Ninja Guy Man 2
I’m guessing that every review of Ninja Gaiden II mentioned the fact that there’s a boss in the game that explodes when you kill it, and that this explosion can and will kill you as well. (And not in the tolerable “die in a cutscene” way, but in the real “Game Over” way.) It turns out the way you survive the explosion is to hold the Block button down, which makes your ninja hold up his sword in kind of a blocking stance. This protects you from an exploding armadillo the size of a city block.
This was especially irritating to me because this boss fight happens after you fight another boss. I thought I had fought the boss! He had an on-screen health meter and everything. At least let me save.
The new Ninja Gaiden games are at their strongest, I think, when you’re fighting vaguely humanoid creatures. If they’re not armed with guns that shoot three-round bursts (also blockable with your sword, but still), that’s even better. There’s a certain appeal to fighting truly enormous monsters, but it’s outweighed by how awkward those fights are, and how little they have to do with the rest of the game. Ryu the Ninja has to run constantly and shoot through the air sword-first just to whittle away at that damn armadillo’s ankles. I mean, look at this shit:
(explosion at 5:30)
I find myself wondering what any of this has to do with whatever ninjas are supposed to be good at, which I thought involved sneaking around and stuff. I’ll give him a pass for wearing black in the snow, since he wasn’t planning on being there, he just wound up there after blowing up the aircraft he was on. (Ninja skill?) But he also gets onto that aircraft via another aircraft that brings him in full view of the bad guys in the cockpit right before he lands. This is James Bond-level subtlety.
When I played the 2004 Ninja Gaiden I felt like it was basically the game version of Real Ultimate Power (“this game is all about ninjas, REAL NINJAS”), which is a good thing to be. This time around Ryu almost seems more like a Jedi, except with way bloodier dismemberments. Or maybe he’s actually the most effective H.P. Lovecraft character ever: ancient evils rear their ugly heads, and he shows up and slices them off. Plus he’s action-hero unflappable: I’ve already seen like three cutscenes where he doesn’t look at explosions.
