I remember when I used to play Ninja Gaiden endlessly as a kid. Either at a friend’s house, helping each other watch out for enemies or at home with a rental grumbling at those blasted raptors and bats that would knock me off my narrow footing, I still loved the painfully difficult game. Endless continues certainly helped, but starting over at the beginning of a level after being defeated by a boss was not exactly fun either. Still, those of us who know what it means to be a child of the 8-bit gaming era know that one could not simply give up over something like this. We pressed on.
Times have changed in gaming. Drastically. Gone are the days of extra lives and continues as your only salvation for dying. We can save our games to hard drives now (a feature I think that contributes to weight gain in children in today’s age. After all, utter frustration often sent us outside to ride our bikes.) and we still often have unlimited continues to press onward. But one thing that hasn’t changed is Team Ninja’s affection for a true challenge and Ninja Gaiden Sigma doesn’t dissapoint.
I don’t know what the game was like originally on X-Box nor in the Black Edition, but Sigma is a fun game that keeps you pushing for more, or at least I did. The game starts out easy enough with an introduction to some of your cool ninja moves like chopping enemies up, running up walls to flip off them, running alongside walls to get over gaps in your path, climbing, and combos. Like so many action/adventure games, Ryu Hayabusa (that’s you, by the way) has to solve a few puzzles here and there by finding an item to open a door or sliding a missing statue piece into place. Sometimes these puzzles are as simple as “don’t fall down the hole there, go around it and cut open the window with you sword” while other times you’ll traipse all around every inch of the map before acquiring your item to make your way back to an earlier area. The longer of these tasks never really get boring and there’s plenty of bonuses to be had in your search.
Enemies often pop up and, with a quick push of a button, you can see you have a time limit to kill them. Beat this time challenge and you’re rewarded with an item, usually one that helps to increase your max life, thus increasing the hits you can take before death. I have to admit, I never managed to pass these challenges, but then I never really tried either. I just had fun toying with different attacks, trying different things, etc. I might try them on another play through, though. On top of this, you can collect scarabs and essence orbs that allow you to buy things from a blacksmith at certain points in the game. Upgrading your weaponry is highly recommended and you’ll usually want to keep a few health potions handy.
Now let’s look at weapons and health potions. Weapons are awesome. Crazy awesome. You have the traditional Ninja Gaiden single katana, the Dragon Sword. You also have twin katana (true katana, they’re curved) so you can pretend you’re Leonardo as a human, nunchuks (Mikey!), a staff that upgrades to more of a spear, a two handed great sword, chained sickle-flails (the better nunchuk), and more. Even a wooden sword that, when fully upgraded, becomes a truly powerful paddle…with runes on it. I call it Woodmourne or the runepaddle. Different weapons are useful in different situations, but you can probably get though most of the game with whatever is your favorite except a fight or two. Projectile weapons include a bow & arrow that can be a pain to fire in first person as it’s difficult to dodge incoming shots when aiming (you can jump and get auto-aim shots in heated combat though), shuriken, the windmill shuriken (returning from 8 bit glory), explosive shuriken (these look like the throwing knife weapons anime followers will see in Naruto more than throwing stars), and different types of arrows. Again, weapons are awesome, and doing various combos with them are more awesome. Potions, however, can be a bit of a pain. You seem to always be needing to grab a few “just in case” there’s a nasty surprise ahead, but with skill of not getting your butt kicked (very hard in some points if you aren’t a ninja master), the game is generous enough to keep you modestly supplied with chests or the timely placement of the blacksmith. I understand health potions are less of a requirement in the sequel as you can regenerate health to a point.
The fighting in the game is fast paced and hard pressing. Enemy ninja will pelt you with explosive shuriken that stick to you, guaranteeing some damage. Motorcycle military will fire at you with explosives and machine gun fire. Soldiers on the street will come at you with guns, swords, and clubs. Later you get to start facing demons that just devestate your life with a chomp or a claw swipe. Once you get the idea of what to do with different enemies, though, you can start to make strides in overcoming different enemy types. Learning your combos and knowing which to use when greatly helps success and I admit I often had trouble hitting a pop up combo because I’d hit a button twice instead of once at the start and change the combo entirely.
Boss fights can range from interesting and fun to utterly painful. Particularly driving me crazy was a later boss called Ultimate Alma, which I defeated after a few tries only to die on the next level and get sent back to her level. Apparently I needed to backtrack across a field to save after beating her. The enemies that killed me destroyed me faster than most bosses, by the way. They’re that nasty. A little ‘net research revealed how to kill them in seconds, though, so don’t despair. What infuriated me more was after killing the boss and going back to her, it took me dozens of attempts to beat her again. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know what was going on differently, but I just had trouble the second kill. Some bosses, such as her, seem to have very cheap moves that are near unavoidable (hers was a 5-fireball attack with her charging right behind them. Dodging the fireballs got me ran over by her and attacking her went headfirst into fireballs).
I really only have two big complaints with Ninja Gaiden Sigma and one minor complaint. The first big complaint is that despite how cool all the ninja moves are with wall running and flipping, this is not a platforming game, but it has points that wants you to platform. I had numerous jumps that I pressed one direction, but Ryu would hit a different wall and backflip to where I started or down into lava to make me start over. I’d often jump at an angle to wall-run, but he’d run up the wall and back flip off of it, again to his death. While these areas are thankfully few and fairly far between, it was enough to frustrate me when I came across them.
My second complaint usually generated itself during certain boss fights. When you’re in a circular small arena and you are largely dependent on watching the boss to dodge attacks and wait for the right time to counter, the camera angle can be extremely detrimental. I would often move to avoid an attack and find the camera against the wall, zoomed up on me and the boss was charging by the time I adjusted the camera. This was another major problem that you can overcome with a little practice, but a pet peeve none the less.
My minor complaint was that the story was what you’d expect if you played the 8-bit games, but still had a good development and wasn’t too insane, confusing, or weird. The complaint comes in with beating the game. Don’t expect much of an from the CG artists. You get a few scenes that are fairly short.
A sidebar complaint I have comes from Sigma only. Rachel, the fiend-hunter, was a part of the story, but didn’t have playable levels in the original version of the game; it was a special addition for us PS3 owners that had to wait for so long to play this blast from the past. Now let me be clear, I liked playing as Rachel and I liked her fighting style. I also like boobies, straight and clear cut, I’m a breast man. But Rachel is just silly. She’s scantily clad as one would expect a heroine fighting monsters with claws that could gut her in a single hit, leaving her stomach, cleavage, arms, legs…basically every major body part and organ center completely exposed. I could deal with this as I’ve grown up with fantasy games where women are eye candy (and if you think about it, they’re logically far superior fighters as they survive in far less than the men do and never seem worried about getting hurt), but her breasts are Jell-O. There’s no other way to describe them. They jiggle when she moves, they bounce when she jumps, they flop around like a Jell-O mold when she turns, and they lightly jiggle when she breathes. They lightly jiggle when she’s standing still. Now, you’re thinking, ‘C’mon, Fox, they’re boobies, they jiggle‘ right? Okay, sure, but Team Ninja should consider the awkward look of a hardened leather armor cupping woman’s chest…only to have the entire thing move. I mean, she isn’t jiggling in her armor, her armor moves, bounces, and jiggles with them. Maybe I’m looking at Rachel in a hardened leather armor when they intended it to be skimpy spandex, but they just move too much. And coming from me, who can be as fan boy as the next guy and appreciates him some fan service, that’s saying something.
Hopefully they tone down the jiggle and crank up even more awesome ninja ass kickery in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 due out this fall. Still, despite my three complaints and minor sidebar complaint, I recommend Ninja Gaiden Sigma to any PS3 owners who consider themselves hardcore. And if the game is too easy, beating it unlocks hard mode. Beating hard mode will unlock Master Ninja Mode. Alternatively, kill the black samurai in level 2 on a difficulty to unlock the next difficulty right off.
Go forth, ninja.
