Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos (WII)

“Hooray! Finally! A classic game that lives up to the hype. As you know, when I find a popular game, I tend to be unreasonably harsh on my reviews. Trying to find everything and anything wrong with the game. Here is an example of a popular...”

“Hooray! Finally! A classic game that lives up to the hype.

As you know, when I find a popular game, I tend to be unreasonably harsh on my reviews. Trying to find everything and anything wrong with the game.

Here is an example of a popular game that even I am like--nothing wrong here. They got it right.

First off, we have a few cool power up effects. Such as the Shuriken upgrades, the dual and triple images (I kind of wonder if there is a quadruple image I could pull off? Quintuple? Sextuple? Septuple? Octuple? I mean--where does the madness end?). The power ups are much more relevant in this game.

Also the hero has the ability to climb up and down walls, regardless of whether their is a ladder on it or not. Which, after looking at most of the ways I died in the first game, is what I would call a Good Idea(TM).

Okay--so that would clearly not be enough to get a raving review from me, right? Well, we move on to have environmental hazards in the later levels. Not the kind of spikes that cause instadeath. No, we have things like a railway train moving along a set of tracks. Which, may not seem like much by today's standards. But this was on the rriggen NES. This really did not appear all that often prior to this. I mean--most of it was likely done via hardware rendered sprites. I mean--it was beautiful.

Then we move into a level with wind that blows our poor ninja around. And a series of puzzles in the level that are based on this.

Where as the first game was, in my mind, greatly overrated--this one lives up to all the praise the series gets.

Good job Ninja.”