Ninja Gaiden Sigma is a great game, but it is not a must-own for anyone who has a PS3.
The Good:
Terrific graphics supported by a silky smooth 60 frames per second. An incredible array of fighting moves and a good selection of weapons and styles to choose from. Beautiful environments. Great music. Lots of replay value.
The Bad:
Story is lackluster. Character development is non-existent. Voice acting is lame. Game difficulty is frustrating to the extreme. Collector's Edition is a rip-off.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma was the first top tier exclusive title to come to the PS3 and remains, to this day, one of the most popular games on the platform. It was a huge disappointment to PS3 owners everywhere when Ninja Gaiden 2 was announced to be a 360 exclusive (though this author suspects the proper phrase is likely to end up being "a 360 timed exclusive" at some point).
But was this game worth the hype and accolades that it deserved? I had the chance to sit down and play it recently and came away with decidedly mixed feelings. Time to go to the scorecards to see if the steak matches the sizzle.
To begin with, I want to focus on the positive, and there is plenty of that to focus on. Ninja Gaiden Sigma is nothing if not an incredibly polished and well-finished title. This polish begins with the gameplay.
If you can find them all, you'll be treated to nine different melee weapons and eight different projectile weapons. While there is some overlap between them, where a couple of weapons handle similarly and have very similar moves, there are enough differences that the gameplay has a significant amount of variety should the gamer choose to make use of it.
Nearly all the melee weapons in the game can be powered up further by paying an in-game blacksmith to refine them. By "blacksmithing" your weapons, you unlock new moves that can only be utilized once the weapon is further powered up. This seems a bit counterintuitive at times. After all, how does smithing the sword better have any impact at all on Ryu Hyabusa's ability to swing it? It would impact how much damage the weapon does, but there is a definite logical flaw in the reasoning.
Still, that is a minor point in the big scheme of things, which is that having a wide variety of weapons and the ability to power them up is never a bad thing.
All the weapons and moves in the world wouldn't make for a good game if the frame rates didn't manage to keep up, and players will be happy to know that they manage beautifully. The game runs completely smoothly, without so much as a hiccup anywhere at all during the gameplay. In fact, the silky smooth nature of the moves is perhaps the best part of the game.
Nor does this refer exclusively to the fighting moves. The platforming moves that you, as a ninja, can perform are equally flawless. Whether it is running up walls, along walls, or jumping along the heads of your enemies, this game captures the feel of being a ninja perfectly. The way the body motions are replicated on screen is seamless, but sadly, brutally challenging.
Be prepared to die, and die often, while playing this game. This isn't a reflection on your skill as a video game player. Rather, this is a reflection on the fact that this is one of the hardest games in recent memory. This is the worst part of the game. It is unbelievably frustrating how hard this game is. Some reviews have made mention that the difficulty is a bit toned down from the first release of this game on the original Xbox, but this is more in the area of the placement of shops and save points than the actual difficulty of the environments or enemies.
This game is just brutally difficult to the point it severely impacts how fun the game is to play. What's worse, it doesn't include the ability to stop in the middle of the action and load a recent save if you get off to a bad start. Rather, you need to either completely exit the game and restart or wait for the enemies to finish beating the snot out of you to reload. A sparse instruction manual that does not in any way show how to perform some of the more important moves in the game doesn't help the difficulty. Ironically, this very factor lends the game a lot of replay value. A lot of people will have more fun playing this game the second time through than they did the first.
For those who either picked up the collector's edition copy of the game or have access to an Internet function and basic awareness of what a Google search is, you also play several levels as the beautiful, well-endowed fiend hunter Rachel. This makes the collector's edition, which costs $10 more, something of a ripoff since at that point the only "bonus" for the collector's edition is a behind the scenes how the game was made video, and that isn't really worth $10.
Rachel's gameplay shows a similar polish to Ryu's, even if her basic modus operandi is somewhat different. Where Ryu handles like a cobra; lean, lethal and astonishingly fast, Rachel is more of a bear. She is slow, but her moves are extremely powerful and heavy hitting. The storyline explanation is that she has "fiend" blood in her that makes her extremely strong, but whatever the reason it is a very nice touch that, for once, the male protagonist in a game is the extremely fast but light hitting one whereas the female is the slow, front-lines bruiser.
Sadly, or perhaps fortunately depending on your opinion on the subject, this break from tradition does not extend to Rachel's, ahem, "attributes" or attire. Rachel's body figure is tactfully described as "generous" and generously revealed as well. This is a nice lead into a discussion on the graphics of the game.
To say that the graphics are pleasing is a bit of an understatement. While the game never reaches the visual splendor of, say, Heavenly Sword, it still manages to hold its own thanks in large part to the level design. The level design is expansive, so much so that you may have to be careful to jot just a couple of quick notes when you save for the night in case you forget what your ultimate destination and objective was when you pick the game back up the next day since the game doesn't give you a journal to reference.
If there is a weakness with the level design it is with the repetitiveness of it. This is a weakness that actually overlaps the storyline. For a ninja, Ryu does remarkably little planning. You'll revisit several of the same environments multiple times because Ryu doesn't seem to have the first clue how to achieve his ultimate goals. He's like a force of nature, destroying all in his path, but with little in the way of direction.
He knows what he wants to achieve (vaguely) but doesn't really map out how he's going to go about doing so. The cut scenes don't give a lot of clues either and so sometimes you're going to end up doing a lot of wandering around and pondering what exactly you're supposed to be accomplishing, where, and how to go about accomplishing it. Thinking and planning are not Ryu's strong points.
And, as I've hinted previously, the storyline isn't this game's strongpoint either. "Tacked on" would be a kind way to phrase it. While, granted, a good and well fleshed out story isn't always the central focus of a game of this type, it often seems that Sigma's storyline exist just so some developer or programmer somewhere could check a box off on a list of their action items.
This weakness extends to character development. To summarize: don't expect a lot. To elaborate: particularly for Ryu. In an ironic twist, Rachel's personality and motivations are explored in much more depth than Ryu's are and, in the process, she comes across as a much more likeable figure.
The storyline isn't helped much by the sparse dialog and pathetic voice acting either. Have you ever watched an old martial arts movie where none of the actors speak Japanese and their lips continue to move long after the voice over dubbing is finished reading the lines, thus providing very strong hints that it isn't the actual actors on the screen speaking? Sigma comes across that way. True, the lip-syncing is done better, but the actual voice acting itself is just plain bad. As in second-rate JRPG bad.
Fortunately for Sigma, and anyone playing it, the in-game music makes up for what the voice acting lacks to some extent. The music always fits the mood and is generally high quality.
So what's the verdict?
Ninja Gaiden Sigma is a great game, but it is not a must-own for anyone who has a PS3. People who do not play action games on a regular basis will not like this game because of the difficulty level and will almost certainly not finish the game. The lack of a strong storyline to provide a hook, combined with the difficulty, will provide a big disincentive for casual action game fans to play it through until the end.
True Score: 8.2