Last night I gritted my teeth and played some more Ninja Gaiden 2. Now on chapter 5 I’m once again dealing with cheap fights and an unintuitive camera but I kept going. Then I came to a spot that for once in my video game career I said “no” to. A section that has you in a huge underwater area dealing with a never ending supply of enemies called ghost fish. This was the most annoying enemy in NGB due to their ability to cause massive damage to the player. This section requiring me to get across a huge expanse was the last straw for the game. I’m now ready to condemn NG 2 as one of the worst games I’ve played due to this ridiculous section.
I’m fine with challenge in my games; I’ve played Ninja Gaiden, God of War, Devil May Cry and other games at their hardest levels. However there needs to be something testing the player for it to be a challenge. This section in NG 2 is not testing the player; I’m not going to become a better action gamer by going through this. It is just a designer getting his or her kicks by punishing the player. This would be like playing an action game where the only way to unlock a door is to walk up 100 stairs and then back down again. There is no challenge or game play reason for this section; it is just there to annoy the player. Not once when I played Ninja Gaiden Black did I feel that the designers were punishing me but instead were providing hurdles for me to overcome. The proof of this is going back to the earlier sections of the game on repeat playthroughs and finding the game is easy now that your skill level has increased. If I replay Ninja Gaiden 2 I’m still going to run into trouble by problems completely out of my hands due to bad design decisions.
While I’m ranting about bad design decisions I would also like to comment on one mechanic that I hate in RPGS. The final super secret boss in most JRPGS, instead of providing a meaningful fight, are usually designed that there is only one way to beat them. Either by having a select group of skills or a specific pattern to follow that the player would not have any knowledge about without a guide on hand, anytime a section in a video game requires a game guide to get through is a bad design decision in my opinion. Even if the challenge is a post game super boss, the fact remains that if I need to read a guide to know the exact way to kill it then that is a design problem.
At this point I know that if I ever do manage to finish NG2 on normal then it will be shelved because no matter how bad that room is on normal, it is going to be a lot worse on hard and up. This is one of those times that you do need someone solely focused on the design elements of your title, as there is a fine line between challenging and just plain unfair.
Josh
