Ninja Gaiden 2 Black Review

There is a moment near the end of Ninja Gaiden 2 Black where you retrace the original Ninja Gaiden’s opening level in reverse. I know that level like the back of my hand, having played it over and over and over again two decades ago on a demo disk until I could beat Murai, the first boss, without getting hit. And though you aren’t forced to go all the way to the beginning of that first stage here, this area isn’t what it used to be. It’s dilapidated, rotting, falling apart; you can see the damage caused by time and the events of the first game clearly. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black never directly comments on this; Ryu doesn’t mention it, and the camera never pulls any tricks to call attention to it. It’s a moment of subtlety that’s very un-Ninja Gaiden, but as I ran back through these familiar stomping grounds, I had an enormous smile on my face. Like this remake as a whole, it may not quite be what it once was, but slicing and dicing my way through it feels as good as ever.

That moment is a good summary of Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, an Unreal Engine 5-powered remake of 2008’s Ninja Gaiden 2, one of the Xbox 360 era’s definitive action games. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is, according to Team Ninja, supposed to be the definitive edition of Ninja Gaiden 2, combining a stunning visual upgrade with several balance changes. Unfortunately, as good as 2 Black is – and let me state without equivocation this is a remarkable visual upgrade to an already excellent action game – it is not the end-all, be-all edition of Ninja Gaiden 2 that the Black moniker implies. Like many of the weapons Ryu wields, 2 Black is something of a double-edged sword. Its changes cut both ways.

But before we dig into what 2 Black isn’t, let’s talk about what it is. This is what I like to call an Action Jackson: a 3D beat-em-up with a hyperintense focus on combat above all else. Like previous versions, 2 Black takes place a year after the Xbox reboot of Ninja Gaiden. This time, the Black Spider Ninja Clan and Greater Fiends have formed an alliance to resurrect the Archfiend, and Dragon Ninja and ultimate badass Ryu Hayabusa is the only one who can stop them (though he does get a little help from his friends and the CIA). The story is more an excuse for you to travel the world, meet exciting and interesting monstrosities, ninjas, and Fiends, and turn them into limbless torsos than it is a fleshed-out narrative.

That said, I forgot how funny it is. Greater Fiends voiced by Steve Blum quote Shakespeare at you! You fight a lightning man on the Statue of Liberty! A giant, four-armed werewolf named Volf brings you to the colosseum in Venice, which is full of more werewolves, for a duel to the death, and he’s like “do you want him to die?” and all the werewolves cheer, and then he’s like “who do you want to kill him?” and then all the werewolves are like “Volf!” and he’s like “Yes! I, Volf, will kill him!” and so you’re just fighting a giant four-armed werewolf in the colosseum while a bunch of werewolves are cheering him on. This, folks, is the best camp this side of the river.

But you’re not here for that. You’re here for the combat, and on that front, 2 Black delivers and then some. Ninja Gaiden 2’s whole deal is that you can delimb enemies, cutting off arms, legs, and even heads as you rip through rooms, opening up anyone who is suddenly short a body part for an instant execution if they’re still up and walking (or crawling) around.

The downside is that enemies that are injured are even more dangerous. These dudes will jump on you, stab you, and blow themselves up to kill you. Unlike Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, Ninja Gaiden is not about styling on your enemies. It is about surviving. Your foes will not stand there and wait for you to attack them, nor will they do long, slow attacks with a noticeable windup. No, these dudes are fast, ferocious, and unrelenting, and they think you kicked their dog and are pretty sure you said something about their momma. They want you dead.

The thing is, they’re up against Ryu Hayabusa. Ryu isn’t your typical Action Jackson protag; the dude, even by genre standards, is a walking arsenal. By the end of the roughly 10-hour campaign, you’re going to be walking around with no less than nine melee weapons, three ranged weapons, and four different flavors of fancy Ninja magic (Ninpo), and each melee weapon has a unique moveset with combos to learn and special techniques to master. You haven’t lived until you’ve decapitated someone with a Flying Swallow, used the Lunar Staff or Vigoorian Flail to combo half a dozen enemies at once, or pulled off the almighty Izuna Drop to slam a dude’s head into the ground so hard that it explodes.

Ryu feels like a character from a fighting game. He has a complex moveset and combos to learn, the ability to block attacks and then sidestep or dodge backward, special moves and magic, and a unique counter-attack ability specific to each weapon that allows him to transition from defense to offense in the blink of an eye. Oh, and he’s a Ninja, so he can do stuff like run up walls and leap down for a powerful blow, jump on his enemy’s heads, and leap forward and hurl them across the screen by the neck.

In recent years, action games have leaned heavily on parries and invincibility-frames to get you out of trouble, but that’s not how 2 Black operates. Ryu has excellent defensive tools, but Ninja Gaiden is about positioning, aggression, and mastery of both your weapons and slew of techniques. You are always moving, always looking for an opportunity to go on the offensive, and always prioritizing the biggest threat, whether it’s an injured enemy who might try to grab you, a caster hanging back to pepper you with spells, or an enormous werewolf looking to tear your face off and eat it.

At its best, this is a symphony of death and you’re the conductor, chaining together combos, dodging and counter-attacking, and using the Essence dropped by enemies to immediately charge your Ultimate Techniques, which are attacks so powerful that they can slice and dice an entire room. Ryu is always the coolest guy on screen, and when you’re cooking, the enemies throwing themselves at you to die give off that “surely I will be the guy that kills John Wick” vibe. When you’re not, you can die very, very quickly. You’re going to get good, or you’re not going to progress.

It’s not as unforgiving as it sounds. Save statues restore your entire health bars the first time you use them, and most of your life (minus a red section that grows over time as you take damage) is restored once you finish any given encounter. Even then, you’ve got items to fix that red section, heal you in a pinch mid-combat, and if all else fails, you can always kill more enemies and pray for blue Essence that will restore health. It’s never over until it’s over.

So it’s a flawless combat system, right? Well… not quite. Just like in the original, the camera can be a little janky and get stuck in weird places from time to time. It’s not too bad if you’re proactive about managing it and smart about how you approach fights, though it can have issues with tight corners and you will get hit off-screen every now and then. It’s an annoyance, but a minor one.

The other major problem is the quality of the boss encounters. Some of them like Volf are challenging, memorable, fun, or a combination of the three. But then there’s fights like the Water Dragon, a weird worm thing in the subway, or the Nuclear Armadillo (yes, really). And those… well, those kinda suck. Not because they’re hard, necessarily, but because they’re just plain not engaging to fight, force you to play in ways that zap the fun from Ninja Gaiden 2’s combat system, or rely on some weird gimmick. Even some of the best fights can overstay their welcome with repeated re-runs. I mean, I love the Genshin fight, but did I really need to do it four times, especially when it doesn’t change much during the rematches? How many times do I need to teach you this lesson, old man?!

Between fights, you’ll get to explore each level, which are linear but still reward heading off the beaten path with health bonuses, Ninpo upgrades, Essence, and Crystal Skulls (Why was 2008 the year of the crystal skull?) that provide discounts at the shop. It’s here, in the stages themselves, that you see the depth of 2 Black’s visual upgrades. Yeah, the new character models look amazing (love the new hair, Sonia), but the lighting changes and texture upgrades really make these environments pop. Ninja Gaiden 2 has always been gorgeous, but it’s easy to forget how ambitious it was. These levels are huge, and occasional camera issues aside, the platforming sections are largely really enjoyable and provide some nice variety between combat encounters. I particularly like the one in the clock tower – running up walls and doing bird flips is fun! Who knew?

So overall, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is pretty great. If anything, though, its biggest flaw is that it’s based more on the 2009 PlayStation 3 port Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 than it is the original 360 version. This is a little inside baseball, but bear with me for a second: For those who don’t know, Ninja Gaiden 2 and Sigma 2 are very, very different. I’m not going to go into extreme depth here because there’s too much to list, but Sigma 2 added or removed certain bosses, costumes, and weapons, reworked levels, changed how weapon upgrades work, and even added three new characters (Rachel, Momiji, and Ayane) with their own story chapters. It’s… a lot. So much so that Team Ninja has even crafted a handy dandy comparison table listing what’s in all the different versions.

The differences I really want to highlight, though, are the changes to enemy density and health, as they have the single biggest impact on how 2 Black actually plays. Compared to the original, Sigma 2 substantially reduced the number of enemies on-screen at once. There are dozens of enemies on iconic sections like The Stairs in the original release, so many that it could actually force the framerate into the single digits on Xbox 360. In 2 Black, you might get eight or so on screen at once in the same sequence. In exchange for sheer numbers, enemies in Sigma 2 (and thus, 2 Black) get more health and take longer to delimb, but are less aggressive. Even a Ninja Dog could tell you that these changes make combat worse. Environments are often empty and enemies feel spongy. Certain enemies, especially bigger ones like werewolves or the gargoyle-esque Van Gelfs (which are already immune to staple attacks like the Izuna Drop) take much, much longer to delimb and kill, making combat encounters with a lot of them drag.

I played 2 Black on the Path of the Acolyte difficulty (Normal) for this review because I figured it is what most people will play, though this was considered Easy in the original 360 release. After finishing it, I fired up the original Ninja Gaiden II on my Xbox Series X and played for a while on Path of the Warrior, which 2 Black lists as Hard and the original lists as Normal. Even on a higher difficulty, enemies died more quickly – I could often delimb or outright kill individual ninjas with a single attack from the Dragon Sword when it might take a full combo to do so in 2 Black – and it was exciting to fight more enemies on-screen at a time. Ninja Gaiden 2 just feels faster and better than Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. Ryu even seems to move through the environments more quickly, and it’s more exciting to play as a result.

2 Black’s issues don’t stop there. The combat changes from Sigma 2 also mean that enemies will sometimes block attacks in a combo after being hit or fall out of a combo mid-string. While this inconsistency does technically make 2 Black more like its predecessor, 2’s combat system isn’t built for it the way Ninja Gaiden Black’s is and it feels bad every time it happens.

That said, however, 2 Black does do a lot right in addition to the visual upgrade. The higher level of gore from the original release is back, as is the weapon upgrade system. Sigma 2 just gives you free upgrades at certain points; in 2 Black and the original, you can buy upgrades at any shop with Essence, which you also spend on healing items. I challenged myself to play through 2 Black without using any healing or Ninpo restoration items unless I found one when I was already full up, so this didn’t affect me a ton, but having upgrades cost Essence again is a good change because it forces you to choose between saving it to boost your weapons or spending it on items that will help you stay alive. Even intro screens before each mission resemble the more appealing ones from the original release more than Sigma 2. These things may feel minor, but they matter.

2 Black also smartly removes the not-great Giant Buddha Statue and Statue of Liberty (yes, really) boss fights that Sigma 2 added while retaining good additions like the Dark Dragon. And while enemies are still spongier than in the original, they do at least feel less spongy than Sigma 2 and there seem to be more of them. Still not quite as many as in the original, though without playing all three games back to back to back and counting corpses, it’s impossible to say.

And the good stuff from Sigma 2 is still here. I like the new levels with Rachel, Momiji, and Ayane. None of these characters have Ryu’s expansive kit, so there isn’t as much depth to them, but they all feel unique and are fun to play as, especially in one-off chapters. This is still Ninja Gaiden, so they still look Like That (Ayane’s costume is particularly silly), but 2 Black never treats them as anything less than Extremely Competent Action Girls and they’re a nice change of pace, even if the transition from Ryu to them occasionally feels jarring from a story perspective.

Finishing the campaign unlocks additional costumes for every character (though not as many as in Sigma 2, and even some of the costumes from the original are not present), which is neat. You’ll also open up Chapter Challenges if you wanna replay chapters and compete for a high score, though there aren’t online leaderboards, and 2 Black does not bring back the original’s New Game Plus mode. There’s the Formerly Co-op With Another Real Person But Now Only With an NPC Friend Tag Team Missions, too, if you’re looking for more to do, which is nice. And I also appreciate the return of Sigma 2’s Hero difficulty, which is great for folks new to action games or who might need additional accessibility options.

If I have one other complaint with 2 Black, it’s that there are bugs here and there. It crashed on me once, had a few texture bugs in extremely funny places like The Stairs (if you know, you know), and once a door with some enemies (and goodies) behind it failed to open. The latter was, admittedly, really funny: I just heard rocket ninjas shooting at me from inside a train as I furiously tried to get in and kill them and they furiously tried to get out and kill me, but it did mean I had to restart from my last checkpoint to fix it.