Part 4: Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 - Chapter 2

The Hayabusa Village is this time getting raided during the daytime, but the path to the fight with Genshin largely remains the same. With this chapter, more of the changes to game structure and mechanics become extremely evident.


So, last chapter it was made clear that you could not upgrade your weapons with essence like in the original game. In fact, it didn't even say when or where you could upgrade them. This chapter introduces the Muramasa statues with a blue lamp, which allow you to upgrade any weapon of your choosing, but only one. This has serious ramifications on a couple of factors. Firstly, the in game economy for a skilled player means you'll be accruing more Essence than in NGII, but have nothing to spend it on, and it's not building up to some reward at the end of the game. Secondly, as you'll find out a few chapters from now that there's not enough blue lamp statues to upgrade every weapon in this game to max. Even if you do what I plan to do in this playthrough, which is NOT upgrade the Dragon Sword and try to not upgrade another specific weapon, you'll still end up with at least one weapon forever stuck at level 2. This is one of the more baffling design decisions made in Sigma 2 as it completely lacks any foresight and misunderstands how any expert player in Ninja Gaiden plays these games, which is maximizing essence gain from fights to acquire EVERYTHING possible from the store, including weapon upgrades, in as early a time as possible.

Now, the other major change that is somewhat more positive is the implementation of the bow. In NGII, it was equipped and used just like in the first game. It replaces your default projectile, you hold the button, then move the left stick to aim while standing in place. Sigma 2 becomes, I believe, the first character action game to actually implement modern shooter controls into its layout, insofar as you hold L2 to aim and R2 to shoot. And you can move around, admittedly very slow but you're less of a sitting duck than before. Plus it adds a pretty strong but useful lock on to the cursor that will snap your aim to an enemy and will barely miss. This idea, I appreciate, but there's something about its implementation that feels not that much more indepth and rather bolted on.

For start, it changes the nature of projectiles that you always have shuriken assigned to the Circle button and you have a choice of a secondary projectile weapon that is fired with R2. But as it will become clear later, the bow and shuriken might as well be the only projectiles, as it removes two projectiles that are available in later chapters and adds a new one in this game that is beyond useless outside the area it's presented in. Plus the bow itself is always visible on Ryu's back and it doesn't mesh as well with his frame when you have to see it there constantly. And this system to top it off gets carried over to Ninja Gaiden 3 and Razor's Edge, and the depth and mechanics are basically unchanged or unimproved. There's so much more that could be done to make the applications for projectile weapons in Ninja Gaiden better beyond cancelling combos, and while I think having a dedicated aim button that still allows for movement is a start, it's not enough work done to it. As we'll see later on, I definitely don't think it's worth this change just for Team Ninja to remove some of the later weapons because they're so good in the context of NGII's combat.

The last change I can think of in this chapter that is a positive is actually the Genshin fight. First off the arena is actually larger than normal so you have more room to work with, but Genshin gets an extra attack in the form of Ninpo. But the best part of it all, is that you can actually launch him into the air and if conditions are right, you can do an Izuna drop to him. Having launchers be effective on Genshin is an amazing addition that I wish a lot of the later, more human sized bosses also had, but for ones that matter why not give it to the rival fight? It helps make up for Genshin having the issue of heavily inflated health and defense compared to his original incarnation.