Profound hypothesis time, kiddies: Ninja Gaiden II is the
ultimate digital expression of purely concentrated id wrung from the
most lovingly crafted fantasies of every 14-year-old boy who has ever
been picked on for being scrawny, funny looking, or generally
undesirable to post-pubescent ladies.
Ryu Hayabusa, Ninja Gaiden II‘s titular ninja, is everything
a lonely teen boy aspires to: He’s stealthy, he keeps company with
women whose breasts have serious differences of opinion with Isaac
Newton, and he solves every problem with decapitation. Even math
problems.
The entirety of the gameplay in Ninja Gaiden II seems like a
logical extension of the above concept. Combat is controlled entirely
through a simple combination of three buttons and a directional stick,
but the variety of attacks and sheer visceral brutality of the
so-bloody-it-verges-on-cartoonish combat makes for a game that doesn’t
need any sort of cerebral (or even comprehensible) plot to entertain
players.
Right until the end credits roll, the game’s combat never loses its
novel feel—yeah, in reality, the gameplay’s nothing terribly
creative or inventive, but the game’s intense difficulty forces players
to constantly strategize based on battleground layouts, enemy
strengths, and current weaponry. Thankfully, it’s not as frustratingly
difficult as the original Xbox Ninja Gaiden, but it’s a hell of
a lot harder than Halo.
Thank the ninja gods for the game’s entertaining combat;
comparatively, the plot is horrid. The entirety of the storyline seems
constructed specifically to offer players pretty backgrounds to kill
stuff in, constantly dealing with the sort of clichés you’d get
from a Saturday morning cartoon. But while the story alternates
between paper thin and completely brain dead, it’s hard to care when
the combat’s this good.
Ninja Gaiden II was obviously designed to simulate the
fantastic ideas about ninjas we’ve all been ingrained with since
childhood. While your psych major girlfriend might think it a bit
juvenile and will probably point out the Freudian implications of so
much stabbing, you’ll be having too much fun slicing up everything in
your path to notice.