Lately, I’ve been thinking about reputation. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how certain videogames become caricatures of themselves. Dark Souls is perhaps the prime example. Here we have an action RPG that warns prospective players to “prepare to die” in its definitive edition, whose difficulty is so lionized by its community that “git gud” has become its timeless refrain. This forbidding facade meant it took me over half a decade to finally sit down and play Dark Souls, only to discover that it’s my ideal comfort game. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is a bit like that.
Often considered the “Dark Souls before Dark Souls,” Ninja Gaiden is a series that’s somehow passed me by. I have a distant memory of Ninja Gaiden on my childhood friend’s SNES, a collection of purple pixels front-flipping across a CRT TV screen. Less distant, the early 2000s: low-rise jeans; flip phones; Team Ninja’s Ninja Gaiden. “This game is hard,” the internet told me. The hardest videogame of all time. But difficulty for the sake of difficulty doesn’t interest me, and anyway, I didn’t have an Xbox. Now, 2025. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. I was ready. I’d played Dark Souls, and I loved it. I could do this.
This… is not what I expected. Ryu Hayabusa the Dragon Ninja flexes leatherbound glutes against a neo-Tokyo backdrop of flying cars and cherry blossoms. A CIA agent in a backless minidress and thigh-high boots breasts boobily into the clutches of a demon ninja clan. A shirtless twunk in a leather catsuit flaps his butterfly wings and bestows a kiss on the Statue of Liberty’s copper-green cheek. This is not your dad’s Ninja Gaiden. This is camp. This is Stellar Blade on testosterone.
What Ninja Gaiden 2 Black isn’t is difficult – at least, not on normal mode, which is recommended for first-time players. There’s a hard mode and a very hard mode above that, and it’s not long before I’m taking a tentative step up that difficulty slope. It’s not because I’m a masochist, but rather that normal mode is missing a fundamental aspect of the Ninja Gaiden experience, like biting into a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and tasting only chocolate. Has the proliferation of tough-as-nails soulslikes over the last decade been training me for this like I’m some kind of action game super-soldier? Probably not. But I do switch to hard mode anyway, and have a much better time getting my shit rocked.
There’s a simplicity to Ninja Gaiden 2 Black that’s sorely missing in our modern landscape of soulslikes and action RPGs. It’s a rare treat to hack and slash through waves of enemies without managing a stamina bar or juggling incremental bonuses in build menus. Combat is a diegetic affair that demands the player read and respond to enemies instead of relying on ever-inflating damage numbers. It’s a purity analogous to the best fighting games. Fundamentally, Ninja Gaiden 2 Black boils down to an endless procession of enemies, but they aren’t the challenge here. The real challenge lies in mastering this combat system; the reward is the palpable sense of that mastery.
Oh, and what a reward it is. Limbs fly; blood spurts from flesh stumps, drenching floors, walls, leather, and muscle in arcade-style crimson. It’s ultraviolent to a cartoonish extreme, an explosion of visual stimulus that dispenses dopamine proportionate to the hit counter in the top-left corner of the screen. Skirmishes are peppered with cinematic transitions that make a spectacle of flashy combos and finishers, letting you marinate in the power fantasy of performing them successfully while watching your enemies vanish in a burst of gore.
It also helps that Ninja Gaiden 2 Black has a fantastic arsenal that just feels good. Wolverine claws? Check. Scythe? Check. A Big Fucking Sword? Check. There’s even a gun! Among all these choices, the Lunar Staff takes the crown as one of my favorite weapons in a videogame. Its ostentatious moveset makes me feel like a baton twirler powerful enough to rival Heather Burns herself (and if anyone could light their batons on fire and do a sexy dance, it’d be Ryu Hayabusa). I quickly reach its upgrade limit, but it’s a testament to Ninja Gaiden 2 Black’s weapon variety that I don’t use it as a crutch.
Instead, each weapon’s distinct moveset offers a new way to respond to encounters. There’s no laundry list of combos à la Devil May Cry or Bayonetta. Ninja Gaiden 2 Black’s difficulty doesn’t lie in input memorization as it is pattern recognition, and this is where my fellow soulslike enjoyers will hit their stride. Sure, you can button-mash your way through every enemy and probably not die in normal mode, but doing so would be a brute-force measure that would be detrimental to the experience.
Nevertheless, I can see why the cadence of combat may confuse or frustrate players who are used to a specific kind of action game almost indistinguishable from Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. The frenetic energy of a classic hack-and-slash collides with the careful deliberation of modern soulslikes to form a combat system distinct from either. Regardless, Ryu’s calculated stillness followed by a devastating burst of speed is as gratifying thematically as it is mechanically; if someone asked me to describe how a Dragon Ninja would fight, this would be it.
The camera is, well. It’s not good, is it? I’m no stranger to a bad camera. The Last Guardian; Sonic Adventure; Dark Souls; you name it, I’ve probably wrestled its camera, but Ninja Gaiden is in a league of its own. The camera is too far or too close, invariably gets caught up in a throng of enemies, and turns at a snail’s pace. Eventually, I let go of the right analog stick altogether in a wild-eyed “Jesus, take the wheel!” moment, and what do you know – it’s actually better. I let the camera move where it likes, occasionally relying on its soft-lock targeting system to reorient and have a marginally better time overall.
It’s time to address the demon ninjas in the room. Look, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to explain the narrative intricacies of Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, I’d beg you to pull the trigger just to put me out of my misery. I’m aware that I’m tuning into a sequel so I can’t exactly hold my ignorance against it. Instead, I want to praise it for the ease with which you can put all that extraneous guff about Vigoor and Archfiends out of sight and out of mind. It’s there if you want it – but if you’d rather skip past every incidental line of dialogue and scrap of flavor text to focus on slicing demons to death, you absolutely can.
This narrative approach is in the spirit of the series’ arcade beat-em-up roots and informs Ninja Gaiden 2 Black’s overall structure. Chapters are synonymous with arcade stages, and while it’s nowhere near as short as the Ninja Gaiden tailormade for cabinets that charge by the session, it’s still technically possible to clear it in a single sitting. This will inevitably pique the interest of speedrunners, but this structure also makes it easy to apportion into half-hour sessions that keep any frustrations to a low simmer.
A 30th birthday is a time of self-reflection, and Ninja Gaiden 2 Black is the prime opportunity to experience Team Ninja’s mid-2000s reboot in all its glory (and infamy) before we see the modern strides of Ninja Gaiden 4 later this year. It’s a return to an earlier form of action-adventure game design that has since been superseded by the FromSoftware or Sony blueprint. The limitations of that design might rip those rose-tinted glasses right off, but it offers a specific brand of comfort unique to earlier console generations. Plus, there is literally no other videogame that includes a ninja bursting through a cathedral’s rose window to stop a pack of werewolves from staging a hostile takeover of Venice. I’ve been at drag shows with less camp.