Adam descended into the depths of the Sherlock Holmes series and realised that sometimes, a man can open his mouth way, way too much. Explosions were had, Michael Bay was hired and Megan Fox was witnessed in another explosive and extremely dialogue driven episode of Love to Hate.
This week, frustrations will rise and giant robots punching each other will occur, when one man faces insurmountable odds and gets torn to pieces by several thousand different enemies, only to come out failing, again and again. I don’t know what I’m talking about either, but the content for this week goes down to the famous and much loved (and hated) Ninja Gaiden.
Ninja Gaiden
Ah, Ninja Gaiden. What is not to love about thee? Most people have played it, and most likely loved it, with its dashing and swift gameplay, large busts, random but awesome storyline (in a B-grade way) and ridiculous amounts of blood and guts, particularly with the second instalment. I know I loved it. Upon grabbing the giant Xbox controller, I was hooked from the moment I dashed through a ninja with my legendary dragon sword and watched his face explode and head fall off. Minutes soon became hours, and the edge of my sword was covered in several things, consisting of giant enemy spiders, bats, ninjas, demon ninja bats, and giant skeletal dinosaurs. And let’s not forget helicopters. Who needs realistic physics when you can stab helicopters? The life of Ryu Hayabusa was a fun life. For a while, at least.
As most people know, Ninja Gaiden has a reputation for being a challenging game. If you play like a stupid ninja, the game will punish your stupid face, and make you do it all over again until you unstupify your face. But not only that, sometimes even when you play well, the game could still punish you, with unblockable and uninterruptable stuns smited upon you, and throws which could literally cancel out your combo in mid-air. Makes no sense but what the hell, the game’s supposed to be a challenge, so I can only assume that these demon ninja bats have super human reflex capable of capturing moving objects by the throat even if they’re travelling at the speed of sound. I do that on a daily basis anyway with jets. Yeah.
But anyway, this whole punishment system the game had was fine..with the first title. It was at times a rather frustrating experience with one or two expletives thrown at the controller already in your TV screen from a powerful throw. You can work around it, because the game’s pro’s totally outweighed the cons, so it was fine.
But then the second game came out, and things changed.
Initially, Ninja Gaiden 2 starts off quite well. You’re still as swift as ever, and when dashing at people you seem to have the innate ability to chop several of their limbs off when aiming at their head. Maybe it’s some kind of odd chain reaction or you have swords for legs or something, but it made the game satisfying at least. The new (and returning) weapons were great, and gave the game a substantial amount of depth. Fun was to be had and all was going well. Then you hit the middle of the game and things start to go oh so wrong.
Around the fifth chapter, you reach a stage which is primarily water based, and also has an absolutely ridiculous amount of werewolves in it. When you’re not fighting werewolves, you’re spamming a button to run across long stretches of water while being chased by some weird water skiing spider demons with spines. Sure, the idea behind it and the imagination behind a fight over water would be cool, but in practice it was really annoying. Constantly spamming a button to run across water while trying to target a fast moving ski spider that has a really easy time hitting you makes you angry. And considering the button used to run across water is also the jumping button, you wonder what in hell was wrong with the developers when they configured and tested the stage.
Once you’ve bashed your jump button inwards with a sledge hammer for half an hour, you encounter a rather large congregate of werewolves. Seems easy enough, just dash through them and chop wolf man heads off right?
Wrong. I quickly came to realise that upon attacking the giant congregate of man wolves, they were nigh unstunnable. A flying swallow sword dash of ultimate fury towards the head did nothing either, it simply went through their necks but didn’t chop anything off, and also seemed to allow them the honour of grabbing me by the throat in mid-air, slamming me to the ground and kicking me in the face a few times, knocking half my health off. Okay, so that doesn’t work. Time to get up and try something else. But what’s this? The moment I get up, they grab me by the throat again, and continue to kick my face in, killing me in the process. Son of a bi---.
Half an hour and several thousand raging expletives later, I managed to get past the wolf men, with a sliver of health left. I was happy, and finished the level. Wolf men will never harm me again! And so I continued onwards to the next level, only to joyously find that the entire level is devoted to a castle run by an army of werewolves. Ffffffffffffffff...
Several of the chapters afterwards also had similar moments, where enemies were unstunnable and seemed to snag you in mid-air easily, as if you were some kind of retarded seagull with one wing, blind and can’t fly. It was annoying, and it went for a while, and yet I still played. The seething and furious amounts of hatred for the game seemed to be rectified by its obscene amounts of limb physics and blood. It was a brutal love/hate relationship, which still exists today. Memories of exploding bosses and giant, hairy wolf men have since then, never ceased to haunt my dreams. Oh Ninja Gaiden 2, how I love thee..like the love a lion has for its helpless victims. Bastard.
Until next time fellow readers, always remember that hate makes you ever so powerful! Unlimited power like that of a cybernetic stegosaurus!
?
Loading...
