Truly, if there were a formula that Nintendo used to put games on the DS it would be something like this. 1) Take good game for a console that we can get rights to. 2) Make a sequel with a quickly thrown together plot. 3) add gimmiky shit. sure, the game was fine before, but now we need to add the stylus as a control for no reason other than we can.

So, that leads us to the ninja gaiden game for the DS. It comes as a sequel to the Xbox versions (since they remade the same game like, twice) which were so amazing i was tempted to go out and join ninja school. The game had so many types of awesome its hard to count. There were a bunch of different weapons, and upgrades for those weapons which added sweetass combos and the like. You could pick a 100-pound badass sword and chop baddies in half with it, and/or decapitate everything. i'll stop there since this is a review for the DS version, but bear in mind, the Xbox version is one of my favorite games ever.

So now that it's on the DS of course the controls cant be d-pad and buttons, no no. instead you use the stylus. holding the pen on the screen makes you run to that spot. drawing a line up makes you jump. making lines in jus about any direction swings the sword. the confusion sets in, though, when the DS cant recognize weather that line going up was supposed to be a jump or an upwards slash. also, because there is a fixed camera you can get very far away in some places, and the DS cant tell what you're trying to attack, so you end up not doing a lot of anything. despite the confusion here and there the system works pretty well, and sometimes it can actually be pretty fun. I'd still rather have the d-pad and such, but what ya gonna do? Other than drawing on the screen all the other buttons (a,b,x,y,l,r) block. ALL of them, which strikes me as pretty funny because my character usually blocks by himself even when im not pushing a button. so blocking is obviously so important you need 6 buttons to do it with, as well as have the game do it on auto-pilot.

now as i said, i didnt totally mind the stylus system for the game, until i tried to cast a spell. To cast a spell you tap the little spell icon on the top left corner of your screen (which of course means good luck trying to attack anything that happens to even be remotely in the same area) which brings up the spell screen. now even though bringing up a whole new screen for spells is kind of annoying because it breaks the flow of the game in a horrible way (on the xbox version you equppied a spell then hit the button to cast it in battle, it was pretty seamless) its not that bad because even though you still have a spell equppied you have the option of changing what spell you're going to cast. now, the terribly awful part of it is that once you choose a spell you have to trace out the outline of some random japanese symbol for it to cast. and it's "timed." i put timed in quotation marks because you have SO much time to trace the whatever its not even funny. they give you like 30 seconds, and i can select a spell and trace it in probably under 5, because you dont have to trace it anywhere near right, just so long as your stylus touches all the parts of the symbol you're good to go, so all you have to do is give the screen a good scribbling. and the "best" part, if you somehow mess up or decide you arent going to trace the symbol at all, you dont even lose your mana. so basically, the developers looked at how fast you could cast a spell and get back to stabbing, and decided to add a TOTALLY UNNECESSARY "casting" sequence to it. i mean, every aspect of the spell screen is totally pointless and unnecessary. I mean, if the spell did more damage or lasted longer, or made more gore if you traced the symbol really really fast, i could see that. but no, it doesnt matter how fast you trace at all, or even if you trace at all since as soon as the spell fails you can go and try it again right away. and im still trying to figure out what they could have been thinking when they decided to give you a limited time to trace it. i mean, if you failed and couldnt cast a spell til who knows when, that would have a point. or even if the timing was competitive so you actually had to try to get the spell off. i guess the only reason for the timing is so you dont use the spell screen as a pause screen...which i dont know why they'd do that because there is a pause screen, so what's it matter what screen i pause it on? overall i would prefer only having to push a button to cast my spell so i can get back to stabbing, but obviously that couldn't happen because then there'd only be 5 buttons for blocking.

another sizeable difference from the xbox game is the lack of weaponry. the huge sword is gone; nunchucks, gone; wooden sword, gone. The only weapon is your starting katana, which is the main weapon from the xbox game, but i really liked being able to pick a favorite. needless to say this is very disappointing.

the plot so far is a solid "meh." basically you're a ninja and live in a ninja village (you're village and everyone that lived there except you were wiped out in the xbox game, but somehow it's rebuilt and there are people of various ages living there with no explantaion of where they came from). rival ninjas start attacking along with "fiends" which are basically devil monsters you stomped all over in the first game. so you're trying to figure out what the bad ninjas are doing in cahoots with the fiends by..um...killing lots of stuff, i guess. the framework of the game is you go to an area that is basically reused from the first game, so far ive been to 4 or 5 areas that are nearly identical to places that i've explored, and destroyed, in the first game (thats right, there's lots of real estate damage in the original), and for some reason the main character "Ryu" decides he needs to remark on how 1) hes been there before 2) it was destroyed and 3) it must be an illusion or something, EVERY FRIGGIN new place you go. so anyway, you fight your way through places you've been before if you played through the original and at the end of every level there's a boss. the boss is either a boss for the original or one thats practically identical to a boss from the original (so far at least). killing the boss gives you a "dark dragon" stone, which you hypothesize the bad ninjas are after, so you decide to collect them all first, even though you are clearly told that if all the stones are gathered together the world will end. so, you get a stone and it unlocks a teleporter to an area which i would pretty much describe as "star road" from super maro bros. its an area with nothing there besides teleporters, and every time you show up with a new stone a new teleporter activates, allowing you to go to the next level. overall, far from compelling.

overall though, i am enjoying the game even though i am terribly aggrivated with the worthless baggage they added to it, and the awesome baggage they took away from it. There's a lot that annoys me, but there's also a lot to love. The grapics are the best i've seen on the DS, the sounds are great, the cutscenes are quick, and the violence is fun. my personal favorite is the "flying swallow" where you jump straight up, then draw a dash through a baddie and you basicaly teleport past time, leaving a sweet after image, and he dies. i also found an upgrade that allows for multiple Flying Swallows from a single jump. THAT is amazing. anyway, i think i'd give the game a 4/5...and that may change depending on how the game turns out from here. but i would definately say its work a look.