A playable and vaguely passable tragedy.
The game begins with a woman, actually, a CIA agent dressed in leather hot pants and a vest that can barely hold in her G-cups. Why the CIA has chosen to employ strippers is still a mystery, but there you go. Without spoiling anything for you, apparently the story involves four fiends and an archfiend. To be honest, as I played through the game over and over (forgetting how many times it took to get all of the achievements), in both English and Japanese, I was still pretty befuddled by what was going on. Everything was inexplicable, most of it seemed tacked on, all of it was bad. At every opportunity the game goes out of it's way to demonstrate how not to tell a story in a game, and I can only venture to guess as to whether or not it was because they cut corners and spent a whopping $20 on hiring a writer for this game, or one of the programmers thought he'd concocted a literary masterpiece that involved someone describing a person that was killing his friends and colleagues in the archfiend service industry as "hot", and that they should "check her out" as she's killing them. The dialogue is like watching a really bad anime, and I mean that in the kindest possible way.
Graphically, this game is actually pretty average. If this has been an Xbox title ported up to the Xbox 360, I could understand and excuse that, but it's not. For a game that is so linear and makes no attempts at offering anything more than an animated image as background scenery, you'd think they'd up the poly count or at least throw some more textures on things. Ryu looks bad, the "hot" CIA agent looks bad, everything looks bad. The worst offender being the stages themselves. It's fairly obvious that they put little effort in masking invisible walls (in one case it was a swamp with a thicket they simply repeated like a clone-stamp, and the walls you could see were like one of those endless looping backgrounds you used to see in Hannah-Barbara cartoons. Rocks and caverns are blocky bump-mapped affairs that look about as natural as a CIA agent in leather hot pants (okay, I'll quit harping), enemies are repetitive and unimpressive (the purple ones were bad, but look! We made red ones, so they must be harder!!!), and if you stop to take a look further out you'll see that the moving cars, city streets and most tall buildings are flat animated images on a loop. It looks and feels extremely cheap, especially given that the path you have to take in this game is so linear and boxed in that it's not as if they needed more power than most Xbox 360 titles to get things looking better than 2 dimensions. The animations were also quite poorly done, almost robotic, and again, many things were very obviously reused from one character type to the next. One exception, I must admit, was the Fiend of Wind, Volf. Of all the characters in the game this one actually looked pretty impressive, surprisingly well detailed, even if he ended up being ultimately just as silly as the rest of them.
Sound and music were about what could be expected, you're going to hear Ryu yelling an awful lot, as apparently all the really best ninjas scream their lungs out every time they attack. The music is mostly out of place, but whether it's techno, or thumping techno, I suppose it's a Japanese action game, and this is what they usually find most fitting regardless of the game's theme (Dynasty Warriors comes to mind). Some sounds, are really incongruous; for example, why do I hear a cash register whenever I pick up an item?
The controls were fairly okay, but still not without their problems. In one boss fight you find that the only weapon you can really use to win is the bow, targeting with the bow can be a pain, and in this case a pair of pains as you are fighting a pair of monsters that fly around you, over you, and away from you, and often when I wanted to target one with the bow, Ryu would begin to auto-target the other, forcing me to have to turn him completely around to face the right one, which by then is a lost cause as the timing is thrown off (this fight, timing is everything as they attack in intervals), and rather than allowing you to move once you've fired your shot, you have to jump, because letting go of the button used for firing your bow isn't enough to drop you out of targeting mode, which can get you killed pretty quickly. Swimming was also an annoyance, but luckily those stages were few and far between.
As a final note I had a lot of freezing issues. The game locked up pretty regularly, and one solution that was presented involved clearing out your cache:
"By deleting your game cache in your hard drive, all of your game updates will be erased, forcing you to download them again the next time you sign into XBOX Live." –N4G
That's an awful lot of work to get a game working properly. I realize by now there is a patch, but I never base my reviews (or I try not to) on what is patched, but rather what I pay for, and what I paid for in this case was a game with serious freezing problems. If you're unable to connect with Xbox Live for whatever reason, consider yourselves warned.
Overall, this game felt last generation, in many ways I actually felt quite a bit like I was playing a very good Dreamcast game. For a Xbox 360 title, this thing's pretty terrible. A weak story, iffy controls, and poor soundtrack and effects only sour this deal further. I've been playing Ninja Gaiden since before many of you were born, way back on the NES and in arcades. It's truly one of the classics as game series go, and deservedly quite a beloved one. I just wish the latest iteration would have been crafted by better folks than the one's Team Ninja gave this to. Instead, I can only hope that next time they actually put an effort in somewhere. In this case even a better story would have made a huge difference.