So After sitting on it for a couple more weeks I went back and played through chapter 12/13 and made it to the final boss basically... unfortunatly after dying 15 + times thinking there's no way they would have designed the final boss to be killed off in such a retarded way I gave up and searched gamefaqs to see what it was I was doing wrong and promptly smacked my head. I mean I think the last save point in the game requires me to go through the hallway of demons and do battle with dagra dai again (not that I found him to be THAT hard) only so I can try to fight the end boss properly.
It's also a bit annoying to me that thanks to these horrible patches I can't upload my scores but whatever, I can deal.
If I had to do a review/comparison right now it'd be as follows-
Ninja Gaiden 2 on the xbox 360 is a great action game hampered by enough bugs and design issues to keep it from being the superb hallmark title it really should have been. The trifectica of Ninja Gaiden and NG black along with NG sigma on the ps3 are all far more polished products then this and it's a damn shame because many elements of this game could have been fixed with just 3 or 4 more months in the oven. These issues include :
-A camera that's just flat out worse then the allready finicky one found in the original game, the problem is 2fold here though. First the camera just doesn't seem as good at giving you a nice angle on the action and more importantly this is due to levels that often times simply aren't built AROUND the way the camera works. In the 3 versions of NG there were very few times where you were stuck in super tight spaces and had to deal with enemies , the game was designed moreso with large hallways and arenas/giant rooms for fighting. NG2 has alot of indoor environments and for whatever reason also contains lots of tight winding hallways . So to often throughout the games 14 stages you'll find that even constant use of the "see" button will fail to help you see what it is you're fighting. With a little more play testing some of the levels could have been tweaked to have "fighting areas" thrown about them to avoid having combat occur in cramped quarters as well as perhaps having a camera that pans out a little bit more to show a better view of the enemies you're fighting.
-gameplay balance is the second issue, the AI in NG2 simply isn't as well made as it was in the first ninja gaiden. It tries to cope with this problem by throwing double the number of badguys at you simultaniously but all this does is , especially later in the game, turn the screen into a mess of special effects that coupled with the camera/stage design issues make it almost impossible to tell what the hell you're even looking at. Fortunatly when the stage design co-operates and the enemies generate in an adequete variety it's way more intense then the first game ever got. The other balance issue is that most of the bosses flat out suck. I think of NG1 and there wasn't really a bad boss in the whole lot , they all had well done AI , decent attack patterns and tried and true strategies to defeat them. This second one seems to suffer from "sequalitis" in this area, they've added way more boss battles and created some interesting looking enemies but many of them aren't fun to fight at all or are defeated by simply getting close and mashing. Genshin was the closest thing this whole game had to a good boss but even Murai from the original game had a bit more thought. NG2 has downright terrible bosses like the subway facerobot, water dragon, firey armadillo and twin dragon battle. NG1 had no downright terrible bosses.
-going on a similar note to these first 2, let's focus on the stages themselves. There were a few downright awesome levels in NG2-hayabusa village, about half of the 2 new york stages, about half of the 2 venice levels, the airship, the entire cavern area especially the pyramid and a portion of the last couple stages in the game works . So why was all that other stuff even in the game? Sky city tokyo should have been a 15 minute stage, have ryu fight on the rooftops quickly and instead of jumping through scaffolding and office space, he simply leaps off the top of building A and smashes into building B, runs through a small foyer area and a cutscene shows him ascend to that rooftop where he fights a bunch of enemies and finally the boss- exit to stage 2 which could be trimmed down in length by 20% or so , then just make new york 1 level with no subway section, have ryu go from downtown and wind up on the bridge almost immediatly , cutscene to the statue of liberty island, a short combat area, a very quick ascend to the top and battle with alexei. cutscene explaining why you wind up in venice, have everything up to the fountain intact then cut out the entire underground section, water dragon boss, water running battles and go straight to the castle, leave it mostly intact and finally have the volf fight the exit to the next stage -airship leave it it 100% the same except for the armadillo fight at the end, drop that. I could go on like this but I'll stop there , basically the game is nearly twice as big as it really needs to be, I'd rather they cut all the poor stuff and just leave the good , it'd make it more consistent.
Finally the last of my complaints aside from the well known bugs riddled throughout the product is the overuse of projectile weapons. It's all well and good to have winged enemies that you gotta shoot arrows at, it's also fine that you can charge the bow now but having to stop and aim really slows down the action far more then the game ever should slow down. I propose that the arrows should simply auto track an enemy and charging an arrow takes 1 second instead of 3. This simple change would get rid of ALL the problems with long ranged attacking, the bow would be more of a super weapon of sorts so to compensate for this you'd only be able to hold 15 arrows instead of 30 and you'd only get more arrows off corpses which would only be in areas that you HAVE to use the bow in.
Pretty well everything I can say that's bad/poor about ninja gaiden 2 can be summed up by the fact that the game was rushed and unpolished. It's a shame because when it's good it's better then the first but when it's bad it's almost terrible. Despite all this bitching were I to score it based on the popular review websites scoring schemes it'd get a solid B or an 8/10. For reference I'd rate the original NG a 9, black a 10 and sigma a 9.
