Is Ninja Gaiden 2 Tomb Raider (with more blood)?
I’ve been playing Ninja Gaiden 2, which is a very good game ( so far, at least ), and it’s occured to me that it’s really engaging not only my action gamer side of the brain but also my explorer side. The exploration is kind of a meta-game - NG2’s geography is almost entirely linear, and while there are lots of nice vistas there is rarely any discovery in terms of landscape - and this meta-game emerges as an exploration of behavior.
And there’s ninjas, so we’re talking extremely violent behavior.
Exploration of adversary behavior is something that’s been present in games, and particularly the adventure and fighting genres, for a long time. It started with sidescrollers like Mega Man and the original Ninja Gaiden, where enemies followed dependable and often limited patterns, with bosses exhibiting behavior that was somewhat more complex. So in this way, NG2 is a throwback.
What differentiates the game from its earlier brethren, and this was present in the XBox game as well, although not quite to this degree, is that nearly every enemey has some sort of interesting behavioral quirk to discover. It’s this aspect of the game more than any other that makes me interested in the series. And, tangentially, makes it the most interesting modern action game out there for me.
Also, ninja dogs that throw knives at you. That’s funny.
It occurs to me that this kind of interesting adversary behavior is something that is lacking in a lot of other genres - especially RPGs. Japanese ones tend to do this a little bit better, but one thing that whole genre could get better at, and as a consequence become more interesting, is investing more in interesting artificial intelligence for baddies.