Part 14: Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 - Chapter 7

Back through the Lychan's castle we go, with some "new" enemies to try and spice things up along the way.


Honestly, very little major changes to note outside of the usual suspects for the game. No ToV, reduced enemy counts, the usual. Oh right, there is one. The return of the imp fiends.

I am extremely mixed on their inclusion in Sigma 2. Once again this is Team Ninja looking back at their past successes on a surface level and not really understanding the more minute details when they decided to include features that would make me people remember Ninja Gaiden Black. The Enma's Fang was an obvious parallel to the Dabilahro, with a bit of Unlabored Flawlessness mixed in for aerial combos, and now they pulled the Imp Fiends from the first game because A) they're humanoid enemies that have a variety of moves comparable to the Black Spider ninja and B) they were one of the more enjoyable enemies to fight in the first game.

To their credit, Team Ninja did not simply dump the old animations and attack properties as they were and called it a day. These things are tweaked to have new options that can let them fight somewhat closer to Ryu's level in this game. They got a fire ball attack they fire from their chest, and they've got their own dive attack move that feels similar to what the Bast Fiends had in the first game. And of course, you can delimb them and they have the ability to do a kamikaze attack. So as far as enemies go in Sigma 2, they're fairly robust. But now you get to a much bigger problem. The most obvious being that despite the new moves added, these things still fight and behave much like they did before that it took significantly less work than it would have for Sigma 2 to just make entirely new enemies with the same amount of love and care that was given to NGII's enemies originally. Whatever was fast and cheap, Sigma 2 almost always opted to go for. Be it removing content to speed up progression, or adding old enemies into the game like so.

There's also the lore reason, if you can take it serious for a moment, where the Imp Fiends were explicitly allied with the Vigoor Emperor, who is classified as an Archfiend. The Archfiend Ryu's trying to keep from getting resurrected in this game is not Vigoor but another named Vazdah. And because the Greater Fiends are all under the service of Vazdah, their underlings are unique to them and have no overlap with the Fiends in Vigoor's domain. Sigma 2 gives no honest to god explanation for why the imps even would be back, considering they get no cutscene presence (well, except in the next Sigma 2 exclusive chapter, along with a familiar boss returning), or even an implication that they might have been absorbed into Greater Fiend's collective armies. I can say for sure though, just going by Volf and his underlings, the imps sure feel super out of place when next to the Lychans. Hell, even next to the Gajas. It's fucking weird.