I played 2 and a half hours of NG2 last night, my first play since the demo.
I got Master Ninja on the first two levels (not a real measure of skill, IMO).
I'm a bit underwhelmed. I really like fighting the standard enemies, especially the ninjas and daemons and whatnot. But I was kind of disappointed with a few things:
1. The Camera - Jittering along walls, the environments and the camera do not play nice. Also when it zooms in for the Y button kills, it looks awesome, but it simultaneously obscures my view of the action and makes me reset the camera even more. I think the tighter environments and the camera action of the Y button kills were a poor design choice. This was not as much of an issue for me in the original NG and NGS.
2. Certain enemies/bosses - Unlike when I played the original NG, I feel like the bosses and certain enemies have no real rhyme or reason about them. For example, the boss that you fight after meeting your father, I felt like beating him was a matter of dumb luck, as he'll randomly stop his combo and allow you to hit him, or continue into another combo instantly with no lag. You can't stop and watch him for a lag because he seems to randomly chain attacks, and I felt like it was hard to see any kind of cause/effect with him. I died a few times, but I didn't really change how I played and still won. There are other enemies, like the ninja dogs, that I need to figure out more before I judge, but I do feel like many bosses and enemies feel arbitrary.
3. Graphics/Framerate - Wow, why does the game randomly have slowdown for 30-45 seconds? It barely looks better than Sigma, the only thing that's different is the bodies staying where they are, but other than that it looks sometimes better, sometimes worse than Sigma. The fire effects on level 2 were pretty poor, and kind of made the game look cheesier than it should have. The gore and stuff looks great though, obviously. Animations are also perfect. But slowdown... I was really shocked.
It's definitely a high quality title, but #2 is really killing me.
I wonder if it improves as the game continues...
And maybe I'm just shitty, does the lvl2 boss have any kind of pattern, or is there any way to tell when he's open, or when he's going to continue his combo?