March 25, 2008 - Tecmo, the company behind the ultimate ninja action game series Ninja Gaiden, today announced the release of the highly-anticipated Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword for the Nintendo DS. The title is the first handheld installment in the popular series, which has sold over 2 million units worldwide. Players will fight enemy ninjas and battle various fiends while taking on the role of Master Ninja Ryu Hayabusa and...
If you're in the market for an action game that wrings the most out of the Nintendo DS's visual and sonic capabilities, you need look no further than Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword. It is possibly the most technically proficient title available for the system, brimming with superb, smooth-as-silk visuals...
Up until now, holding the DS sideways like a book has triggered images of brainy minigames or self-help software meant for mommy dearest. After spending five chaotic hours with Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, it's now become synonymous with nut-busting action on par with Devil May Cry or God of War.
Developer Team Ninja has seemingly done the impossible - create an adrenaline-drenched action title that's totally stylus driven. Slashing an enemy with the pen makes Ryu attack, stroking up makes him jump, tapping an area fires an arrow, etc. These controls are obvious, and that means a lot for a system that holds such a tight grip on the casual audience. Literally anyone who owns a DS could dive in and start dicing demons within minutes. It does take a few to learn the ropes, but Dragon Sword is much more accessible than its console counterparts and, more importantly, a lot more forgiving (they're known for being infuriatingly difficult).
The DS is rife with puzzle games, RPGs, platformers, and tests of mental strength, but you don't see a lot of hardcore action games on the system. It would seem that those tiny buttons simply aren't made to withstand the furious button mashing that such games require. Despite this...
March 7, 2008 - It's clear that Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword was a gamble right from the start of its development. Very few developers outside of Nintendo are truly willing to take the risk of experimenting a brand new way of playing an established franchise, but Tecmo's Team Ninja did just that with its DS-exclusive design. The risk worked: Ninja Gaiden on the Nintendo DS...
The Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword footage starts at 4:20.
Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword goes gold
February 29, 2008
The latest game in Tecmo's series is the first for the Nintendo DS platform, and gamers hold the DS sideways to play, as in detective adventure game Hotel Dusk: Room 215.
Dragon Sword tells the story of young Ninja Ryu Hayabusa, who used family heirloom the Dragon Sword to shatter the Dark Dragon Blade, and six months have passed since this epic battle.
The title has gone golden, and will be out in stores on March 25. On March 26 between 12 and 4 p.m. at the Nintendo World Store in the Rockefeller Center in New York, game director Yosuke Hayashi will be signing autographs for fans of the games.
Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword has been rated T for Teen by the ESRB, and has a recommended retail price of $34.99.
February 20, 2008 - At Microsoft's Keynote held during GDC 2008, Tomonobu Itagaki showed a new level from Ninja Gaiden 2. The "GDC Special Edition" demo gave us a glimpse at the Temple of Sacrifice and revealed an exciting new feature for Ninja Gaiden 2.
For those who have had doubts about the visual fidelity of Ninja Gaiden 2 -- stop worrying. The Temple of Sacrifice is a gorgeous level. Set inside a gigantic gave, with bats fluttering about and dozens of enemies standing in Ryu's way, the Temple offers something not scene in the first Ninja Gaiden -- the sense of an epic scale. This is a sprawling level that makes the greatest ninja in history look like little more than an ant. Jaws dropped. And then Ryu started lopping off heads.
The combat in Ninja Gaiden 2 is fast. Yes, even faster than in Ninja Gaiden Black. And body parts and blood are everywhere -- and none of it disappears. Team Ninja has clearly kicked the creature design up a notch. The fiends in the Temple of Sacrifice are cooler than most anything seen in the previous iteration. The stars of the demo were a set of horrific eight-foot-tall beasts with a chainsaw for one arm and a gun for the other. At one point, Ryu was knocked to the ground and the fiend began sawing into his chest.
February 15, 2008 - Tecmo has revealed to us that a demo version of its hugely anticipated Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword will be available for download at Nintendo's Game Developers Conference booth starting Wednesday, February 20.
Game Developers Conference is an industry event that takes place in San Francisco beginning next week. The demo should be available through normal means at participating retailers shortly after Game Developers Conference, but attendees of the conference will be the first to get a sample of the US version.
Let's hope Nintendo's wireless signal's strong enough for non-attendees to leech the demo off the streets of San Francisco.
January 30, 2008 - Many great fictional heroes have used the staff to great effect. Donatello of the mutant ninja turtles used it to pummel the foot clan. Gambit of the X-men put a Cajun flair on the eastern weapon. In a pinch, we'd take Mr. Ryu Hayabusa and his lunar staff over all of them. IGN's favorite weapon from Ninja Gaiden is back and we have the screens and movies to prove it.
The lunar staff wasn't included on the first Ninja Gaiden revival for Xbox at first. It didn't make its appearance until the Hurricane Pack download was released through Xbox Live. The download, which got its name from the charged essence attack the lunar performs, added a significant level of difficulty to the game along with a nasty cat fiend that liked to attack in packs. The lunar was your only saving grace. Great for combos and with a wide attack range, the lunar was fantastic for taking on a single foe or an entire crowd. .
Just like last generation's version of Ninja Gaiden, you'll have to level the lunar staff up to reach its full effectiveness. The screenshots we have here show how it looks when you first obtain it at level 1. The three videos (find them all in the gallery) give you a glimpse at what you'll be wielding when it reaches level 2.
We know Team Ninja is reworking the move lists and altering the look of the attacks that carry over, but we don't have any word yet on how the lunar will change in effectiveness or control. Take a look at the movies and you'll see that even the blunt staff can remove a limb here or there and it definitely has no trouble painting the walls red.
Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. When the descriptions come directly from Team Ninja like they do for the screenshots below, a few sentences is all you need.
He's a quiet, philosophical man, a 21st Century ninja, a shadowy anachronism who routinely pits ancient skills against modern weaponry with absolutely brutal finesse. Common thugs, trained soldiers, armored tanks, combat cyborgs, rival ninja and all the demonic hordes his Dragon Sword can reach... nothing survives Ryu. Stealth isn't a component of the Hayabusa school of ninjitsu. Killing everything that moves, and then killing it some more is. Ryu Hayabusa is a thorough man indeed.
Games propelled by his unwavering sense of honor are legendary for their difficulty, easily among the most punishing games ever developed. They've become an unofficial test for separating button-mashers from true masters. Millions have eagerly queued up for their masochism fix over the last two decades, wading through different genres and changing platforms and flexible backstories just to get the only guarantee that matters.
If the game is called Ninja Gaiden, it's going to kick your ass. And make you like it .
January 28, 2008 - On a recent trip to Seattle we had the distinct pleasure of seeing a new area of Ninja Gaiden 2 , a game that lands firmly on every one of our "most anticipated" lists for 2008. Tomonobu Itagaki was on-hand to give us a demo of the game and answer some of the questions that we've been dying to ask since the game was last put on display.
The short game demo took place at what was presumably the very beginning of the game. Ryu found himself in a familiar setting: on the balconies of a building in Sky City Tokyo. Aside from Sky City, Team Ninja has yet to announce any other definite locations but Itagaki stated that the series is making a return to its roots with a slew of real world locations building to a final showdown in an underworld filled with demons. In the demo, a detailed metropolis loomed in the background as Ryu immediately met with waves of Black Spider Ninja Clan. The metal claws, scythe, and Dragon Sword we saw in previous demos were back on display along with the bow, which is featured prominently in our new gameplay movie.
Team Ninja's enigmatic mastermind Tomonobu Itagaki is a well known fan of Halo. But last week, when he went to the offices of Microsoft Game Studios in Seattle, it wasn't to convince his pals at Bungie to make Halo 4: Gravemind's Revenge. He was there to show off an early version of Ninja Gaiden 2 , which Microsoft will publish for Xbox 360 later this year. And while mum about whether the game will feature a second playable character (rumored to be a woman who isn't Rachel), support downloadable content like the last Ninja Gaiden or have battles set in a certain city known for large fruit, he did go into more detail about other aspects of the game that he hadn't before.
Taking a cue from the Capulets & Montagues (or J. Lo and Mariah Carey), the story of Ninja Gaiden 2 is centered around a feud. "As you know, our hero [Ryu Hayabusa] is from the Hayabusa clan," Itakagi explains, "but there's another ninja clan that's been fighting with them for as long as anyone can remember. So what you're going to see is the intense conflict between these two clans."
Heading this enemy clan is Genshin, a guy who doesn't take "no" for an answer. Which makes Ryu's job that much more difficult. "Genshin is so focused on killing Ryu that if one of his lesser ninjas doesn't kill Hayabusa, Genshin will kill them for failing," Itakagi says. "So since they have nothing to lose, they're still going to come at you even when they get an arm chopped off or a leg chopped off."
One of the first things Team Ninja bossman Tomonobu Itagaki asks me is "Have you played Ninja Gaiden?" I tell him that I only got up to the boss fight with Alma before stopping, and he quickly responds, "I'm sorry," before personally demonstrating Ninja Gaiden II.
Most of what people have seen of NG2 so far is Venetian level Aqua Palance, where Ryu fights a bunch of ninjas from the rival Black Spider Clan and takes on a guy who looks like a giant spider himself. This time, Itagaki is showing off Sky City Tokyo, which is the very first level in the game. "When you come home and put the disc in, this is what you see." I quickly notice that he set the game to "the path of the acolyte" before playing.
This level is closer to the visual style of the previous Ninja Gaiden than the bright colors of the Aqua Palace level. Parts of it look like the old-style ninja village from the first game, while at one point Ryu looks out to a landscape full of modern neon lights. In between these views and the expected ninja fights, I'm noticing a lot of tutorial prompts. Sure, they were present in the first level of Ninja Gaiden (where Ayane would throw notes that tell you how to do stuff like jump up walls), but these tutorial prompts have fuller descriptions of what's going on, and even videos of what you're supposed to do. Besides all of the tutorials, I'm also noticing that in contrast to the screens of Ryu fighting 10 ninjas at once, I'm only seeing about three enemy ninjas at a time in this demo. Finally, while Ryu is fighting these ninjas, I notice the new health system, where part of Ryu's health bar actually regenerates when he's out of combat à la Halo (though like Halo, excessive damage will go past the "regenerative" portion and affect the more finite part of his health bar).
It started off rather simply, with a severed arm and blood squirting everywhere. Lead character Ryu, under the control of Team Ninja head Tomonobu Itagaki, chopped off both of an enemy's legs and, in one smooth motion, decapitated him before he had time to fall over. After the battle, Ryu flicked his sword to clear it of the excess blood.
Up against an endless horde of baddies that seemed more than eager to lose their limbs, Itagaki appeared invincible, slicing an arm off here, severing a leg or two there. But then, something surprising happened. One of the dudes who had lost an arm rushed Ryu and tackled him to the ground. Then, with his gaping wound still squirting blood, he attempted to drive a sword through Ryu's neck with his one remaining hand.
In response, Itagaki did what any good ninja would do. He threw a giant fireball that blew the one-armed bandit across the stage and left his corpse in flames. As the demonstration continued, he showed off a number of tools at Ryu's disposal--a bow and arrow used to pick off jumping enemies, a giant scythe that seems to severe a limb with every swing, a set of Wolverine-esque claws and accompanying bladed boots--but none that packed the same eye-opening oomph as that fiery explosion.
When you have a game series that's comprised of numerous releases, you know there are going to be more than a few fans waiting for the next one. However, when your franchise title is nearing its 20-year anniversary with installments on about a dozen different game platforms—from arcade-based coin-op machine to NES to Game Boy to mobile phones, and almost everything in between—you can be sure there'll be a crowd at the local game store when the latest game hits its ship date. It's a good bet, then, that that's what we'll see when the next chapter in the Ninja Gaiden series comes out at some point this year.
The next release, curiously titled Ninja Gaiden II —despite its many variations since 1988, including a 1990 arcade game called Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos , which also came out on NES and is currently available through Wii's Virtual Console—will be the first in the durable slash-and-dash collection to appear on Xbox 360. In fact, it's being billed as an Xbox 360 exclusive, with Tecmo's Team Ninja developing it, while Microsoft takes up the publishing duties. You have to figure that, for Microsoft to get behind the game in such a direct way, the company is expecting big things from this new sequel.
When Nintendo created the DS, this is what they had in mind. Not the exact game idea -- and probably not the violence -- but games that can't be done on other systems, and ones that use the stylus confidently. While there have been many successful touch screen games to date, it's still rare to see one that takes things as far as Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword .
If you've seen coverage of the game before, you likely know its main feature -- that you can play the entire game with just the stylus (though you can block with any button if you choose) -- but even knowing how important that was to the overall game, we were still impressed with how well it worked when we got to play a few levels last week.
You use the stylus to run, jump, attack with your blade, and throw stars, so there's a lot to keep track of, but thanks to smart design choices, the basic abilities are very easy to use. If you want to attack an enemy, you just draw a line across their body. To perform a combo, you scribble back and forth. To jump, you draw a line vertically (in previous versions of the game, you jumped by tapping twice on the screen, but the developers changed that to avoid confusion with the throwing stars, which you toss by tapping once on an enemy).
Thanks to forgiving controls, it all works very smoothly. We noticed a few points where Hayabusa would attack a different enemy than we intended if there were two standing next to each other, but in about 30 minutes with the game, we never tried to perform a move and failed because our angle was off or we didn't press hard enough.
You start the game as Hayabusa's female apprentice Momiji, which is a convenient way of providing players a tutorial since you're playing as a less-than-skilled character. After you spend a few minutes learning the basic controls, the enemies capture Momiji, and you take over as Hayabusa in an effort to rescue her, which looks to be your motivation for playing through the story.
Once Hayabusa tags in, you learn a few additional abilities. If you draw up-up-up in a narrow area, you'll flip back and forth off the walls to reach the top. If you tap on an enemy then draw down-up-up, you'll grab that enemy, spin in the air, and slam them on the ground. You'll also gain your first magic early-on, which you can use to create a fireball that burns away spider webs, allowing you to access different areas.
One complaint about the controls at this point is that when there aren't any enemies on the screen and you have to move without attacking -- which you do by holding the stylus down to plot destination points -- Hayabusa feels a bit difficult to control. So when we had to avoid boulders rolling down a series of steps, it was hard to move out of the way quickly. This likely has to do with combat being so fast that the rest of the movement simply feels slow in comparison, and as such will take some adjusting, but we're curious to see if there will be many environment-based challenges later in the game where this could be a problem, or if the game will be mostly combat.
Fortunately, Team Ninja head Tomonobu Itagaki revealed to us during our time with the game that Dragon Sword will be longer than previously suggested. While he had previously expressed interest in making a four-hour game, where players would have reasons to replay it to get more value out of it, he now says the title will last roughly eight hours. And for those who put in enough time, Momiji will be an unlockable character, as a way to keep things varied.
With both this and God of War: Chains of Olympus on the way in March, it's great to see portable action games taking off. It's too early to know if Dragon Sword will end as strong as it starts, but it provides an extremely impressive first few levels.
January 15, 2008 - Over the course of several months we've been introduced to many iterations of Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword , the Nintendo DS-specific action game in development at Tecmo's Team Ninja game group. Just this past week, the studio head Tomonobu Itagaki brought a 93% complete version (not 90 or 95 percent, mind you…93%. His words) to the IGN offices so we can see how the game's evolved since our last outing…the demo version shown at Tokyo Game Show back in September last year.
Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword is a continuation of the Ninja Gaiden console series established by Team Ninja, a series that spun out of the 80s from the arcade and NES, launching on the Xbox then updated on the PlayStation 3 late last year. For the Nintendo DS version, Team Ninja has built a game that uses the touch-screen of the system almost exclusively for its game control – movement, jumps, and attacks are all handled by taps and swipes of the touch screen with stylus in-hand.
New to this version is a completely revamped tutorial that trains players in the way of the stylus control. Instead of taking control of Ryu Hayabusa right from the start, the development team uses this opportunity to drive the story forward by using Momiji as the controllable character. Here, players learn how to move (hold stylus on the touch screen), sword slash (swipe the stylus along the specific enemy), throw shuriken (tap the enemy), jump (swipe the screen upwards), block (hold a button…any button), and evade attacks (hold block and slide the stylus). Players work through a specific set of challenges, and then do battle against a huge dragon…and we're guessing that with the pummeling he does to Momiji, it's expected to lose against the giant red lizard and get taken away.
That's when Ryu leaps in, and that's when players take control of the Ninja. Everything that players learned during the tutorial applies to Ryu's capabilities. As you progress through the levels, you'll earn the familiar Ninpo ninja powers to not just lay waste to the surrounding areas, but also to solve specific puzzles. For example, a huge boulder will block the path, and the only way to move the massive rock is to give it a significant electric jolt. To pull off these Ninpo powers, you'll have to trace the specific on-screen character to charge the abilities…if you've got the energy, that is.
The latest build continues to show that Team Ninja has struck gameplay gold with Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword. The vertical book form works extremely well, and the development team's focus on touch-screen exclusive control gives the series a unique feel in a familiar setting. Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword also looks outstanding, pushing that Resident Evil-like 2D/3D hybrid engine – 3D characters over a prerendered, scrolling background – while mimicking the same style of action of the console games…and keeping a framerate incredibly high and a pace incredibly quick. A new area in this game showed off a challenge where you'll have to run through an area as giant boulders roll in your direction. Boss battles are rendered entirely in real-time 3D to give players the ability to move with a free-flowing camera.
The game is still getting the final tweaks – we did notice that in Normal Mode it was a bit easy to keep a combo string going (we got as high as 85 hits at one point). So over the next few weeks the game will be getting an extra polish in the balancing department. March is the month Team Ninja and Tecmo are aiming for, and I don't think the company will have a hard time meeting that schedule.
We've been big fans of Tecmo's upcoming Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword since Team Ninja mastermind Tomonobu Itagaki unveiled the pint-sized action game last year. The game packs impressive visuals and an innovative control scheme into Nintendo's dual-screen handheld. With Dragon Sword's March release coming up, Itagaki-san stopped by our offices to give us some hands-on time with three levels of the game and direct feed of a fourth level, which shows off how creative Team Ninja is getting with the promising game.
The levels we were able to get hands-on time with comprise the first three levels of the game and include the tutorial on the game's slick stylus-driven control scheme. The game's opening finds ninja poster boy Ryu Hayabusa training his protégé Momiji (yes, bit of an odd name but considering she can stab a man dead in two blows we won't dwell) in front of a waterfall. The short sequence serves as a primer for the game's simple control screen.
Once you've gotten a feel for getting around by moving the stylus, the game's story kicks in and you play a chunk of the level as Momiji. The lithe ninja in training handles pretty much like her mentor Ryu, sans ninpo magic, and acquits herself quite well as she makes her way through the forest locale, shanking enemies in search of an unnamed evil. Unfortunately, when she finds said evil, she probably wishes it would have stayed unnamed as she gets smacked down and kidnapped, which is a nifty segue to controlling Ryu who's distressed his star pupil got nabbed. The next two levels, one of which is based in part on the TGS demo we played, find Ryu working his way through different areas and interacting with an array of foes, as well as the residents in Hayabusa Village.
The game sticks closely to the structure we saw in our last few looks at the game. The different areas you'll go through are broken up into screen-sized chunks that you'll progress through by defeating enemies or solving puzzles. The first three levels we tried were basic and had a nice feel of progression in terms of difficulty. The game just threw a few handfuls of enemies at us at varying heights early on, as well as archers stationed on cliffs we couldn't attack that forced us to mix melee and shuriken attacks. The levels we tried had a mix of bosses, flying dragons, and ground-based bone-dragon critters. One interesting wrinkle to the proceedings came at the end of our hands-on portion of the game. We were exploring the village and instructed to find someone whom we found to be napping. After a bit of trial and error, we found that he needed to be literally spoken to via the DS mic to be woken up, which was a cool little twist.
The fourth level we saw was demoed for us and set in Egyptian-themed ruin that offered a more complex challenge by virtue of being further into the game. The basic action of the earlier levels was ramped up and the environment itself provided the challenge, courtesy of moving spikes. The enemies also offered a greater challenge. Thankfully, Ryu was tricked out with a wider array of ninpo magic, such as a lightning attack, as well as some wickedly powered-up physical attacks and extra weapons.
The action we saw demoed and played ourselves worked very well with the stylus control system. In many ways, it feels like the next step up from the Phantom Hourglass system, thanks to its faster pace. The game handles as well as it did the last time we played it, although we noticed Ryu's jump has changed to an upward swipe on the touch screen, which seems to feel better in the middle of all the action.
As far as the overall presentation goes, the game continues to impress us with what it's doing on the DS. The high level of detail, bright color palette, and smooth frame rate for the in-game graphics all make a very positive visual impression. The cutscene stills also stand out, thanks to a clean art style that blends a bit of anime and traditional comic art. Finally, the game's audio is robust with sound effects, music, and some sound samples all ringing out clearly during the action.
So far, Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword appears to be living up to its promising debut. The game looks great and has some very cool gameplay. We're pleased to see Team Ninja flexing its creative 2D muscles and turning out some cool, inventive stuff. If you've mastered Phantom Hourglass and are ready to graduate to some more intense stylus-driven gameplay, you will want to check out Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword when it ships for the DS this March.
Gamerscore Blog recently extended us the offer to ask Tomonobu Itagaki, the outspoken head of Team Ninja, one question about Ninja Gaiden II . We thought long and hard about the question, and this is what we came up with: some changes have been made to Ninja Gaiden II to make it more accessible to the gaming community at large, most notably the regenerating health system. What do you say to gamers who are worried that Ninja Gaiden II will be less challenging as a result? You may behold the detailed answer to that question (in video form) after the break.
