Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword Hands-On

After our first look at Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword in motion earlier this month in Japan, we clearly needed to get our hands on the game. Thankfully, Tecmo and Team Ninja happened to be in town with the demo version of the game that was shown off onstage at their event. Given the short nature of the demo, we played through it a few times, scrutinizing both the game's visuals and its control scheme to soak in the promising little title.

The demo finds Ryu Hayabusa doing what he does best, stabbing people and taking names, which in this case consisted of a short sequence of fighting, exploration, puzzle solving, and boss murdering. You know, the usual ninja stuff. We had a good sense of what to do since we caught the live demo and got through fairly quickly. What stood out to us was the game's control, which was superslick, despite its work-in-progress state. You'll rely on the stylus and touch screen for attacking and jumping. Tapping anywhere on the screen will have Ryu throw a shuriken. Double tapping causes him to jump, with a quick second double tap initiating a double jump. It's also possible to mix the two sets of actions together and throw stars while jumping.

If you slide the stylus down while Ryu is jumping, he'll hit the ground with a powerful sword attack. For more up-close-and-personal melee action, you'll rely on three types of stylus motions done over enemies. A top-to-bottom slash does a downward slice, a horizontal slash does a standard slice, and a bottom-to-top slash does an upward slice, which is perfect for launching enemies and setting up meaty combos. You'll simply need to do any of the motions over any enemy onscreen, and it'll send Ryu racing over to dole out the hurt.

Besides the melee and shuriken attacks, you'll be able to perform charged moves and trigger magic attacks. Charged moves become possible when you block attacks, which is done by holding down any of the DS buttons and rapidly moving the stylus along the screen. As you do, Ryu will charge up, powering up his attacks up to two times. When you're charged up to the level you want, you can unleash on foes. Your magic will be triggered by tapping an icon in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and then tracing along symbols or letters that appear onscreen. You'll even be able to control the route of your magic fireball with the stylus.

Above and beyond what we played, we hit up head Team Ninja ninja Tomonobu Itagaki for the word on what wasn't being shown. The biggie is a new playable character, a female ninja, who you'll get to use in the game. The game's weapon system will differ from the console game in that you won't gain different weapons to use in the adventure. Instead, as you defeat bosses, you'll gain dark dragon items, which are used to power up the sword's abilities. As for Ninja Gaiden staples such as unlockable modes and costumes, Itagaki was coy but said the team was considering a number of different things that they feel would be a good fit on the DS.

Though we didn't play anything new, being able to try our hand at the game with our own hands cemented our positive take on it. The action is fast, the controls intuitive, and the visuals rock, even at this stage. If this is what the game is like now, work-in-progress state and all, we have high hopes for how it's going to come together. Look for more on Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword in the coming months.