Game review: Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus

So, after several week of contacting Sony, I found out that my purchase of Unit 13 was refunded to my wallet again. For all intents and purposes, I consider the matter with Sony fairly resolved. So I cut my losses and did the honorable thing by deleting my copy of the game.

I decided to pick up a different game, Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus, which ought to carry the subtitle, The Longest Ninja Gaiden Title Evar. No. E.V.A.R. Rather than make a full game, Team Ninja has ported a PS3 title to the Vita and added a few features for the touch pad and rear touch interface. So, how does that work out?

Well, it's hard to say. First of all, Ninja Gaiden has always had a reputation for being difficult. But, up until a certain point, I didn't feel the game was being too cheap. But, I was playing at the lowest level, so that should be taken into account. However, in Chapter 12, two days into having a great time with the many long fights, I was put against a helicopter who can fire heat seeking missiles sideways out of the launcher rack, and these missiles, even when blind-fired from behind a building, fly to their target. Even if said building should cause the missiles to blow up before reaching their target. This cheap ass boss tactic left me completely cold, so much so that I stopped playing, won't finish the rest, and don't care enough about the story to YouTube the rest. If it wasn't for the eleven chapters of fun…nine chapters of fun I had, this would be a one star game.

I want to make clear, I made a brief attempt to play on Normal Mode, but I died so much in the first level that I just opted to go with "Hero Mode" AKA: Easy Mode for people who are trying to avoid saying easy. On this level, the fights kinda went like this. The bad guys spam all their weapons until Ryu drops to low enough health to auto block. Then Ryu turns into an actual ninja and starts killing people. This kinda of fighting style is known as "You guys are going to get tired of whipping my ass soon." (I'm sure it translates better in hiragana.) Right after the fight is over, many of the enemies drop blue health essence, so Ryu pulls back from the edge of death, ready to get his ass kicked again while I study the patterns of my enemies.

I'm not kidding about this being my only constant tactic, because everything else I tried involving movement or finesse is a waste of time with these controls. I want to find something nice to say about them, but the front touch pad aiming is terrible, and makes me get shot most of the time for being out in the open. It's easier and safer to fire arrows just using the jump and shoot method, so much so that I only used the touch screen and left stick to aim at one target on a wall. A non-moving target. And I my mark missed a lot.

The game gives out new weapons every other level, so Ryu has a lot of toys to play with and upgrade. The best of the bunch is the twin katanas, but there's also a Vigoorian flail, like a nunchuku with blades on the ends. When Ryu gets a combo going with either of these weapons, it's hard for enemies to break it, and it does a LOT of damage. Ryu also does a special Ultimate attack if you hold the triangle button, and the first and second modes look like the aura power up from Dragonball Z. If you unleash it and an enemy is within Ryu's range, he leaps forward and goes into a blurring fury of attacks that usually ends with someone losing their head or other limbs.

But where the game hooked me was in the boss fights. That first fight with a flaming samurai on horseback was awesome. I didn't mind getting knocked around or dying, because I was taking my time to really watch the boss and all the great detail that went into his steed. Every boss up to the chopper in chapter 12 was fun and interesting, and I didn't even mind facing the same boss over again. Yes, the technique I needed to use to win was tricky, but it wasn't so hard as to seem impossible.

And then right there in chapter 12, Team Ninja says, "You get the fuck out of our game, biyatch. No women allowed in our boys club. You been here too long, having fun with our clever level design and whatnot. So now here's a spitwad shooter, and go face that armored helicopter." No, Team Ninja, fuck you. That's exactly the kind of cheap ass boss that you'd avoided doing throughout the rest of the game, and you even threw a giant zombie dinosaur at me. But I balk when you decide to arm me with a bow and arrow versus heat seeking, phasing technology-equipped missiles.

So, you know why I don't know how the game ends, and you know I don't care. But let me try to tell you about this shitty plot, because it should factor into the score. Ryu Hyabusa, eternal prick with a dick up his ass as a replacement for a personality or an acting career, has left Hyabusa village to take in some training in a neighboring village. After killing some guards, Ryu faces off against the master of the house, and then they have tea, and the master asks about the EXACT SWORD that's about to be stolen back at Hyabusa village. No, they just finish discussing it when a big boobed chick with lavender hair rushes into the room to explain that Hyabusa village is on fire. Ryu runs home alone, because that other dude can't be bothered to help, I guess. And there he faces evil samurai who have come for yet another sword under the family's protection.

Yes, I have played Ninja Gaidens before, but all back in the NES days. I've played three incarnations of the game, and I'm frankly amazed that despite 20 years passing, the Hyabusa clan is still being entrusted with swords despite having one stolen in every, single, game. But given that this is the ONLY plot that guys can come up with to bring Ryu back, I let this go. And hey, it's kind of nostalgic revisiting the same freaking plot over, and over, and…yeah, nostalgic. Right.

Shortly after Ryu sets off to face the higher fiend who stole his family's most evil sword evar, he meets Rachel, a walking cliché that makes it clear every person on the development team for this game's side characters is a man. Rachel has giant red cock sucking lips, bigger boobs that jiggle when she blinks, and long eyelashes to give her that proper doe in the headlights look. (She's good at the slow doe blink too.) She's dressed in a leather bikini that wouldn't contain her through one fight, much less the melee slogs she goes through.

And for a chick this heavily endowed, what do the game makers arm her with? With a bastardized hybrid battle ax/war hammer. Any lighter weapons? No, not really. So, as you might expect of a women in a bikini for armor who's carrying around a hundred pound weapon, Rachel handles like a brick. But what makes Rachel infuriating is her sudden feeble fits. Right after you use Rachel to fight in a level, Ryu will come along and rescue her from this monster or that. Then, right after Ryu says "You shouldn't be around me" and abandons Rachel after fighting her twin sister Alma, she gets kidnapped to be used as a blood sacrifice for reviving her sister.

And… I really don't care. Maybe it was the fan service female designs that really killed my interest, or maybe it was the way the game makers took the one part of the game I was enjoying, the boss fights, and turned it into a cheap and aggravating experience in just one level. Maybe it's the fact that at no time did I ever care what happened next in the story, I just wanted to see what new enemy types were still in hiding.

And that's what I liked about the game, the sheer variety of enemy types. There's ninja, super-ninja, samurai, and armored soldiers with guns and swords. There's guys with uzis riding motorcycles, flying robots with laser guns, fire breathing demons, and even hordes of zombies. After playing a bunch of Vita games where enemy variety was kinda weak, it was awesome to play so many different kinds of enemies in this game. I was enjoying that so much, I could forgive the shit story and the cheap tactics used to make the game tougher just for the sake of being difficult. But the cheap chopper fight is my limit, and since I didn't really have to pay for this game, I'm going to just cut my losses and quit instead of letting the game aggravate me.

I guess this kind of game appeals to some niche market of hardcore players who feel the only good game is a game that dumps shit on them. The strategy I used on Hero Mode won't work on higher difficulty levels, and while the promise of even more enemy types is vaguely tempting, the combination of locked arena game play with endlessly spawning hordes has never been a good match for me.

The variety of weapons is good, yet the upgrades don't really feel like they do much extra damage unless Ryu pulls off a level two ultimate move. And wouldn't you know it? Most enemies don't give you time to pull that kind of move often. But, the combat here is better than in Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen, and the shuriken aren't completely useless…just mostly useless. Still, I'm sure that this kind of fighting style will appeal to fans who like memorizing button patterns to pull off bigger combos. For me, it all turns into a long blur of button mashing. If I manage to pull something off, yay, it looks cool. But most of the time, I'm just alternating between hard and light attacks to see what makes it through the enemy's defenses.

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that the continue screen ALSO has a cheap tactic of changing "Continue?" to "Abandon the path of the Ninja?" That's "Do you want to quit?" And if you're pushing buttons to try and get back to the long ass loading screen, you can quit pretty easily without realizing what you're doing. This same cheap ass tactic was used in Shinobido 2, and I have to say, I don't understand why Japanese game makers think this kind of thing should be thrown into their games. It's like they're saying "This game isn't hard enough…on the continue screen, let's alternate the default continue question with a trick question that will dump the player back to the start menu." What the fuck. Who thinks that's a good idea? Seriously.

I'm sure male players will love Rachel's bouncy…personality. I hated her tits, and her oversized lips. She looks like an over-inflated sex doll instead of a real person. None of the females in the game look like real people, which is weird, because Ryu does look like a real person. The women have huge googly anime eyes and poofy hair that is somehow still stiff, and when compared to Ryu, they look fake. Even Alma, the demon boss, is hyper sexualized with a set of gold nipples. (No, for real.) So it feels like the women were designed solely as fan service, while Ryu was actually modeled to take his impressive list of moves into account. This could be said of all the male models, and since you're fighting all dudes, all the time, the dudes look great. The demons do too, so why the chicks have to look like something out of a Yujin manga drawing, I dunno.

Actually, since I've brought his moves up, there's nothing Ryu does that isn't copied from somewhere. Half of Ryu's moves are borrowed from Prince of Persia, and the button mashing combos certainly feel very similar to a Prince of Persia title. Others have been staples of Ninja Gaiden since the 2D NES days, like the wall jumping, charged attacks, and timed jump and shoot fighting style. Some of this was good, because it brought back nostalgic memories. But then the continued missile fire from the last chopper reminded me of another historical detail: I've never finished a single Ninja Gaiden game. Not even the first one. At some point, there's always a boss with a cheap tactic that sends me stomping out of the room in a fit about Things That Aren't Fun In Video Games.

So, I give Ninja Gaiden Sigma Plus 3 stars out of five. I'm taking into account that before the chopper, I was having fun in the game. Yes, even though my progress was slow and stumbling. I still felt I was making progress by learning a new enemy's moves. But the only thing I learned from that last boss fight is, collision detection wasn't in the missile budget.

I flat out hated the levels where I played as Rachel, but these were mercifully short. The boss fight with the old dude in a trenchcoat was pretty intense, and I muddled through it with Rachel's shitty lack of moves. But right after this huge fight, Rachel gets one-shotted and dragged off, either another useless sacrifice, or another "save the princess" scenario. I don't know how the story plays out, and I don't even care to Wiki the synopsis. That's how fucking tired I am of video games where the only purpose the women serve is to be rescued by the big strong man.

Seriously, guys in the game industry, you claimed that 2011 was the year that video games matured, but we're still seeing this adolescent storytelling bullshit where the little women hang back while the men do the real work. Enough with the rescue the princess drivel and try to make more women playable for longer than one or two levels. And if you're going to make them playable, don't kidnap them or get them swallowed by demons so a man can rescue them. And dress them in something a woman would be seen wearing instead of an attempt at softcore bondage porn. Cause that bullshit is so fucking tired and worn out. If I hadn't had so much fun playing though levels and bosses with Ryu, this game deserved one star for Rachel alone. So Team Ninja is getting off light with three when the story, plus Rachel, plus cheap tactics should equal a bomb. Instead, what you get is lots of fun combat wrapped around a really shitty story.

*Takes deep breath* So, yeah, that's my incomplete review of the game. Your mileage may vary.