turn them against your enemies… but, my God, set off an alarm and you are going to get subjected to a full minute of wave after wave of flying gun turrets swarming you and unleashing a torrent of gunfire your way. Getting spotted basically forces you to rush to the nearest alarm shutdown panel, or hack a few of them to make it a tolerable fight (which also halts the game’s pace), but that’s something you’ll need to do for EVERY single alarm that goes off in this game. It is, frankly, not very fun to deal with.
Finale – It’s pretty well acknowledged that Bioshock‘s final stretch is disappointing. It all starts when you undergo the process to become a Big Daddy. What should have been a fascinating body horror sequence, akin to the infamous “Stroggification scene” in Quake 4, instead just has you collect a few ingredients, put on a suit, and bada-bing, bada-boom, you’re a Big Daddy now. So what’s it like being a Big Daddy? Well, they put an awful helmet filter over the screen (which covers a lot of screen real estate in the process) and give you +25% damage resistance… that’s it. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that they don’t even change your character model’s hands to show the equipped diving suit… that’s the level of effort that’s gone into making you feel like a Big Daddy here. The subsequent final boss fight with Atlas is also a pretty underwhelming way to end the game.
Oh, bonus, during this point in the game, Fontaine constantly calls you to taunt you. He won’t shut the fuck up, to the point where it gets annoying. It’s like I’m living rent free in the dude’s head.
Bioshock absolutely holds up as one of the greatest triumphs in the history of gaming nearly two decades after its initial release. Every complaint I have is minor in comparison to the totality of what has been achieved here, and even the larger issues (ie, the mediocre shooting) are offset by other strengths (ie, the plasmids and how they interact with the environment). The world of Rapture is absolutely spellbinding and getting lost in this world is a joy that few other games can even dream of replicating. If you haven’t played it, I strongly recommend it.
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And with that, we have completed another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! Suffice to say, this was quite the undertaking: I ended up playing nineteen games (most of them to completion) over the course of this series of articles. Even at its worst, it was a lot of fun! Playing the different versions of the games simultaneously gives you a different perspective on them, and I’m glad that I’ve got this little series to capture my thoughts and those moments in my life. Like I did with Dead or Alive, I’ve also started to expand my collection of physical Ninja Gaiden games as a result of this little series… I don’t think I’m going to go get every version of these games just for the hell of it, but I’m always excited to see a Ninja Gaiden game for a decent price!
This is a good time to note that there were two Ninja Gaiden games I did not play for this series. This is because I could not for the life of me find a copy and they are, as far as I’m aware, lost media.
The first of these is Ninja Gaiden X, which was an early mobile phone prequel to the NES Ninja Gaiden! It looks like they captured the aesthetic of the NES trilogy well, and the game is pretty impressive considering what phones were capable of at the time. However, the game itself is barely five minutes long, making it perhaps the most forgettable and insubstantial game in the entire franchise.
The other lost game is Ninja Gaiden Clans, which was only released in Japan for smartphones. It was a card-based game with social elements, but its design and art style made it look like a spiritual successor to Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. It was supposed to get an international release, but this was quietly cancelled and the game faded into obscurity. I can barely find any gameplay of it. However, there are some screenshots of card art, including two ofmy girl, Hitomi! It appears that this game was exclusive to a game launcher portal, so you can’t even find an APK file to mess around with; the game is just gone with little trace to show that it ever existed… Even if it was not great, that’s still a very sad fate.
Ninja Gaiden Games Ranked
Here is how I would rank the all of the Ninja Gaiden games:
Long-time fans tend to prefer Ninja Gaiden Black but, gun to my head, I would have to give Sigma the slightest of advantages over it. This is largely down to the quality of life enhancements introduced in Sigma that make it a bit more enjoyable to play. Calling the content that has been removed from this version “puzzles” would be extremely generous: the “puzzles” in Ninja Gaiden (2004) are incredibly easy, but often force you to do a bunch of repetitive backtracking. Removing these puzzles ultimately replaces lengthy pace-killers with exciting combat sequences. I also kind of enjoyed getting to play as Rachel. A lot of fans hate how slow and limited her moveset is, to the point where it’s often cited as the reason why Black is better. Personally, I liked the change in pace her chapters bring. Both Sigma and Black are incredible, so you can’t really go wrong either way.
While I would say that Sigma is my favourite of the lot, I would actually recommend Ninja Gaiden Black to a first-time player, just so you can get to experience the more varied gameplay that the puzzle sections bring. They do present a more unique game design philosophy that the franchise quickly honed away. Plus, the game defaults to normal mode, so play Black, and then you can jump to a higher difficulty off the bat in Sigma (or, y’know, just keep playing Black on a higher difficulty: again, you can’t go wrong with either version).
Ninja Gaiden (2004) is a step down from Sigma and Black, but that’s simply because it’s a less “complete” and “refined” experience. That said, it’s still effectively the same game in most respects: the iron-wrought foundation upon which all other versions were forged, so it’s still deserving of a top-tier placement on the list.
Closing out our S-tier is Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus. Purists will poo-poo this game due to its framerate of 30 FPS, but the game’s still goddamn Ninja Gaiden (now on the go)! Honestly, the bigger problem this version faces is its motion control gimmicks, which make the mandatory bow sections even more annoying. Due to these small blemishes, I have to say that this is probably the weakest version of Ninja Gaiden (2004), but its placement here in S-tier should illustrate how fucking great it is overall.
As I stated in its respective Love/Hate entry, the original Ninja Gaiden II is my favourite version of the game, despite some major reservations. The moment-to-moment combat is just so good, and learning how to deal with (and massacre) the swarms of aggressive enemies with low health is a joy that later revisions have not even tried to match. Unfortunately, the latter-half of the game is just miserable to play through. As much as I love this game’s quirks, the notion of having to replay these latter levels fills me with dread… It’s a game of soaring highs, and infuriating lows that its successors would even out.
Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is probably the most enjoyable way to play Ninja Gaiden II today. It corrects a lot of the mistakes of Sigma 2 and, while it doesn’t match the best parts of Ninja Gaiden II, it’s a hell of a lot closer. Plus, the absence of the absolute bullshit that plagued the original release makes it a game I’m far more likely to come back to just to enjoy myself in.
Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection is an interesting case. On the one hand, it’s an absolute steal just for Ninja Gaiden Sigma alone. Unfortunately, it also has Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, which makes it a bit harder to recommend, because it’s my least-favourite version of Ninja Gaiden II. As a result, I’d recommend the Master Collection to first-time players looking to get into the series, but I’d strongly recommend picking up a copy of Ninja Gaiden II or 2 Black as well… and, at that point, you might just want to get Ninja Gaiden Black, rendering the entire collection kind of pointless. Ain’t this franchise’s fractured release history grand?
B-tier: Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge, Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos, Ninja Gaiden (1988), Ninja Gaiden (1992)
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is… fine. A lot of my distaste for it comes down to it being compromised compared to the better versions we have (plus I hate games with spongey enemies). However, if Sigma 2 is the only way you’ve experienced Ninja Gaiden II, then you probably won’t mind too much, as you’re still going through largely the same experience, just with a different feel to the combat.
Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge is a monumental improvement on its predecessor, thanks to some inspired changes to the combat mechanics. If it was not bogged down by the sins of its predecessor that couldn’t be fixed in eight months of development, this could have rivalled Ninja Gaiden II.
Thanks to a handful of major refinements and a more measured difficulty progression, Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos is a notable improvement on its predecessor, even if it is marred by some awful level gimmicks.
Ninja Gaiden (1988) is a pretty fun (if punishingly difficult) game in its own right, but much of its importance comes down to its revolutionary narrative presentation. Not exactly an easy game to get into for a modern player, but well worth trying out!
Ninja Gaiden (1992) for the Master System is by far the best looking classic-era game in the franchise. The game is just an absolute bastard with its enemy spawns, to a hilarious degree, and you want nothing more than to show this game who’s the boss.
C-tier: Ninja Gaiden III: The Ancient Ship of Doom, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy
Ninja Gaiden III is a cautionary tale about the limits of video game difficulty. The game is punishingly difficult for no good reason, with even basic enemies in the opening levels causing ludicrous amounts of damage. Like, as difficult as the other NES Ninja Gaiden games are, you could at least afford to take a hit every once in a while. Ninja Gaiden III is just excessively punishing to the detriment of the game overall.
Ninja Gaiden Trilogy is a lackluster collection due to its poor ports of the NES trilogy (akin to the slap-dash “remasters” we got during the PS3/Xbox 360-era). About the only true positive I can say for it is that its version of Ninja Gaiden III has the originally intended, much fairer difficulty (but even then, you’ve got the weird graphics, imprecise controls, and poor sound effects to contend with). It’s not unplayable, but it’s not great either, especially in an era where the original titles are easily accessible.
I was fairly disappointed with Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. Despite its short length, its combat quickly became a slog and its gimmicky control scheme, while perfectly functional, is unable to sustain interest. I certainly appreciate its expansion of the Ninja Gaiden universe, but the game is too experimental for its own good. In addition, the amount of assets reused from Ninja Gaiden (2004) is frankly ridiculous.
Ninja Gaiden Shadow is reasonably fun, but the short playtime and extremely stripped-back gameplay make it little more than a curiosity in this franchise’s long-running history.
I really don’t know how I managed to get through Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus back in 2013, let alone how it became the gateway drug that got me into this entire franchise. I guess I just was extremely forgiving, because Sigma 2 Plus is borderline-unplayable if you have any standards for game performance. The framerate is terrible, often dipping well below 30 FPS, the game constantly gets interrupted by mid-game loading screens, and the graphics look very muddy as the PS Vita struggles to keep up with the chaos on-screen. Plus, y’know, it’s a port of Sigma 2, so it’s already a pretty compromised experience. I guess if you’ve never played another Ninja Gaiden game then it might be bearable… but if you have…? Bleh. Yeah, this is unacceptable and a curiosity at best.
Ninja Gaiden 3 (2012) is a prime example of the dangers of trend-chasing. So many bone-headed decisions were made in the creation of this game. The story is terrible, largely due to the directors pushing for a more “complex” narrative. A ton of options have been entirely stripped out and replaced with nothing. The health system is frustratingly designed. All the worst design trends of the PS3/Xbox 360 era make an appearance. Worst of all though is that combat, the bread-and-butter of Ninja Gaiden, just kind of sucks. I don’t know what I could say that could be more damning than that.
I can overlook Ninja Gaiden (1991)’s poor graphics and 30 minute runtime, but what I can’t forgive is the terrible game feel and the extremely cheap enemy placements, which spawn in and then immediately attack, leaving you a split second to react without taking damage.
Ninja Gaiden (arcade) is a moderately interesting slice of late-80s arcade gaming, but that’s about it. As-is, it’s too rudimentary to compete with other retro side-scrolling beat ’em ups, while also having all the frustrating bullshit you’d expect from a coin-op arcade machine. Play it for nostalgia or curiosity, but don’t expect to have a great time.
F-tier: Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z
Fuck this goddamn game. It’s not “bad because it doesn’t play like a Ninja Gaiden game”, this game is horrendous by any standards, full-stop. The humour makes me want to die, the combat is dull, the platforming is irritating, the game looks like a bowl of puke, and its janky as all hell.
Ninja Gaiden Games Ranked by Difficulty
Suffice to say, this is an extremely subjective ranking by someone who played mostly on normal or hard mode throughout this series. If you’re playing on Master Ninja, then some games are going to be harder than others, but I cannot speak to that experience (and, honestly, my experience is going to be more relevant to 80% of the people who play these games (the one-and-done playthrough player).
A couple notes here:
Yaiba‘s on top because fuck Yaiba. The game isn’t particularly difficult (in fact, it probably would be just above Dragon Sword if you want a “true” ranking), but the game is so miserable to play that the true difficulty is in making you want to even play this piece of shit game.
Ninja Gaiden II‘s pretty low on the list! Obviously, it’s a pretty difficult game in its own right, but by Ninja Gaiden standards, it seems to be one of the more approachable entries. I say this because I had no issues on Ninja Gaiden II‘s hard mode on any of my playthroughs, whereas the equivalent mode on its predecessor and sequel felt more challenging. Apparently it is brutal on Master Ninja, but I cannot speak to that.
Dragon Sword‘s the only Ninja Gaiden game I’d say is straight-up easy, largely due to its imprecise control scheme necessitating an extreme level of generosity.
Ranking the Bosses of the Modern Ninja Gaiden Games
S-tier: Volf, Genshin, Doku, Alma
Volf is just the best. This boisterous personality and sense of honour make him a boss that you cannot wait to face off against. The showdown that ensues is pretty great in its own right.
Genshin is a solid boss, but his surprisingly strong presence within the storyline really elevates him to S-tier levels.
In his introduction, Doku is just the coolest antagonist in the entire franchise. He’s incredibly intimidating, so the point when you finally are forced to face-off with him is an adrenaline-pumping highlight.
The RNG elements of Alma’s can make her somewhat frustrating, but I love this fight, it’s challenging but learning the fight is fun. In addition, Alma’s design is fascinating. There’s such a strange and ethereal presence about her.
A-tier: Marbus, Prototype Goddess, The Regent of the Mask, Epigonos, Ghost Doku, Murai, Ishtaros, Awakened Alma, Nicchae, Dagra Dai
Marbus is a pretty great fight, despite only really being vulnerable when he does one attack. This could be extremely frustrating if done wrong, but thankfully he is an enjoyable test of mettle on the two occasions you meet him.
I really enjoy the Prototype Goddess. Her attacks are telegraphed distinctly, so you get a fair chance to react and then punish. The Steel on Bone mechanics in Razor’s Edge also make this a fun showcase of the mechanic. Just a really good boss, one of the fairest in the entire franchise.
The Regent of the Mask gains a lot of points for his personality alone, but thankfully his fights live up to the hype. Like the Prototype Goddess, he telegraphs his attacks, so you have a fair chance to respond. However, he does have two infuriating techniques that pushed him down from a higher ranking: 1) his grab attack is incredibly fast and punishing, to the point where you just kind of predict that it’s coming, and 2) his goddamn ranged grab in your third showdown is fucking bullshit.
We already had doppelganger fights in Ninja Gaiden Black, but Epigonos is the ultimate expression of that idea. As you can expect, he can do everything you can do, so the more knowledge you have of your abilities, the better you’ll be able to punish his attacks. As a result, this is an extremely fair fight: even when you’re getting caught in devastating Izuna drops, just block more (which is exactly what enemies have been doing all game to break your own combos).
Ghost Doku is a weird step down from his prior incarnation. Seeing him come back as a ghost robs him of a lot of his formerly-intimidating aura. Still gets high points for being a great fight, but it’s definitely less-exciting.
The initial confrontation with Murai is a classic affair, as you go sword-to-nunchuck with your uncle. It’s a solid fight to open the game and one that tests your skills in a manner that feels very fair.
Ishtaros’s design is something. It’s wild to me that she’s the main antagonist in a T-rated Nintendo DS game! Her status as a secret boss earns her a lot of points, and her moveset is fairly unique.
Awakened Alma is kind of bullshit, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s basically entirely ranodm whether your Flying Swallow will land on her, so you can end up getting frustrated when you die to RNG. However, her moveset and the atmosphere of the fight really elevate this confrontation for me, even if she’s not as good here as she was in her first encounter.
Nicchae earns points for being a challenging secret boss. She plays like a reskin of Alma, which I’m pretty mixed on (Alma’s moveset is fun, but it’s pretty lame that they couldn’t give Nicchae her own identity). A pretty good boss, but could be better if she had a more unique moveset.
I’ll be entirely honest: I always forget about the Dagra Dai fight. Of all the bosses in Ninja Gaiden II, no other boss has left less of an impression on me. Every time I get to him, I enjoy the fight (far more than the two fights after him), but I cannot remember a single thing about it. I’m serious: I re-watched this fight yesterday to remind myself what happens in it, and I’ve already forgotten everything about it again. I feel like he is deserving of the A-tier, but I cannot justify anywhere else but the bottom of the tier due to how extremely forgettable he is.
B-tier: Fiend Murai, Alexei, Zedonius, Dynamo (and Alternator), Paz Zuu
Fiend Murai suffers for being the final boss at the end of your journey. He’s fast and hits hard, but you’re facing him when you’re at your most skilled. If you’ve saved enough health elixirs, you can just brute force through him easily. If you have not saved enough elixirs, then this fight could be incredibly tough, especially since you’ll need to replay the shitty platforming section every time you die and there’s no way to restock on heals.
All of the Greater Fiends are fun, but Alexei makes it this high off of sheer personality. He’s a weirdo and a creep, but he’s so flamboyant that it works. His fight is also pretty enjoyable, with an enjoyable level of challenge.
I dunno, I have heard that a lot of people struggle with Zedonius, but I’ve always found him really underwhelming in Ninja Gaiden II. It feels like he’s dead before he gets much of a chance to make an impression. Having only one chapter instead of two also doesn’t make your showdown any more exciting. Still, while the fight doesn’t last particularly long, it is quite enjoyable!
Dynamo is a pretty random, but enjoyable, showdown on the top of the zeppelin. He’s also a good skill-check, forcing you to learn when you are safe to punish and when you need to back off. I’ve chosen to just lump Alternator in here too, since he’s literally just a rehash of Dynamo, except that he has a jetpack. He plays pretty much identically.
I really enjoy the battle with Paz Zuu! That said: it is incredibly easy. Most of its attacks can be avoided by just standing behind it, its main attack is incredibly easy to avoid, and it gives you a ton of openings to damage it. This can make it fun to just beat this guy down, but it’s one of the easiest showdowns in the entire game.
C-tier: Elizabet, Holy Vigoor Emperor, Rasetsu, Cliff, The Archfiend
Elizabet is kinda bullshit. She seems like she can block your attacks automatically, and actually landing a hit in feels entirely random. On top of this though, she has high damage and a ton of health, so you have to be extremely careful when facing her.
The Holy Vigoor Emperor’s psychedelic aesthetic goes a long way towards making him a fascinating main antagonist. Honestly though, the boss battles against him are pretty weak. The first is a gimmicky DPS test while suddenly having your movement controls completely changed on you. The second fight is basically a game of “I sure hope you still have arrows for your bow!” Neither is awful, but they are pretty underwhelming.
Rasetsu is a decent fight, but his reputation as a boss drops because he gets downgraded to a fairly common mini-boss enemy towards the end of the game… and those black spider ninja fiends have more health than Rasetsu did. Yeah, the nameless enemies are stronger than this guy, great spot to put him in.
Cliff is super lame due to his role in the narrative of Ninja Gaiden 3. However, I can’t deny that the fight with him is reasonably enjoyable, redeeming him slightly.
I don’t understand why they were trying to make the bow more important in this game, it is boring compared to your melee weapons, and the first phase of The Archfiend suffers for it the most. The second phase is better since it’s largely melee-oriented, but it’s nowhere near as fun a finale as Fiend Murai.
D-tier: Gamov, The Dark Dragon, Tengu Brothers, Fire Dragon, Masakado, Electric Worm, Spider Tank, Yotunfrau, Hydracubus, Ashtear
Gamov is kind of random. He seems like he’s up to something, but he ends up doing nothing for the entire game, only to get killed off randomly by Murai at the end. His boss fight in Sigma is decent, but nothing particularly special or memorable.
The legendary Dark Dragon is pretty cool to see in a Ninja Gaiden game, but that game is Dragon Sword… so just swipe a bunch and dodge generously and you’ll win anything… Yeah, it’s a pretty rote fight overall. He comes back in Sigma 2 to replace the Quetzalcoatls, so that’s a point in its favour, but it’s still a pretty simple fight overall.
The Tengu Brothers are a decent fight, although they can get a bit annoying considering how many times you face them…
The Fire Dragon makes for a good bit of spectacle, but man is this fight ridiculously easy. Most of its attacks will struggle to even hit you, allowing you to just wail on it.
Masakado, aka Horse Guy, is a bit of a mid fight. He’s basically just a stronger version of the samurai riders you’ve already fought. The biggest annoyance though is the mage adds in the fight. I just focus on killing them until they stop respawning, because Masakado is much less of a threat than they are.
Fuuuuuck the Electric Worm (both fights with it). It’s that typical “lame Ninja Gaiden boss” formula: it cannot be attacked directly, so you watch as it cycles between a bunch of attacks, only two of which open it up for damage… and you’d best be fast, because you have a second to respond or it will get away. It’s an okay fight mechanically, but man did I get annoyed by it.
The initial Spider Tank fight was alright. The thing spammed bullets, rockets, and electrical shields a bit too much, but it was a decent enough first boss. However, having to face two of the sonofabitches near the end of the game is just fucking stupid. You can’t stand still for an instant or you’ll get bombarded by rockets from off-screen. That second fight pulls this boss’s overall ranking down for sure.
Yotunfrau is an incredibly easy boss. His attacks are a bit too slow and telegraphed, making him trivial to fight. Honestly, if you get hit during this fight, that’s on you for being impatient. That said, it’s fun to beat him down, so I can’t put him any lower than this.
Hydracubus is also an incredibly easy boss – just Flying Swallow repeatedly and then attack when he’s growing his tentacles back. Again, it’s kind of enjoyable to just beat him down in less than a minute, although I enjoy him a bit less than Yotunfrau.
Ashtear is a… interesting fight. His biggest issue is that he comes right after the double Spider Tank fight, so you’re probably coming into this fight with low health. To compensate, his moveset is extremely exploitable, making it very possible that you can go through this entire fight without taking damage. That said, the fight goes on for multiple phases, so you had better hope that you have enough health for some margin of error (I didn’t, so I had to play it perfectly in my Razor’s Edge hard mode run).
E-tier: Obaba, Dragon Skeleton, Tanks, Bone Giant, Buddha Statue, Statue of Liberty, Helicopter, Godomus, Fire Worm, Water Dragon, Nuclear Armadillos, fucking Giganotosaurus, Canna the Goddess
Obaba has had three completely different boss fights across three different games… and they’ve all been pretty disappointing, hence her fairly low ranking. I think her boss battle in Sigma 2 is probably the most enjoyable one.
The Dragon Skeleton is one of those bosses that’s… fine, I guess, but it’s a pretty dull affair. Attack its limbs when he’s vulnerable and then dodge a couple different attacks… very easy stuff.
The tank battle suffers, again, because it’s a bow fight in my ninja combat game. You have to be in constant motion, balancing movement and firing off armour-piercing arrows. Oh, and when you beat the tank, a second one enters and you have to do literally the same fight all over again. It’s kind of funny, but it’s also a big “fuck you” to the player…
The Bone Giant in Ninja Gaiden II is a complete slog. It’s not all that difficult, but he takes so little damage that you will start losing health sooner or later. Nothing feels worse than getting him low, then dying, and having to restart the whole process again.
The Sigma 2-exclusive Buddha Statue fight is really lame. He has that usual “attack the limbs” formula that boring bosses have, but he also has barely any health so at least the fight’s over with quickly.
The Statue of Liberty fight is basically just the aforementioned Buddha Statue, but with some more annoying attacks, so it gets a lower rank as a result.
You fight a lot of helicopter bosses over the course of this franchise, and they’re all pretty lame. Again, this is because they are bow fights… yawn.
Godomus operates a lot like the Bone Giant – doesn’t take a lot of damage, but he dishes out more damage, so fighting him gets really annoying, especially on rematches.
Ugh, as if fighting the Electric Worm twice wasn’t lame enough, you then fight the exact same boss, except now he has a fire attack instead of an electric attack. This is easily the most annoying version of the worm, but the fact that you’re fighting the same guy again just makes this fight a pain in the ass.
The Water Dragon sucks in pretty much any version of Ninja Gaiden II. You’re stuck on a platform avoiding two types of attacks over and over again and just firing off an arrow when you get an opening… it’s extremely dull and frustrating. People will complain that Sigma 2 removed the option to go into the water to fight him, but that method of fighting him also sucks.
FUCK the Nuclear Armadillo (especially their tag team rematch in the original Ninja Gaiden II). If you want to be “safe” then you stick to its tail and/or legs and get some chip damage in. However, the armadillo will eventually spam a ridiculous amount of flaming projectiles at you, making the latter-part of the fight incredibly risky. As a result, I just go for the head, which takes more damage than the rest of its body, but leaves you open to a very fast and damaging bite attack… it’s worth it compared to slogging through the fight the “safe” way though. Oh and lest we forget, when you kill the boss, he explodes in a nuclear blast that fills the entire arena. This can only be survived by blocking, a thing that the game does not communicate to you, so you can easily beat this boss multiple times and then die on the last hurdle because you’re the idiot for not realizing you can block a nuclear explosion…
The fucking Giganotosaurus in Ninja Gaiden 3 is a pain in the ass and illustrative of the issues with this game’s design. Because you can’t just heal in the fight, bosses have to be very exploitable. As a result, the boss is a clumsy idiot, tripping over her own feet to give you a lengthy opening to attack her, and you can easily bait her into flailing about uselessly so that you take no damage. However, if you do get hit, the Giganotosaurus does a ton of damage, which can easily one- or two-shot you, with zero opportunities for healing.
Canna the Goddess is a ridiculous battle, feeling more like a bullet hell at times than a proper Ninja Gaiden boss. If you can get through the first part of the fight, where she spams projectiles and does arm slams while you try to fight a bunch of adds to get your ninpo bar maxed out, then the rest is pretty easy. A lot of fans really hate her, but I didn’t hate her quite enough to reach F-tier.
F-tier: Giant Helicopter, Quetzalcoatls, GigaDeath, Giant Death Worm
There’s a pattern with most of these F-tier bosses and that’s that they are bow fights. The Giant Helicopter in Ninja Gaiden 3 is bad because it is incredibly drawn out over the course of three phases with zero opportunities for healing. The third phase especially is frustrating because it gets adds which you need to kill in order to focus on the boss. The only reason I managed to get through this was because you can slow down time by hitting R3 while aiming, making it easier to kill the adds and land your shots on the helicopter, but the game never communicates this to you.
Holy shit the Quetzalcoatls suck. This is largely due to the garbage camera, which only tracks the two bosses, but leaves you entirely vulnerable to the adds spamming you with fireballs and swooping attacks. As much as I liked the original Ninja Gaiden II, encounters like this are an absolute piss-off and replacing them with the Dark Dragon in Sigma 2-onwards is an objective improvement.
FUCK GIGADEATH. This electric fish sonofabitch spams a stupid amount of projectiles and ghost fish at you, which can melt your health bar from full to zero in a second. I legitimately don’t even understand how I’ve beaten this guy every time, I feel like I’m barely managing to dodge its attacks.
The Giant Death Worm is the one boss in the entire franchise who feels completely broken and unfinished. You spend the entire fight just sitting in tunnels, getting cheap hits in as the boss passes by harmlessly. Then, if you get hit by him, you get bounced around the screen as the boss awkwardly pushes you forward: it looks downright embarrassing. There’s a reason this boss was cut out of Sigma 2 and I don’t think anybody laments its absence.
What Does the Future Hold For Ninja Gaiden?
Unlike many of the franchises we’ve covered on this series, Ninja Gaiden fans are eating good right now. After a decade of nothing, 2025 is bringing us three new Ninja Gaiden games. The first of these, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, has already released and been covered here, but the next two are arguably even more exciting.
The first of these is Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, which I am super excited about. It’s being developed by The Game Kitchen, who made Blasphemous, one of my favourite games of all-time. It’s the first 2D entry in the franchise in decades, so they picked the perfect developer for it. Beyond this, the game just looks better and better every time I see it. It seems poised to bridge the gap between the modern games and the NES trilogy. The new protagonist, Kenji, seems cool and the Black Spider Clan kunoichi, Kumori, looks fascinating. It also just looks like it’s going to be really fun, I cannot wait to get my hands on it in the next few months.
The other upcoming Ninja Gaiden game is Ninja Gaiden 4, being developed by Platinum Games and Team Ninja. I’m cautiously optimistic about this one. Platinum Games have a pedigree for good action games, although their track record in the past few years has been a bit spotty (hence the cautious optimism). Their style is also pretty distinct from Team Ninja’s, so I hope that they can put something together that can please fans of their style and the existing Ninja Gaiden fanbase.
Aaaaaand that’s it for another Love/Hate series here on IC2S! Honestly, as insane as this undertaking was for me, I’m actually feeling a bit sad to be done with it. I’ve got other games I’d like to play, but sometime soon I’d love to try to play Ninja Gaiden Sigma or Ninja Gaiden 2 Black on a higher difficulty and see if I can do it! In the meantime, I’d got more Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden articles in mind, so don’t expect my obsession with these franchise to end anytime soon.
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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series! We’ve covered all the Ninja Gaiden video games that I could get my hands on, so we’re coming in with a bonus entry for the Ninja Gaiden anime film from the 90s which acts as a direct sequel to the NES trilogy! I knew literally nothing about this film going in, so I had no idea what to expect from it. Does this film hold up as a stand-alone film and/or as a canonical entry in the Ninja Gaiden storyline? Read on to find out…
Love
The Early-90s Anime Aesthetic – Ninja Ryukenden looks gorgeous, and that is largely due to the hand-drawn style which screams early-90s anime. It looks incredible and makes me very nostalgic for that simpler aesthetic.
The Fights – Being a video game movie, Ninja Ryukenden has a bunch of fights. What I was not expecting was for these sequences to be really well-animated and surprisingly violent affairs! I guess that this film would have released right before Mortal Kombat and the subsequent moral panic, so maybe Tecmo had no problem showing Ryu lop off heads and slice people in half in a geyser of blood and gore. Seriously, there are sequences in this film which feel like they directly inspired the ultra-violence of Ninja Gaiden II!
Side Characters – As enjoyable as it is to see Ryu being a ninja badass, I think that my favourite part of the narrative was its B-plot, featuring Robert F. Sturgeon (whose return means that he survived Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos!), his girlfriend Sara, and his friend Jeff. They basically spend this time doing typical detective investigation stuff, but the trio have fun personalities that really endears you to them. Jeff’s sudden shift to being a total badass in the third act was also joyous, I was grinning from ear-to-ear whenever he was on-screen.
Mixed
Animation – While the pure 90s aesthetic of Ninja Ryukenden sure elevates it, it’s pretty clear that they didn’t have much of a budget or time at their disposal. Many scenes have very little animation to them at all. That said, when the film does start animating at a higher quality, they’ve allocated it to the areas where it mattered most (particularly during the fights). Still, there are some moments where the lack of motion to the animation can be a bit distracting…
Hate
The Story – While Ninja Ryukenden looks good, its story is incredibly generic. The bad guys are trying to summon the Dark God, again. Irene gets kidnapped, again. Ryu has to fight through monsters to get to the bad guy, again. But wait, they added something new this time! A melodramatic romance subplot between Ryu and Irene… oh wait, no, that’s also extremely generic in its own right.
It probably doesn’t help that the film’s only forty-five minutes long, so it’s not like they had a lot of time to let the narrative breathe.
Irene – God, I don’t know who’s been disrespected more in this franchise: Rachel, or Irene? At least Rachel’s gotten a chance to kick some ass, Irene is just constantly getting kidnapped. She’s even worse here though, being nearly worthless in a fight (despite being a trained CIA operative in the NES trilogy!), and spending every scene whining about her fear that Ryu will break up with her. She’s a burden and a wet blanket on the whole affair, it’s idiotic that they made her so incapable here.
Having seen my fair share of extended universe video game movies, I wasn’t really expecting much out of Ninja Ryukenden. As a result, I was pleasantly surprised to find a lot to like here, even if the narrative is completely generic. It’s too bad that this film never got a sequel, I would have loved to see more of this style… especially because it hints at a potential follow-up that never was!
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Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series on IC2S! In this entry, we’ll be looking at the most recent Ninja Gaiden game (excluding re-releases), Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, a strange spin-off featuring zombies and an asshole ninja protagonist trying to find and kill Ryu Hayabusa. Frankly, this game has a horrible reputation within the Ninja Gaiden fan community, and was blamed for killing the franchise (at least up until its recent revival). Given its noxious reputation, I had never played this game and did my best to avoid it until now. I don’t really know all that much about it, so it’ll be interesting to see how it actually plays. Is it as bad as people say? Read on to find out…
Refreshingly, we reach the end of this Love/Hate series with a game that had only the one release. No revisions of Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z for me to have to play, nice and simple!
Love
Improvised Zombie Weapons – For what it’s worth, being able to grab a zombie and then use it to beat down other zombies is pretty hilarious the first time you do it, and it actually makes your flail hit harder, so there’s actually some incentive to do it. You can also throw them at distant enemies (including helicopters!). Some zombies will even explode when you throw them. In addition, most special zombies will give you a limited-time attack if you land an execution on them, which are all very strong and pretty funny (the clown zombie dropping “nunchuckles” is a pretty great pun).
The Soundtrack – Okay, so Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z doesn’t have the most memorable, revolutionary or unique soundtrack, but I quite enjoyed when the electronica/dance music kicks in (especially on the main menu). As far as the core design elements go, the soundtrack is by far the best thing Yaiba has going for it.
Mixed
Elemental Mechanics – The most original aspect of Yaiba‘s gameplay is that it gives special properties to fire, electricity, and poison damage. These status effects can be used by enemies against you, but you can also use them to attack enemies and interact with the environment. In addition, different elements can be combined to produce special effects (eg, fire + electricity = an huge electric tornado, fire + poison = a massive incineration, electricity + poison = crystallizes the target, etc). There are several puzzles and encounters that revolve around this system, to the point where it kind of feels like it takes over the game. It’s kind of an interesting concept, but in practice it feels like a chore that’s a bit too prescribed. It also doesn’t help that the effects of elemental combinations are unintuitive. I would often completely forget what would happen when two elements combined, but the game had given me two in one area, so clearly it wants me to combine them to advance. It would have been nice if this was more like Bioshock, where you get to decide what you want to use and combine them however you want to.
Combat – Despite the title, Yaiba does not play like Ninja Gaiden at all. If anything, its combat feels more like God of War, as you perform free-form combos with your various weapons to kill hundreds of zombies however you want to, without the precision or intentionality you’d expect from Ninja Gaiden. It works, I guess, but it’s not particularly interesting. The only reason this doesn’t go into “Hate” is that I do legitimately like the cyber fist: its strikes have a really satisfying feedback and, when you get the charged attack upgrade, it’s really fun being able to land a fully-charged rocket punch to do devastating damage. It’s overkill for a lot of enemies, but at least it’s more enjoyable than the sword or the flail. I also really enjoyed the “pocket rocket” (a giant missile launcher) which annihilates half the screen on impact.
Hate
Tone – Your opinion of Yaiba is going to be coloured heavily by how you respond to the game’s tone. Ninja Gaiden games have always been very serious affairs, even if their narratives have been pure B-movie cheese (hell, I’d argue that Ninja Gaiden II‘s campy tone works because of how seriously it’s taken). Yaiba goes in an entirely different direction though. The game’s tone is excessively crass, juvenile, and edgy. I’ve seen this described as stereotypical “gamer humour” and I think that’s a pretty apt description. Sure, the other Ninja Gaiden games aren’t exactly high art, but Yaiba just felt trashy. Maybe this will work for you, but I found myself cringing at Yaiba, rather than going with it.
So, first of all, let’s tackle the juvenile aside of things here. The game makes sex and dick jokes constantly in an effort to elicit a laugh, but you quickly find yourself wondering if they have any other material (spoiler: they do not). I love Seth Rogen movies for God’s sake, I’m not opposed to raunchy and juvenile humour, but it just did not work for me in Yaiba. Most of the jokes are just lazy and dumb, with very few managing to land (eg, a zombie failing its jump and splattering against a wall, and a zombie throwing up for about twenty seconds straight got chuckles out of me).
Look, I can’t really properly convey how lowbrow this game’s jokes are without describing some of the dumbest ones. Probably the stupidest one I encountered was a journal entry where some random guy decides that he’ll become a super hero named after his two favourite animals (the horse and the rooster), so he comes up with… “Pony Cock”… The journal entry just hammers you over the head with the joke over and over again.
The most elaborate joke though is when you come across a lingerie shop with a gigantic pair of lady’s legs jutting out of the roof. You need to destroy the building, so you crash a semi-truck into it, which careens out of control and flies in between her legs (sex, you get it?) and then explodes. This causes it to start raining panties, which makes Yaiba start getting giddy for the first (and only) time in the entire game, because… uh, I guess he’s a freak for the sight of lady’s underwear? And then he starts getting mad when a boss zombie shows up, because “they’re ruining my fucking panty party”…
Oh and in addition to these, you will also often encounter zombies who are pissing or fucking random objects in the game’s environments… because “haha, jokes” I guess? When this is the things the game’s doing to try to make you laugh, can you see why I was just exhausted and cringing before long?
The game also will often stop to do a short, slap-stick comedy sketch involving the zombies. You’ve got sequences where a zombie pulls the pin on a grenade, but is too stupid to know to throw it, so he blows himself up, another zombie who tries to get another zombie to move out of the way of a steamroller, before running him over, a zombie wedding, etc. Again, this could work, but it just feels like the game’s trying too hard to get you to laugh at its irreverent sense of humour, so it just didn’t land for me.
Then there’s the edginess, most of which revolves around the titular anti-hero, Yaiba Kamikaze. He’s a stereotypical gruff, macho, arrogant, selfish, irreverent asshole. I get that you’re supposed to kind of hate him, but man is he completely unlikeable and irredeemable. He’s also just such a fucking loser as a result, like he was written to be cool by a bunch of socially inept nerds. When he interrupts the zombie wedding, he complains that the organ music sucks and that “I prefer death metal”. As a metal fan myself, this line made me die of cringe, it was so fucking embarrassing. He also spends the entire game sexually harassing Miss Monday… until it turns out that she was actually into it and she fucked him while he was unconscious, Jesus fucking Christ, this fucking game.
In addition to all of the above, this game is kind of sacrilegious as an entry in the Ninja Gaiden franchise for how it treats established characters. Yaiba keeps making jokes at Ryu’s expense, saying in the very first cutscene that he looks like he’s missing the ball-gag from his gimp suit. The game also has severaljournalentriesyou can find that make it seem like Ryu is terrified of Yaiba and acting like a big baby, until we find out (much later) that Yaiba’s unconscious mind was making these up as a juvenile fantasy. Oh, and speaking of juvenile fantasy, this game has Momiji in it… and, for once, I wish it didn’t. One of those aforementioned journal entries is basically Yaiba’s fantasy of having her fuck him… In a series that dances around the fact that its women are sexy, this outright skeeving over her by such a piece of shit character legitimately pisses me off.
Terrible Design – Yaiba is, straight-up, one of the jankiest games I’ve seen in ages, featuring the sorts of basic design issues that I thought we had ironed out by the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era. The camera in particular is fucking garbage. I don’t know how many times it zoomed out so far that I could barely see what was going on, while other times being so zoomed in on Yaiba that I couldn’t see enemies right in front of him. Oh, and you’ll often find enemies will obscure the camera and make it impossible to be able to see what you’re doing, which got me killed on a couple occasions. And that’s just the camera! There’s also the crowded UI, unmemorable level design (seriously, it’s all just industrial sludge), the game goes into slow-motion every time you die (making every reset take significantly longer than it needs to), long downtime as you wait for enemies to load in, and some very stiff and awkward animations. Worst of all though is the poisoned status condition, which causes the entire screen to be covered in a green filter to obscure your vision. WHY would you design a game where you can get a status condition that stops you from being able to play the game!?!!!?!!!! Absolute fucking idiocy.
On a related note, the game is also blatantly chasing trends. You can tell that some dipshit at Comcept wrote down a list of things that gamers like and then made Spark Unlimited cram them all into the game: leveling up, upgrade trees, collectable journal entries, a rage meter that you fill up to go into rage mode (for like five seconds, LOL), executions, a God of War-style whip, QTEs… the game is sorely lacking its own identity, and this sort of shit just makes it feel like Video Game: The Video Game at times.
“Platforming” Sequences – Yaiba brings back more frequent platforming sections than we’ve seen from this franchise in ages, but the way that they’ve been implemented just sucks. Instead of giving you full control as you pull off some cool moves, Yaiba turns platforming into a glorified QTE event. You end up automatically moving forward and just pressing the correct button for the next obstacle (eg, jump to jump to the next platform, flail to grab onto a distant hook, etc). This is pretty dull on its own, but there are two annoying issues: 1) the window to press the correct button can be very short, resulting in cheap deaths and, 2) the game introduces an entirely new button prompt halfway through the game without telling you, which will result in several deaths as you sit there wondering what you did wrong (pro-tip: you need to press the cyber fist button to rocket yourself towards an enemy). Suffice to say, this sucks, but at least the game’s pretty generous with checkpoints during these sequences.
The Final Boss – Look, I was having such an awful time with Yaiba on normal mode that I decided to lose an entire hour of progress to restart the game on easy, because fuck the idea of playing this game as a challenge. So, with that in mind: I gave up on the final boss, the giant alien god. The bullshit and sheer disrespect to the player was just not worth it. I’m not raging here, the final boss is the cherry on a shit design sundae. First of all, they do a terrible job communicating how the fight should play out. The boss has a bunch of glowing spots on his body, but I apparently was the idiot for thinking that his glowing arms could be attacked as a punish for when the boss did his arm slams, when it was actually an identical glowing spot on his chest that was the target. Then the second phase has him doing more attacks, one of which sees him start spawning in elemental special zombies. This is where the fight becomes utter shite, because nothing else matters except for the fight with these special zombies. The boss has a couple other attacks that it will occasionally do, but they literally do not matter and are nothing more than a waste of your time, patience, and health. When the special zombies spawn in, you have one single chance to land an execution on one of the zombies so you can get their special weapon pickup and then use it on the boss. This is easier said than done too, because these zombies will often interrupt your combos, stopping you from landing the final blow you need to trigger an execution. I kept getting hit on the last attack before the execution, or having the special zombies keel over one-by-one to my fury. Worst of all though, if you fail to get the execution off, you will be stuck waiting at least a minute for the boss to randomly spawn in more enemies. The boss also takes an eternity to go from one attack animation to the next (seriously, there’s a point where you sit there with nothing going on on-screen for nearly twenty seconds). This, combined with the fact that most of the attacks the boss throws at you do nothing but prolong the fight, and that there are no checkpoints makes this an infuriating finale. I gave up, the game was so badly designed that it wasn’t even worth my energy.
Graphics – Look, I don’t tend to get too caught up on a game’s graphics if it’s fun, but at a certain point it really needs to get called out. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z looks terrible for a late PS3/Xbox 360-era game (hell, this game came out after the PS4/Xbox One had launched, so it would have looked even worse at the time). These graphics wouldn’t look impressive on a 3DS, let alone on a seventh generation console, they’re so blocky and low-res. I mean, just look at the textures this game has going for it. “But it’s part of the comic-book art style!”, I can hear some defenders crying. If this was an intentional stylistic choice, then it looks extremely unpleasant. I think it was more likely a matter of time and budget, with the cel shaded style being applied to paper over just how bad everything looked.
Fucking Zombies – Zombies were already a tired trend in games before 2014, so seeing Yaiba ditch the series’ normal gameplay for a zombie slash ’em up is just exhausting. You can just tell that some dumbass executive said “everyone loves zombies, how can we force zombies into one of our franchises?” Basic zombies are faced by the dozen and put up zero resistance as you eviscerate them… which is pretty antithetical to Ninja Gaiden‘s traditional gameplay model, where even the most basic enemy can kill you if you get complacent. That said, I don’t mind the basic zombies too much: cutting them down in droves is enjoyable enough on its own. However, it’s the special zombies that are a headache. The various types of special zombies are extremely spongy, taking several combos to defeat, and often require specific attacks or elements to damage. They feel like mini-bosses, except that that you face them constantly, and in multiples. As I’ve said throughout this series, I hate spongy enemies, so this was aggravating for me.
It’s Not Ninja Gaiden – At the end of the day, making Yaiba a Ninja Gaiden game brings with it certain expectations that it can’t even come close to measuring up to. You can argue that this isn’t fair to Yaiba and that it should be judged on its own merits, but the game sucks on its own merits too, so that’s fine (not to mention that it came out while fans were still sore from Ninja Gaiden 3, so they were in no position to be charitable to a spin-off).
I already had my expectations lowered by Ninja Gaiden 3, so I was going into Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z at my most charitable. Unfortunately, the game ended up being worse than I could have possibly imagined. Once again I find my list of the 25 worst games I’ve ever played becoming outdated, because Yaiba is easily near the top of that list. I am absolutely shocked at the ineptitude on display here. I desperately would like to find more information about how this game ended up this way, because games do not end up this bad by design.
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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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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 Alivemovie and games. I liked it at the time, but does the game hold up in 2025? Read on to find out…
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.
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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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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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…
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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Man, when I started this blog thirteen years ago, I never would have expected that I’d manage to reach four hundred posts! I had started a couple blogs prior to this one and those struggled to continue after the first couple posts, so having this monument to my writing, thoughts, and their evolution over time is just… well, it’s difficult to quantify, really.
Knowing that I was approaching this milestone, I knew that I had to do something special to celebrate. Given that my two hundredth post was about Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, and my three hundredth post was about the DOA movie, I obviously had to find a way to dive back into the Dead or Alive well once more! And, wouldn’t you know it, the timing for this milestone would be reached in fairly close proximity with Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme, a brand new spin-off entry in the franchise. Given my previous commentary about this game during preview season, I also knew that there was the potential for some really spicy opinions, and those kinds of articles are always the most fun to write. Suffice to say, I knew that I was going to need to write a review of it for the occasion. So strap in for my thoughts on Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme!
While the Dead or Alive Xtreme games had some very basic dating sim elements stapled on, Venus Vacation is a full-on dating sim, presented through a visual novel format. The game has a robust photography system, and much of the game’s “content” revolves around watching the girls and waiting to take the perfect shot. Much like Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 and Venus Vacation, you play as the “Owner”, hired by Zack to oversee the Venus Islands and manage the upcoming Venus Festival. In order to prepare for the festival, you go around recruiting alluring women you meet to be a “Venus” to do promos for the festival. The game doesn’t really elaborate on what being a “Venus” entails, but I understood it to mean “a supermodel who embodies the essence of ‘beauty'”. Each of the Venuses is vying for your affection, so you have to decide who to show preference to. Most of the game involves you watching the Venuses interact and making occasional dialogue choices. You also can take photos throughout each level to increase the pictured Venus’ interest in you and earn them more fans. On rare occasions, you may be asked to do a QTE sequence. If that sounds dull to you… well, I don’t think you’re cut out for visual novels, sorry.
So Who Are Our Cast of Venuses?
Venus Vacation Prism has brought over six of the girls from Dead or Alive Xtreme: Venus Vacation for you to photograph and woo:
Misaki is the first girl you meet in the game. She’s the stereotypical Japanese “trad-GF” archetype: constantly working, polite, sweet, modest, and innocent. She takes a long time to get out of her shell and feel comfortable with herself. She is far too insecure to make the first move, so you need to do it for her. Romancing Misaki is all about making her feel comfortable enough to show off her voluptuous body to you… which just gives me the ick. As a grown man experiencing this game, trying to romance this shy and innocent girl makes me feel like I’m grooming her, ugh! I was legitimately uncomfortable pursuing her romance, so I just romanced the other characters instead. This left Misaki visibly disappointed and saddened throughout the entire game, but since she didn’t make the first move, I just roleplayed that I didn’t even notice this as I cucked her with the rest of the cast.
Disappointingly, the only girl from the mainline Dead or Alive series in this game is Honoka… but, like, she’s Honoka. She feels out of place in the mainline Dead or Alive games, but she’s right at home in Dead or Alive Xtreme.
Honoka’s the second girl you meet in Venus Vacation Prism. True to her portrayal in Dead or Alive 6, she’s a simple sort: not particularly smart, but sweet and fun-loving. She doesn’t have much of a personality to speak of… which is why I’d say that Honoka is literally just this game’s “teenage boy’s fantasy” archetype: she’s got ridiculously massive tits, and a personality so dull that it couldn’t possibly intimidate the lowest common denominator (y’know, those sorts of cowards who get angry if the object of their affection has any sort of self agency). Romancing her is all about having fun and staring at boobs as much as possible. That’s… fine, really, but so shallow that it couldn’t hold my interest.
The third Venus you’ll meet is Tamaki. She is very open, has few boundaries, and greatly appreciates honesty and forthrightness. She’s heavily bi-coded, fawning over the Venuses just as much as she flirts with you. She’s also a bit of a goblin, flirting with you to see how you’ll react, teasing people, groping the other Venuses, and she’s a borderline alcoholic. She immediately begins flirting with you the moment she lays eyes on you, and is not shy about trying to seduce you.
And I love this.
I’m just going to say this up-front: Tamaki was my ride-or-die in this game. I’ve complained in the past about how Dead or Alive girls are almost all portrayed as innocent, untouchable angels, which makes the voyeuristic aspects of these games more uncomfortable. However, here we have a character who is aware of, and in control of, her sexuality, and she expresses her interest in you outright. That is a thousand times more arousing than preying on someone’s inexperience! The franchise legitimately needs more characters like this. Suffice to say, I prioritized Tamaki every chance I got. Romancing Tamaki is all about being honest with your feelings, and having a (relatively) realistic, adult relationship with someone.
Fiona is fucking insane. She’s a yandere, a character who is extremely obsessed with you. That would be weird enough on its own, but Fiona is also a literal princess who has spent her entire life in a castle. Like a week or two before you meet her, Fiona saw an advertisement for the Venus Festival with Misaki, Honoka, Tamaki, and yourself in it and she decided that she needed to throw her entire life away to be with you. Why is she so devoted to you? Well, she liked the way that you looked at the other Venuses and wanted you to look at her that way…
Fucking what???
Personality-wise, Fiona is clearly has social anxiety. She’s soft-spoken and sweet, but her obsession with you makes every interaction awkward. She was also clearly only educated in etiquette and politics, so she needs help from others to understand the ways of the world… ugh, here comes that uncomfortable groomer feeling again…
Quite frankly, I did not like Fiona. I can’t really tell you what romancing her entails, because I didn’t fuel her delusions. She seems fairly sweet, but I’m not into these yandere types, other than Monika.
Nanami is uncanny. She seems to be intended to be a relatively normal, modern city girl: she’s soft-spoken, sociable, interested in photography, gets bored, and she’s uncertain what her future holds. I actually found this concept moderately interesting, but the more time you spend with Nanami, the less “normal” she feels. She’s excessively soft-spoken and chill, to the point where you become sharply aware that it defines her entire personality. I can’t even imagine her being angry, losing her cool, or even expressing excitement. As a result, she ends up being kind of a bland dating sim character, lacking much of a personality to latch on to. Maybe she has a more engaging personality as you get to know her, but I didn’t have much interest in getting to that point when there were much more compelling choices available. Romancing her is equally chill – just don’t be an asshole, real-life rules apply here too.
But hey, at least she doesn’t give me the ick, so that put her above a couple other characters in my books.
M-mommy!?! Elise is the harsh teacher/boss archetype: she’s stern, strict, and disappointed in you. You need to earn her approval, which makes it feel all the more satisfying when you do. She’s a workaholic and needs someone to show her how to loosen up and have fun. She doesn’t even become a Venus until after several chapters with her, so you get a lot of time to get to know her compared to some of the other girls.
Hoo boy, Elise was waking something in me and, at times, even managed to take some of my attention from Tamaki. Elise may be intimidating and cold to some people, but she’s totally my type, looks very cute, has a great storyline, and feels particularly suited for a dating sim narrative! That said, going for Elise is playing this game on hard mode, because she is particularly difficult to impress and, as the last Venus recruited, you get less opportunities to prioritize her.
“Gameplay”
Given that the dating sim elements of Dead or Alive Xtreme are my least-favourite part about those games, I was not expecting much from a Team Ninja dating sim game. However, this really is a case where going all-in on a concept made for a better end product, because I actually rather enjoyed the dating sim elements in Venus Vacation Prism. Instead of having to memorize the specific colours of wrapping paper that each girl likes to get them to arbitrarily accept a gift from you, Venus Vacation Prism‘s dating sim elements revolve entirely around getting to know the girls’ personalities through your interactions with them and then making dialogue choices which correspond to their interests. You’ll also often be forced to choose which girls to spend your time with, so you can’t just woo them all at once – someone has to end up disappointed. Granted, this is just bog-standard modern dating sim gameplay, but it’s certainly a step up from Dead or Alive Xtreme‘s half-assed approach.
The other big gameplay system in Venus Vacation Prism is the photography suite. You can choose to just take a quick screenshot with a press of a button, but those who really want to indulge can get full 360 degree control of the scene so you can line up that perfect shot, in addition to being able to control the lighting, add filters, etc. The game requires you to get at least six photos by the end of a chapter, but you will likely take several dozen instead, because taking pictures is fun! To make that point clear, every screenshot in this review was taken by me, because I had no shortage of photos to choose from during my playthrough!
In addition, you are graded one-to-three stars per photo at the end of each chapter. This certainly incentivizes you to take more photos, but the game is really unclear about the criteria to get a higher score. As a result, it can be a bit frustrating when one of your favourite photos gets a one star rating, while some random shot gets two or even three stars.
Lastly in the gameplay department, Venus Vacation Prism will occasionally ask you to partake in a micro-game to earn some affection from a chosen Venus. There are a handful of these, but they are generally just a QTE sequence that’s over faster than your mom. As you’d expect, they kind of suck.
But how else are Team Ninja going to get you a face-full of Honoka’s sweaty cleavage while she does sit-ups?
“Story”
Venus Vacation Prism is a visual novel, so that means that there’s more of an emphasis on story compared to other Dead or Alive games, right? Well, about that…
The narrative of Venus Vacation Prism is very shallow and low-stakes. I was not skimping on details earlier when I described what this game’s premise is: you really are just recruiting Venuses and preparing for the festival for this entire game’s runtime. Sure, there are a couple developments (you get caught on a date by the person who you rejected, the head office is threatening to fire you if your performance doesn’t improve, etc), but the whole thing is lacking in any real stakes, twists, or tension. For the most part, you’re just having normal conversations with the girls and hanging out.
That said, I’m not sure that this lack of narrative tension is actually a problem. The Xtreme games carved a niche due to being relaxing vacation simulators, and Venus Vacation Prism‘s breezy “story” achieves the same sort of feel. This game does, at times, really feel like being away a tropical vacation. Like, sure, you’re technically working throughout the game, but your job is so ridiculously easy that it doesn’t get in the way. Despite the extremely mundane narrative, I was still interested to see where things would go. It also helps that I am hopelessly obsessed with seeing new corners of the world of Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden, so there’s that too…
Despite the very laid-back narrative, there is some thrust which keeps things from getting boring. In the first half of the game, a new Venus will get introduced every couple chapters. This provides some novelty as you get to meet them, learn about their personality, and then recruit them. While this approach keeps things fresh, it takes a long time to introduce all the girls, which can really suck if you don’t care for the early Venuses. Elise in particular is really difficult to romance, due to her strict personality and having much less time to try to blitz her approval rating high enough before the game ends. The game also heavily foreshadows the Venus Festival that corresponds with a romantic prismatic meteor shower as the grand finale, so you’ve always got it in the back of your mind that you’re working towards that final goal. It’s simple stuff, as I’ve said, but it works well enough.
As for the chapters themselves, most will only have a couple of the girls available to be interacted with at any one time, so you can often go multiple chapters without seeing your preferred Venus. Furthermore, there are plenty of mandatory interactions which are not particularly balanced between the girls: Misaki and Elise get lots of one-on-one time with the Owner in which to make an impression on you, but fans of Honoka and Nanami are going to be absolutely starved if they don’t specifically pursue those characters every chance they get (which, combined with their boring personalities, didn’t help my perception of either character any). Each chapter has some branching paths that you can take (usually picking between one of two girls, but late-game chapters will allow you to choose between any of the Venuses). These choices are shown in a handy flowchart in the between-chapter menu, so you can see all the scenes you found and the ones still available. This is much appreciated for those looking to experience everything the game has to provide, but it also shows that your choices, and their consequences, are pretty limited outside of affecting your overall relationship score with the girls.
Much of this lack of consequence is down to the Venuses all immediately falling in love with you as soon as you meet them (other than Elise, who takes a few chapters to get to that point). Even if you consistently reject their advances, they’ll still pine after you as if nothing happened. This was displayed most egregiously for me during Fiona’s introduction. As I stated, I did not like her character’s obsession with me, so I gave her the cold shoulder and immediately stood her up for Tamaki. However, at the end of her introductory chapter, the game railroads you into going on a date to recruit her as a Venus, and acts like it’s a romantic occasion no matter what you’ve said up to that point. While this is the most egregious example I found, you can feel it elsewhere as well. For example, I wasn’t kidding about Misaki when I said I was cucking her at every opportunity: the poor girl was consistently dropping hints that she liked me and hoped that I would reciprocate, but then I’d go and spend my time off with literally anyone else, to her constant disappointment. Like, girl, at this point you’re delusional if you think that I’m going to pick you to be my date to the prismatic meteor shower!
That said, this is a dating sim, so most of the game’s consequence boils down to romancing your chosen Venus. There are certain scenes and dialogue options which are only unlocked if you have a high (or low!) enough interest score with a particular girl. The thresholds to unlock these scenes are pretty high, so these are typically only going to be available if you’re actively wooing one or two of the girls above all else. Again, this is pretty standard dating sim stuff, but it would have been nice if you actually had to work a bit to get the girls to like you in the first place.
The game also has a smartphone where the girls will send you texts to chat and flirt. On the one hand, this is a very easy way to get in more interactions and choices without having to go to the effort of animating and voicing an entire scene. It also offers an different feel to conversations, especially with the shyer girls who are clearly more comfortable speaking to you via text. On the other hand, these text conversations feel disconnected from the rest of the game. For example, you’ll get a text and agree to go on a date with your chosen Venus, but then you don’t get a new scene or anything, the game just gives your affection score a bump and moves on. You’ll also be in the middle of a scene with another character when the smartphone will pop up and you’ll start texting one of the other girls randomly before going back to the scene at hand. Hell, you can be in the middle of the scene and then get texts from the girl who is in the scene right in front of you and go off on an entirely unrelated conversation before going back to the scene at hand. I love the concept of the smartphone in this game, but the implementation is immersion-breaking far too often.
Looks That Could Kill
As is usual for a Team Ninja game, Venus Vacation Prism looks fantastic. When this game was originally previewed, the character models felt a bit too realistic and uncanny, but having played the actual game now, this was not a problem at all. Like Dead or Alive 5/6/Xtreme 3, the characters are more realistic-looking, but still stylized enough to avoid the uncanny valley (especially Elise, who I feel deserves special shout-out for her ridiculously gorgeous character design).
Visual novels and dating sims aren’t usually my thing, but from my understanding, Venus Vacation Prism has insane production values for the genre. Most of these sorts of games are low-budget indie affairs with 2D sprites and little to no animation, just due to the economics of such a niche genre. In comparison, Venus Vacation Prism, with its AAA-level graphics, animation, full voice acting, and photography suite is a technological behemoth (to the point where I am legitimately curious if it has sold well enough to be worthwhile for Koei-Tecmo). This certainly helps the game stand out, even if its mechanics are pretty bog-standard otherwise.
Like the Xtreme games, Venus Vacation Prism allows you to dress your Venuses in various outfits and swimsuits and also change their hair style. I like that most of the outfits have additional customization options (for example, the you can choose whether or not you want to wear a zip-up hoodie over a particular style of bikini). However, there are a couple issues with the dress-up system which are hard to ignore. First of all, the number of available outfits per Venus is tied to their number of fans (which is influenced by the star rating of photos of the Venus submitted at the end of each chapter). It takes quite a while to unlock new outfits for each Venus because of this system. Despite giving Tamaki most of my attention during my playthrough, I hadn’t even unlocked half of her outfits by the time I reached the finale, so several playthroughs are going to be necessary if you want to unlock everything (I’ll leave that up to you to decide whether that’s good or bad).
I think that the bigger issue with the dress-up system though is that there just are not enough options available. The game has about thirty-seven outfits per girl, which doesn’t sound too bad, until you realize that the vast majority of these are reskins. Most outfits have three-to-five recoloured variants (some have even more), so these recolours are padding the total massively: discounting all the recolours, there’s only seven outfits available to dress up your Venuses, plus their one unique outfit and two pre-order bonus ones that you may not even have access to. That’s extremely limited, especially since you won’t unlock most of them in a single playthrough, so expect to have a bunch of Venuses all wearing the same outfit around the mid-point of the game…
Core Values
This is a Dead or Alive Xtreme game, so naturally that begs the question: just how lewd does this game get? Well, to put it simply…
…the game’s weirdly kind of chaste and restrained (at least by Dead or Alive‘s standards)?
Like, don’t get me wrong, the game’s still horny – the camera will linger on the girls’ boobs, most of said boobs are massive, and there are plenty of revealing bikinis to dress them up in. Compared to the Dead or Alive Xtreme games though (and especially Venus Vacation, which this game is directly spun-off of), the game’s downright modest. Sure, the bikinis are revealing, but they’re just fairly normal bikinis, as opposed to, say, the downright insane Venus swimsuit from Dead or Alive Xtreme. And sure, this game will occasionally have scenes which are egregiously fetish bait (most notably involving Misaki: in one scene, she nervously tries on a bikini in front of you, and in a later scene she’s bent over for no real reason and you’re clearly being invited to upskirt her), but that’s nothing compared to the literal pole dance sequences in the Xtreme games. And don’t even get me started on the ability to sexually harass the girls whenever you want to in Venus Vacation…
Conversely, Venus Vacation Prism takes the opposite approach, where acting like a creep and fixating on the girls’ assets above all else will leave them unimpressed, unless they actively invite that kind of attention from you. As I’ve said in the past, a big reason why the Xtreme games feel creepy is because the girls don’t seem to have any agency and are completely innocent angels, so all the voyeurism you engage in explicitly happens without their consent (as their reactions to you poking and peeking on them make clear). Venus Vacation Prism, on the other hand, wants you to form a connection with your chosen Venuses, make them want to open up to you, and will straight-up punish you for disrespecting the girls’ boundaries. Again, having Tamaki openly flirting with you and taking notes about the things that turn you on is orders of magnitude more sexy than the ham-fisted sexuality we get in the Xtreme games.
That said, this is still an Xtreme game: you’ll have plenty of opportunities to ogle the girls, but I really cannot understate how relatively restrained this game is. You can dress the girls in the most revealing outfits you can unlock, you can take their shoes off to get the best look at their toes (you know that someone on Team Ninja was begging them to implement this feature), and you can make all your photos zoomed on their girls’ cleavage, but that’s entirely up to you and the game doesn’t really incentivize it one way or another. Hell, despite having the series’ vaunted boob physics and ass physics (they move like gelatin this time!), you will almost never notice any jiggling outside of the costume selection screen.
It also really needs to be said, that Venus Vacation Prism feels restrained, not only in comparison to the Xtreme games, but to visual novels in general at this point. We’re living in an era where pornographic visual novels appear on the front page of Steam. Mobile app stores and Youtube ads are infested with a plethora of generic, anime, gooner gacha games. While the ending I got with Tamaki slyly implied that sex was had off-screen, a lot of this game’s contemporaries would be revolving entirely around showing the act rather than implying it. Dead or Alive Xtreme was salacious in the 2000s, but in 2025, a game like Venus Vacation Prism is downright modest compared to the competition. Am I suggesting that they should go all the way and release a Dead or Alive game with full nudity and sex? No, I think that would stray too far from the series’ identity, but it’s just something worth thinking about when putting this series’ sexual themes into a wider context.
Further to that point, there’s absolutely no reason why this game could not get a Western release, aside from Koei-Tecmo being a bunch of cowards. The biggest criticism you could level at the game is that it might give you unrealistic expectations regarding dating, but a) it’s a fantasy, and b) that’s something you could say about any dating sim; it’s just inherent to the genre. Sorry, butthurt culture warrior Dead or Alive fans, but there’s nothing particularly objectionable about this game that would draw any protest or negative attention (other than, y’know, some fucksticks loudly gooning over the game on social media and drawing derision over that; aka the Stellar Blade effect). This Asia-exclusive release strategy is honestly just Koei-Tecmo being idiots, with the absolute most charitable reading being that they want to preserve the Dead or Alive series’ reputation as a fighting game in the West and not dilute that with spin-offs that historically have sold poorly here. It sucks, but at least it’s easy to use a VPN or import the game if you really want to try it.
Bottom-Line
I enjoyed Venus Vacation Prism a lot more than I was expecting to. While I would have certainly preferred a new, mainline Dead or Alive entry, I think it’s extremely unfair to judge this game based on what it isn’t rather than what it is. For what it is, it’s a pretty bog-standard, low-stakes visual novel with some well-integrated dating sim and photography systems. As a result, it’s definitely a pretty niche experience, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy my time with it. Frankly, it’s a considerably more engaging and enjoyable game than any of the Xtreme spin-offs, so I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to getting more spin-offs of this nature in future… just a long as we get Dead or Alive 7 sooner or later!
5/10
(5/10 means the game is pretty average and has some niche appeal – that doesn’t mean it sucks, gamers!)
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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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