The awesome controls and gameplay make for a fast-paced, highly enjoyable, yet short experience.
The Bad: Cutscenes look kind of cheesy; even with both difficulties the game's insanely short; stealth moves and certain jumping moves are a little messy.
Ninja Gaiden has made itself a legend on the Xbox and PlayStation systems, with Ninja Gaiden II getting similar praise, even if it's not as original. Dragon Sword was chosen, oddly, for the DS. Or, it seems odd until you play it, when you realize the intuitive controls were done as well as you would have hoped and make for a fantastic fighting game for the handheld.
When you hear about a system like the DS, you're always hoping that someone will make a game that uses the touch screen really, really well. Manipulating a character with just a stylus, though, is a difficult feat for any company to pull off. Phantom Hourglass being the only exception, this was never successful. But now, the first third party to succeed in it, Tecmo, has made a brand new experience thanks to the controls.
You'll be slashing your stylus to swing your sword, drawing it up to jump, tapping to throw shuriken or shoot arrows and of course moving it around in front of your character, Ryu, to run.
You're off to save your apprentice, who fell into the hands of a demon. She's not a helpless damsel in distress, seeing as she's a warrior, but Ryu's the most powerful ninja alive. You'll be getting new swords, using an RPG system to buy new combos, chi techniques (magic, basically, where you draw symbols to summon attacks) and getting new long range weapons.
Ryu's journey takes him through multiple, bizarre realms full of demon creatures to defeat. As you can tell by the title, it'll be the legendary Dragon Sword that you'll need to save your apprentice.
Using your sword works well, as does moving around, using your shuriken/ bow, and even jumping. But stealth attacks aren't executed quite as well. Clicking down on the control pad (down as it seems when you're holding the system sideways) has Ryu duck and block. While holding that down, tapping to the sides of Ryu, apparently, get him to roll left and right. It works usually, but when you're avoiding traps, it's hard to avoid getting hurt. It's good that there isn't much emphasis on these parts of the game, but it still needs mentioning.
Meanwhile, in the heat of battle you'll be swinging your sword like a madman. It sounds repetitive, but there's enough variety to the attacks that you can play for quite awhile before it even seems a little stale. It is also notable that Ryu will sometimes do a technique you didn't mean for him to do, but it rarely messes you up enough to harm you. If you're slower and more exact about it, that won't be an issue anyway.
Generally, in other words, the controls are great. The music sounds very honestly oriental, the short bits of voice acting feel right (and they're Japanese too), while the graphics make the game gorgeous. This title would've been unbelievably good looking on the N64, as the backgrounds are already drawn, like in Resident Evil. That means they're flat, but they'll look 3-D enough, and it allows for more emphasis on the characters, which obviously have to be made normally. And they too look great. The title shows off what the DS can do, even though it's still the weakest system graphically this gen.
Blowing into the mic is actually incorporated and not overdone. There is a pause menu, but again the entire focus of the game is on the touch screen, not on buttons. And you'll have a variety of enemies to battle with, and you'll need different strategies to take them all down.
Those same enemies are pretty easy early on. Even on the normal difficulty, though, the final boss is insanely challenging. It'll take you a ton of tries to bring it down. And once you have you'll learn that there's a harder mode. That one, I haven't even attempted, to be honest. I'm terrified, because from what I understand it's nigh on impossible.
But either way the game's gonna be really, really short. It's around five, six hours the first time through, including playing bosses and certain groups of enemies through again when you die. That... Isn't much. Playing again, doubtlessly, will take longer. But at max that'll be eight hours. Fourteen hours, if you're not great at fighting games, and that's still extremely short. Minus the battles you lose, it's more like eight hours through both difficulties.
The quantity just isn't much, and that's the main reason the game's score got docked for me. But on the other hand, the quality is spectacular. Few third party companies produce titles that rival the games Nintendo themselves put on their own systems, but this one does. Tecmo has proven that they can hold their own against the other big third parties on Nintendo systems: to me, Capcom (mainly for Wii), EA, Activision, Square Enix (for DS), and, soon if not already, Sega.
If you're looking for a game that has a long campaign to it, this isn't the game for you. If you're looking for a ton of high quality fighting, plenty of replayability and quite the challenge, then look no further.