Ninja Gaiden 2 Black review — Begrudging respect

No one likes it when someone does things begrudgingly. Grudges in general have a bad reputation, so begrudges must be even worse. Any begrudged feelings will surface in the final product, making it obvious to everyone that experiences it that whoever was behind it didn’t want to get the job done. When I played through Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, its begrudging nature pierced me like its iconically merciless enemies. 

Ninja Gaiden 2 Black begrudgingly offers an excuse for people to revisit an all-time classic, it begrudgingly combines two conflicting visions for the game, it begrudgingly attempts to give longtime fans what they want, and it begrudgingly updates the game’s visuals with the latest technology. This rerelease is an example of a death by a thousand cuts – things that may be innocuous at first glance add up over time to create an experience that’s hard to recommend over any other version of this game on the market. Yet at the same time, I must begrudgingly respect Ninja Gaiden 2 Black: at its core, it’s still one of the best action games available. 

Ninja Gaiden 2 enjoys a rather contentious release history. Think Star Wars or Blade Runner, but for problems you need a doctorate in the ninja arts to fully understand. The 2008 release of Ninja Gaiden 2 on Xbox 360 and the 2009 release of Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma for the Playstation 3 share the same levels, story, and basic gameplay mechanics. To this day, many likely think of Sigma 2 as an “enhanced” version of the game that simply brought it to a different platform with more content. 

The truth is convoluted. These two different versions of the game represent competing visions for what the soul of “Ninja Gaiden 2” should be. Ninja Gaiden scholars will likely debate the merits and weaknesses of these visions forever, each side carrying eternal grudges against the perceived inferior version. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black claims to be the “definitive” version of the game, which at least I interpreted as it aiming to resolve this longstanding conflict once and for all by giving us the best of both worlds. That being the case, we should briefly touch on what exactly those worlds are. 

The original Ninja Gaiden 2 can be summarized in one word: overwhelming. It overwhelms players with enemies and obstacles as much as it can. Each enemy can easily kill you with just a few mistakes or moments of hesitation. Ninja Gaiden, in basically every incarnation, maintains a reputation for being brutally difficult, and Ninja Gaiden 2 did everything in its power to live up to that reputation…even to its own detriment. The framerate frequently dipped, enemies spammed projectiles to the point of absurdity, and there are more than a few sections on the highest difficulty you have to genuinely wonder if they had time to properly playtest the game. Yet despite its messiness, Ninja Gaiden 2 balanced it out with a unique sense that victory was always in your grasp – enemies can be killed as quickly as they can kill you, giving the sense that persistence could lead to victory eventually.

While the original Ninja Gaiden 2’s approach may not have been perfectly polished, it was a uniquely designed experience that you can’t get from basically any other action game...including itself. Sigma 2 saw what its original incarnation did and took things in the opposite direction. Whether you want to blame porting problems or simply a desire to make things more “fair,” Sigma 2 significantly cut back the enemy count in virtually every area of the game. To compensate for fewer enemies, it buffed enemy durability across the board. These two changes significantly change the overall pace and feel of the combat – instead of constant assaults of do-or-die chaos, Sigma 2 instead shifted towards prolonged, focused encounters where your life always hangs by a thread. 

There are more differences between the versions like censored gore and boss lineups, but the changes to the enemy encounters are the most fundamental. Both approaches have merit in my eyes, and that’s the problem. While Sigma 2 may be a fun game, it’s not Ninja Gaiden 2. While Sigma 2 just got re-released on everything a few years ago, Ninja Gaiden 2 got nothing outside of limited Xbox backwards compatibility. The hole in the market that something like 2 Black could fill seems obvious. 

Still, given that Sigma 2 is available on everything in a bundle with two other games for $40, another Ninja Gaiden 2 on the market is a hard sell. A product like 2 Black could take two separate routes to justify its existence. It could simply be an enhanced version of the original game which would appeal to hardcore fans, and likely only hardcore fans. Alternatively, it could do what 2 Black claims to do: be a definitive release that combines the philosophies of both versions into a distinct experience that appeals to everyone. That’s easier said than done; these disparate approaches shouldn’t be compatible with each other. How does 2 Black pull it off? 

It doesn’t. This new release is mostly just Sigma 2 with a graphical overhaul. 2 Black chooses to bridge the gap between versions superficially: the gore and the weapon upgrade progression (you can upgrade weapons at any time rather than be gated by story progression) from the original game return. Some of the Sigma 2 exclusive bosses were removed, which technically makes this incarnation closer to the original release yet raises awkward questions on whether removing things can be considered a selling point. Those changes aside, the game functions almost exactly like Sigma 2 in terms of content and game design. 

I say almost exactly the same because 2 Black does attempt to bring some of the spirit of Ninja Gaiden 2’s overwhelming nature into the enemy encounters. Various encounters half-heartedly increase enemy volume, but these meager increases won’t fool anyone familiar with these games. The enemies and their disbursements simply don’t meaningfully change fights enough to capture the same feelings that battles in the original version do – the heart of Sigma 2 always shines through. 

Some changes made in a post-release patch demonstrate why adding enemies at all misses the point somewhat. Battles at the end of Chapter 13 and the beginning of Chapter 14 stood out to many fans as particularly iconic moments for how intensely the original could drown the player with enemies. Sigma 2 significantly decreased the enemy count for the Chapter 13 stairway climb and wiped the enemies from the first few areas of Chapter 14 entirely.  These changes were often paraded as the perfect representation of how greatly Sigma 2 differed from the original. Post-patch, 2 Black reverts the spirit of these changes by spamming a completely obnoxious onslaught of enemies in both areas. Mission accomplished? Unfortunately not. 

The developers nailed the spam enemies part of the equation, but forgot that the game was still using Sigma 2 sensibilities, so now you have too many enemies with too much health. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that if you launch a basic enemy several feet into the air, stab them a bunch, then piledrive them head-first into the ground, they should die. Yet in 2 Black, enemies will regularly eat two or three of those Izuna Drops before getting a debilitating headache. Multiply this by the hundreds of enemies added to the stairway climb in Chapter 13, and you have an extremely tedious amount of Izuna Drops in your future.  

The effort put into bringing this game closer to the original feels horribly misguided. If the developers wanted to only superficially appease fans of the original, there were plenty more exciting ways to do it. Ninja Gaiden 2 had a notable amount of content that Sigma 2 removed. Why does 2 Black insist on leaving out the Windmill and Incendiary Shuriken as weapon options? Why can you not do Ultimate Technique charges with the bow and arrow? Why are the Tests of Valor still gone? Any of those additions would matter more to me than redoing the graphics or adding the gore back in.    

Even if the developers truly believed that Sigma 2’s design should be the only one available to the masses, they should at least acknowledge that there was room for improvement. Sigma 2 broke some of the properties of attacks and the game’s auto aim, leading to decreased utility and combo routes that don’t work. 2 Black does not fix these problems, and at times it even feels as though they made the auto aim worse. I have never accidentally hit the wrong enemy or had the wrong move come out so many times in one of these games. I’d hesitate to call any of these problems outright gamebreaking, but what the heck? It’s bad enough to have missed this stuff the first time around; missing it again makes me wonder if anyone carefully playtested this thing at all.

That’s not even getting into the actual content side of things. 2 Black carries over most of Sigma 2’s additions like the extra playable characters and the Tag Missions (which like the modern console release removes the online co-op functionality in lieu of slightly buffed AI partners). Curiously, however, it does not carry over all of the content. Many of the unlockable costumes and the Ninja Race mode have been axed with no real explanation. I’d think that a definitive release would have all or even more content than its previous versions, but I guess these days definitive can also mean worse than everything it can be directly compared to. 

2 Black could have perhaps avoided these direct comparisons if it was more distinctly its own iteration of the game. The post-patch changes to one of the extra characters, Ayane, best represents a direction I wouldn’t have minded this release going. Ayane was notoriously bad in Sigma 2 and pre-patch 2 Black – her mandatory chapter in these releases was a definite low point. The patch powers Ayane up in virtually every way, making her chapter far less of a pain and the character far more viable to play as a whole. It makes me wonder how things could have been if the developers had made a genuine effort to rebalance the entire game like this, perhaps altering some of the more questionable bosses like Elizabet in Chapter 13. That kind of release still may not have been definitive, but it would have at least been interesting.

Ultimately, the only feature 2 Black truly offers over its predecessors is its graphical presentation. The game’s visuals were entirely redone with the power of Unreal Engine 5. This is a selling point to someone, I suppose. 

People in the video game industry have a bad habit of equating new technology with better results. I would not say that 2 Black looks “better” than the original. It undeniably looks “different” and it mostly looks “fine.” Some areas look great, the hair looks weird, and I really dislike how the “realistic” lighting totally removes the color and personality of areas like the Venice and Rome locations. No matter how I feel about them, though, the graphics were easily the least important thing they could touch to sell this game to me again. 

The biggest problem with talking about 2 Black is that despite everything, I can’t say it’s a bad game. If you’ve never played Ninja Gaiden 2 before and have no other options, you would be perfectly fine playing this. Can I recommend it over Sigma 2? Not really – it's situationally better at best. Can I recommend it over the original Ninja Gaiden 2? Absolutely not. Can I recommend playing it on Xbox Game Pass? I guess. 

At its core, 2 Black still has a great game beneath its shiny new graphics. I should know, I played through every difficulty and mission for this review. Yet as I did that, I often wondered: am I playing so much of this game because it’s a good version of the game, or simply because it’s the version in front of me right now?  I lean towards the latter. It’s a begrudging release that I begrudgingly played to full completion.