So continuing my quest to play a lot of Ninja Gaiden media, and taking a break from Ninja Gaiden 3 because holy shit that game gets exhausting on the higher difficulties, I figured I'd play Dragon Sword because it seemed extremely different. I think I'm most of the way through the game at this point, with a few chapters left ahead but wanted to share some of my preliminary thoughts.
Was fun going back to this interview for some context.
www.ign.com
And figure I'd share the trailer since I'm playing on original hardware and didn't capture any emulated footage or screenshots.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbwuQDPwOWo
And fuck it, IGNs review lmao. Miss this sort of goofy shit.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyeWJkek_h0
So straight up, I think this is probably the best character action game on the Nintendo DS. I mean, it doesn't exactly have a ton of competition, but even taken on its own, this is a seriously impressive DS game. It looks extremely sharp, the portrait presentation of the game lends a unique feel to how some of its screens are framed. At its core, the game basically translates the feeling of Ninja Gaiden combat with the Dragon Sword down to a touch device. Controls are basically slide stylus over an enemy to attack, tap enemy for shuriken, draw up from ryu to jump, double jump, flying bird flip, wall cling etc. jump and then lateral swipes for flying swallow, hold any button to guard and tap on the screen to reverse wind/dodge. If you swipe laterally over Ryu you do a 360 input. You can upgrade your sword and this seems to unlock new combos as well, but they don't really seem super well communicated to the player. The animations, the enemies, everything feels extremely authentic to Ninja Gaiden 1/2. Probably some of the best 3D animations I've ever seen on the DS.
Obviously, shit is simplified from the console releases. You don't have crazy long movelists. You only have one weapon. There's not really any wall running. But it's remarkable how much of the core is translated. You can attack an enemy and throw out a shuriken quickly to keep an enemy from approaching behind you. You can launch an enemy and ping them in the air with a ranged attack. You can do an izuna drop with splash damage.
The game borrows inspirations from both Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2. You have the max health damage of NG2, but lack its delimb and OT systems. Enemy waves are smaller, but the total number feels substantially higher than Black. Stuff like the consecutive flying swallows from 2 are in this game, and they're even more broken than in that entry. Some elements in the game showed up in later installments too -- I think the core Obaba boss fight is reused in Ayane's chapter in Sigma 2, for instance.
The boss fights are an absolute highlight of the game. At one point you fight Spirit Doku, and it feels like a Ninja Gaiden boss. He has a few attack patterns, a lengthy string where different hits will break your guard (and you can reguard), different hits that you can punish, and his attacks do a lot of damage. Like, yeah, it's not amazing, but given the hardware it's extremely solid. (timestamped). They feel like 3D soulslike bosses except on the DS, and that's pretty nuts.
View: https://youtu.be/uQE1jlbROLQ?t=5359
One other thing the game does very well, that, honestly, was never really explored in either 2 or 3 all that much was really dialing up the stage hazards for certain combat arenas. Many rooms in DS will feature spikes on the edges, jets that shoot fire, pits you can fall down, so on and so forth. You have to be extra aware of these because just swiping enemies mindlessly will often move you right into them as that sort of forces Ryu to do what would otherwise be a running attack in the console titles.
I also really like the chapter start jingle, which is taken from the NES games. While the story is nothing amazing, I appreciate how you have Hayabusa village as a hub with characters to talk to and their own little side stories that evolve as the game goes on. It feels sort of like a proto village thing from Wo Long. Muramasa's shop is back and you've got health upgrades and power upgrades and technique and ninpo you can buy. Once you clear a chapter you unlock a trial of valor equivalent thing as well. They're okay, but less interesting than their console equivalents.
There are also some DS specific features -- shouting Muramasa's name into the microphone to wake him up while he's sleeping is the one that jumped out and reminded me how much I missed some of these hardware gimmicks. The cutscene presentation in portrait reminds me a lot of the NES game cutscenes as well, now that I think about it.
I do have some complaints:
First up, this game is extremely content light. It feels like the game is maybe like 3-4 hours long. Like most action games NG has never been crazy long, but Black and 2 feel like 12 hour-ish games. 3RE is shorter but still probably like 8 hours or so.
Stages are pretty darn linear, with minor backtracking.
The game feels familiar to a fault at points -- almost all locations you visit are lifted from Ninja Gaiden black, though with reworked layouts. It's a shame because the original locations you visit are very cool, and if they had been included in the console titles would have been met with some praise I'd bet.
Because the complexity and skill ceiling is cut down, and because stuff like FS, ID are so busted, a lot of enemies can feel very samey to fight. Enemies don't really guard or dodge as much as they do in the console titles (excluding a handful of types), so you don't really need to master that level of precision in handling certain encounters. My guess is that, no shit, this would be more frustrating than fun with touch controls, so the game feels more touchscreen slashy/button mashy as a result. Enemies are also largely reused from Black.
Grabs are very hard to react to because its difficult to read enemy tells given the scale at which everything is happening on screen. In some ways would it be a NG game without obnoxious grabs? Probably not.
A ton of the music is also reused. Also Doku doesn't have his drum theme from Black.
But by far my biggest complaint is my complete dismay at playing the tutorial as Momiji and being hyped to finally play as a character that wasn't Ryu in a game, only for Momiji to be damseled like 10 minutes in. I read somewhere that Itagaki made this game for his daughter and I'm just like...c'mon man. Mega missed opportunity.
Overall, Dragon Sword is a fun novelty for how much it manages to capture of the core NG experience, but it feels like it could have been so much more. More unique locations. More new enemy types. More weapons (heck, even just something like a scythe with big aoe but slower attacks and larger recoveries would have been a cool balance). More reason to explore for items and upgrades. That said, it's a cool little curio, regardless and I'd still say probably one of the best action games on the system. I don't think touch is really the ideal input method for an action game, but as a demonstration of setting oneself restrictions and managing to work within those, its quite the technological accomplishment. They could have just done a dpad controlled ryu with fixed perspective and the old priority system and called it a day, but the end result would have probably just been a bad console conversion. Even though as it is I don't think I'd want to play DS over, idk, Black, its commitment to touch controls makes it unique.
It's kinda similar to how, yes, Metroid Prime Hunters is like a cut-down metroid prime, but damn if the gunplay doesn't feel distinct due to its touch control scheme.
And man those animations are smoooth. Framerate does sometimes dip if there are a lot of enemies on the screen though. A Team Ninja classic.
Will post some update or something after finishing the game and futzing around on a higher difficulty. Interested to see if the NG hallmarks carry over.
Was fun going back to this interview for some context.
Itagaki on Ninja Gaiden DS - IGN
Earlier this week Tecmo -- and the head of Team Ninja, Itagaki -- swung by the IGN offices so we could get hands-on with the studio's Nintendo DS game, Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword. It was the first time we've been able to wrap our mitts around the projects -- previous experience with the game was...
And figure I'd share the trailer since I'm playing on original hardware and didn't capture any emulated footage or screenshots.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbwuQDPwOWo
And fuck it, IGNs review lmao. Miss this sort of goofy shit.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyeWJkek_h0
So straight up, I think this is probably the best character action game on the Nintendo DS. I mean, it doesn't exactly have a ton of competition, but even taken on its own, this is a seriously impressive DS game. It looks extremely sharp, the portrait presentation of the game lends a unique feel to how some of its screens are framed. At its core, the game basically translates the feeling of Ninja Gaiden combat with the Dragon Sword down to a touch device. Controls are basically slide stylus over an enemy to attack, tap enemy for shuriken, draw up from ryu to jump, double jump, flying bird flip, wall cling etc. jump and then lateral swipes for flying swallow, hold any button to guard and tap on the screen to reverse wind/dodge. If you swipe laterally over Ryu you do a 360 input. You can upgrade your sword and this seems to unlock new combos as well, but they don't really seem super well communicated to the player. The animations, the enemies, everything feels extremely authentic to Ninja Gaiden 1/2. Probably some of the best 3D animations I've ever seen on the DS.
Obviously, shit is simplified from the console releases. You don't have crazy long movelists. You only have one weapon. There's not really any wall running. But it's remarkable how much of the core is translated. You can attack an enemy and throw out a shuriken quickly to keep an enemy from approaching behind you. You can launch an enemy and ping them in the air with a ranged attack. You can do an izuna drop with splash damage.
The game borrows inspirations from both Ninja Gaiden 1 and 2. You have the max health damage of NG2, but lack its delimb and OT systems. Enemy waves are smaller, but the total number feels substantially higher than Black. Stuff like the consecutive flying swallows from 2 are in this game, and they're even more broken than in that entry. Some elements in the game showed up in later installments too -- I think the core Obaba boss fight is reused in Ayane's chapter in Sigma 2, for instance.
The boss fights are an absolute highlight of the game. At one point you fight Spirit Doku, and it feels like a Ninja Gaiden boss. He has a few attack patterns, a lengthy string where different hits will break your guard (and you can reguard), different hits that you can punish, and his attacks do a lot of damage. Like, yeah, it's not amazing, but given the hardware it's extremely solid. (timestamped). They feel like 3D soulslike bosses except on the DS, and that's pretty nuts.
View: https://youtu.be/uQE1jlbROLQ?t=5359
One other thing the game does very well, that, honestly, was never really explored in either 2 or 3 all that much was really dialing up the stage hazards for certain combat arenas. Many rooms in DS will feature spikes on the edges, jets that shoot fire, pits you can fall down, so on and so forth. You have to be extra aware of these because just swiping enemies mindlessly will often move you right into them as that sort of forces Ryu to do what would otherwise be a running attack in the console titles.
I also really like the chapter start jingle, which is taken from the NES games. While the story is nothing amazing, I appreciate how you have Hayabusa village as a hub with characters to talk to and their own little side stories that evolve as the game goes on. It feels sort of like a proto village thing from Wo Long. Muramasa's shop is back and you've got health upgrades and power upgrades and technique and ninpo you can buy. Once you clear a chapter you unlock a trial of valor equivalent thing as well. They're okay, but less interesting than their console equivalents.
There are also some DS specific features -- shouting Muramasa's name into the microphone to wake him up while he's sleeping is the one that jumped out and reminded me how much I missed some of these hardware gimmicks. The cutscene presentation in portrait reminds me a lot of the NES game cutscenes as well, now that I think about it.
I do have some complaints:
First up, this game is extremely content light. It feels like the game is maybe like 3-4 hours long. Like most action games NG has never been crazy long, but Black and 2 feel like 12 hour-ish games. 3RE is shorter but still probably like 8 hours or so.
Stages are pretty darn linear, with minor backtracking.
The game feels familiar to a fault at points -- almost all locations you visit are lifted from Ninja Gaiden black, though with reworked layouts. It's a shame because the original locations you visit are very cool, and if they had been included in the console titles would have been met with some praise I'd bet.
Because the complexity and skill ceiling is cut down, and because stuff like FS, ID are so busted, a lot of enemies can feel very samey to fight. Enemies don't really guard or dodge as much as they do in the console titles (excluding a handful of types), so you don't really need to master that level of precision in handling certain encounters. My guess is that, no shit, this would be more frustrating than fun with touch controls, so the game feels more touchscreen slashy/button mashy as a result. Enemies are also largely reused from Black.
Grabs are very hard to react to because its difficult to read enemy tells given the scale at which everything is happening on screen. In some ways would it be a NG game without obnoxious grabs? Probably not.
A ton of the music is also reused. Also Doku doesn't have his drum theme from Black.
But by far my biggest complaint is my complete dismay at playing the tutorial as Momiji and being hyped to finally play as a character that wasn't Ryu in a game, only for Momiji to be damseled like 10 minutes in. I read somewhere that Itagaki made this game for his daughter and I'm just like...c'mon man. Mega missed opportunity.
Overall, Dragon Sword is a fun novelty for how much it manages to capture of the core NG experience, but it feels like it could have been so much more. More unique locations. More new enemy types. More weapons (heck, even just something like a scythe with big aoe but slower attacks and larger recoveries would have been a cool balance). More reason to explore for items and upgrades. That said, it's a cool little curio, regardless and I'd still say probably one of the best action games on the system. I don't think touch is really the ideal input method for an action game, but as a demonstration of setting oneself restrictions and managing to work within those, its quite the technological accomplishment. They could have just done a dpad controlled ryu with fixed perspective and the old priority system and called it a day, but the end result would have probably just been a bad console conversion. Even though as it is I don't think I'd want to play DS over, idk, Black, its commitment to touch controls makes it unique.
It's kinda similar to how, yes, Metroid Prime Hunters is like a cut-down metroid prime, but damn if the gunplay doesn't feel distinct due to its touch control scheme.
And man those animations are smoooth. Framerate does sometimes dip if there are a lot of enemies on the screen though. A Team Ninja classic.
Will post some update or something after finishing the game and futzing around on a higher difficulty. Interested to see if the NG hallmarks carry over.
