The Ninja Dog

Before playing the Ninja Gaiden reboot, my experience with Ninja games were a bare minimum. I never got to play the original Ninja Gaiden NES trilogy and by the 3D era, ninja games have sort of been pigeon-holed to the stealth genre.

Recently I looked at my backlog of games on the PS3 and vowed to finish as many as possible before it becomes unmanageable. Right at the top of the list was Ninja Gaiden Sigma which is easily the oldest game I haven't finished. I have tried to play this game several times before but can never managed to adapt to the poor 3D camera and brutal difficulty.

This game is truly awesome once you get the hang of things and accept the shame of lowering the difficulty. Just imagine playing Metal Gear Solid but instead of Solid Snake, you play as Cyborg Ninja. The action is way too fast at times to the point I feel like I'm button-mashing rather than skillful beating these guys.

The game really shows age when you realised you can't change your weapons without going to the pause menu. The loading time is also freqeuent and sometimes right in the middle of the action with no benefit of installing game data to the HDD. This is probably due to the original coding of the game on the Xbox as it didn't have a HDD.

These issues aside, the game can be very fun and perfectly caprtures the essence of being a bad-ass ninja. I have thought of selling this game since it looks ugly in the red GH case and I wasn't playing it at all. Upon finishing the game, I liked it enough to keep in my collection and even added the third game to my Wii U.