Part 34: Ninja Gaiden II - Post-Game

We've now made it to the post game of Ninja Gaiden II. There may not be much in terms of quantity and variety as Ninja Gaiden Black, but there's still enough to demonstrate and talk about for almost an hour. Let's dig in.


Extra costumes return for Ninja Gaiden II, but the context is somewhat different. You see, as this was on the 360, DLC had become a common thing on consoles and Team Ninja released 3 costume packs on Xbox Live that could be purchased for a few bucks each. Well, each pack is more like a costume with multiple color variants. See, before the costume packs came out (which didn't take long to begin with), all the player had was Ryu's Legendary Black Falcon outfit, and for each difficulty they completed an alternate color would be unlocked. So there is essentially five variations on the same costume. This same rule applies to the downloadable outfits, so if you bought them after finishing the game on Master Ninja you'd have access to all the different color variants of those costumes as well.

That said, the costumes may technically be more plentiful than what was in Ninja Gaiden Black, but I don't think I'd rate these as being as memorable as the ones in that game. Especially when it had stuff like Ryu's DOA2 outfit, or the Red Muffler. But, if you like to replay games like these, it's nice to have a different outfit every now and then.

You can see screenshots of all the different outfits in game by clicking on the icons below. Gives you a better look than just watching them slashing and flying all over the place in video.











A major addition to the game that, like the costumes, was released as DLC about a month after the original release. There are some changes to how it's set up and arranged compared to its Ninja Gaiden Black counterpart, but it's largely the same at its core.

For start, unlike the 46 missions of the original (45 regular + Eternal Legend), NGII's Mission Mode only features 24 (16 regular + 8 survival). Not surprising as this was very quickly put together in the wake of Itagaki preparing to leave Team Ninja, but at the very least less missions means it'll take less time to get through and see everything, as opposed to Black where getting through and just surviving a mission on its default level could be an ordeal at times. That's one thing Mission Mode in Ninja Gaiden II preserves for better or worse, and that is despite each mission having multiple difficulties like the main game, the difficulty balancing here is way different compared to main game. You do get rewarded with a medal to signifies you completed the mission, but if you want that mission screen to be filled with gold medals you gotta go the extra mile and beat them all on Master Ninja. Naturally, I haven't done so yet. Master Ninja in the campaign was already hell enough.

So what the mission mode does do differently compared to last game is a couple things. For start, there is a new Essence type that gets introduced, Green Essence. The purpose of this essence is to provide a score multiplier to your karma score. Called Karma Burst, the multiplier can go up to 5 and you must periodically keep collecting green essence to preserve the multiplier or else it drops back to 1. As you'd expect, it follows the same rules as generating essence where UTs, OTs, or any combo that's above 20 hits will override it with yellow essence, so you must learn to drop your combos or hold back if you want a chance at a green essence drop. The high karma score at the end of a mission is nice, but it doesn't change the medal you get based on difficulty. Except for one mission type at the end.

The final 8 missions in this mode are known as Survival Missions, a returning feature from DLC that was released for Ninja Gaiden Sigma, though a bit more refined. You are restricted to only one weapon for each mission (hence why there's 8, 'cause 8 weapon types), and you must survive as long as you can while killing everything the game throws at you in a circular arena. It's tough and unrelenting, providing no breaks inbetween the action to refill grey health because there is no grey health. But it's incredibly fun. And this is where getting the highest karma score possible is important and requires understanding how to manipulate green essence drops to keep the Karma Burst up. Getting the gold is no easy task though, as it requires something like 2 million karma score total to get for each mission, which I have not been able to consistently do. And then there's the fact that after going through a bunch of enemy waves, the survival missions will mix things up with a boss fight against Genshin. Defeating him repeats all the enemy waves you faced prior, and it will continue to do so till you run out of health. In a way, these missions are a better distillation of the core of Ninja Gaiden II than the regular missions are. The weapons are the star here. Taking on dozens of ninjas and fiends at once while feeling like a fragile, yet destructive god is a fantastic feeling. The mission mode DLC is worth it for these survival challenges at the very least.