Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword
April 1,2008 - Very rarely do we see third party DS games make extensive use of the handheld’s capabilities. While there are some exceptions, it is still a generality that third party DS games will never hold a candle to whatever Nintendo publishes for their own handheld. But DS fans can rest easy now that Tecmo has finally released Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. The development team took some risks, but they were all well worth it; Ninja Gaiden is the most intuitive DS game to come out since The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

Dragon Sword picks up a few months after the events of the Xbox classic. The narrative talks about the mythical Dragon Sword that was created using the remains of a powerful dragon. The sword, under the possession of Ryu Hayabusa, was the weapon used by the last member of the Dragon lineage to protect the world from evil’s bane. The game begins as you take control of Momiji, a female Ninja going through training from Ryu himself. The introductory chapter works as sort of a tutorial, and when you beat the game’s first boss, Momiji gets kidnapped, giving you control of the ninja you really wanted to use—Ryu Hayabusa. Now it’s all up to him not only to save the village maiden Momiji, but to learn the secrets of the Dragon Sword as well as stop the plans of the Black Spider Clan.

Following suit of the Brain Age games and Hotel Dusk Room 215, you have to hold your DS sideways like a book to play the game. With this, the map of the area, as well as save points, will be marked on the left screen while all the in-game action will take place on the touch screen. It’s something the developers at Team Ninja really didn’t have to do, but we’re guessing this is the method of play because the game sets itself up like a graphic novel. Through each chapter you play in, live-action cutscenes are replaced by comic-style artwork—not unlike the introductions and conclusions to each song in Elite Beat Agents.

For the most part, the game is played with the stylus. To move Ryu around, all you have to do is drag your stylus to the exact location you want him to go to. The closer you point to Ryu, the slower he’ll travel and the farther you point, the faster he’ll go. To jump, just swipe upward. You can also double jump by double-swiping upward. Instead of mapping various offensive strikes to the four face buttons, attacking in Dragon Sword is as simple as swiping at your enemies. It takes a little getting used to, most plainly due to the fact that your touch screen might confuse your swipes with taps instead. When you tap on an enemy, you throw shuriken (which are nowhere near as strong as your melee strikes).

In addition to your standard combat, there are special moves as well. When jumping, you can swipe the stylus downward to make Ryu come down hard on any enemy that’s in the given area. Along with that, you can swipe the screen downward and upward twice to send enemies up into the air and then bring them down for massive damage. Scratching with the stylus for a certain amount of time will cause Ryu to unleash some beams all across the screen with his sword, inflicting damage on every enemy there is in the area. It’s particularly helpful because enemies pop out in a little more than half of the screens on the map you pass through.

Ninja Gaiden is an action game through and through, but there are some parts that’ll require much more than fighting. As previously stated, the left screen shows a pretty detailed map of where you are, so it’s really impossible to get lost because of how linear the game is. But as you progress through the game, you unlock some abilities that not only help you in battle, but progress through each stage as well. For example, the beginning of the game had huge cobwebs blocking the passage to a temple we had to get to. But skipping that allowed us to find a Ninpo Ability that turns Ryu into a huge fireball that you can drag around the screen. In this case, you can burn the cobwebs to get through. When you find a new Ninpo, you can unleash their power by drawing the insignia on the touch screen. It’s nothing overly complicated; all you do is trace the outline of the Sanskrit writing.

About every chapter in the game has its boss, and the game does a good job going old school on its audiences by making the boss fill the screen with its girth. Like all good boss fights, there are very specific ways or strategies in order to get rid of it. While Dragon Sword has that, almost all the bosses can be killed simply by slashing them all the time. It takes an increasingly long time, but it is possible, and that ruins the experience a tad. Granted, it’s easy to get rid of this problem by killing each boss the right way, but it still takes a bit out.

With how hectic the combat can be at times, it’s sometimes best to go on the defensive. This is where the actual buttons on your DS come in. You can block just about any weak strike by holding on any button on the DS (except for the start and select buttons). At that, you can also dodge enemy strikes by dragging your stylus anywhere while holding any of the block buttons.

The game looks fantastic. Part of the reason why is because the game’s environments look extremely realistic. At the same time, since almost none of the backgrounds can be interacted with, that’s just what they are—backgrounds. Not to take anything away from the visuals, because they obviously work. It’s just worth pointing out just so you can have something to say when you hear that the developers pushed the limits of the DS to extraordinary heights, because they really didn’t. Even at that, the background artwork and the hand-drawn graphic novel-style cutscenes all look really cool.

The developers also did a bang-up job with the game’s sound. All the developers really did was translate the text; the little voice acting in the game is done in Japanese—giving players a more traditional Ninja Gaiden feel. The eastern-theme music is great to listen to as well, especially during the fights. There’s nothing like a martial arts movie, and Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword emulates that feeling with its sound quite well.

While there are quite a few parts in the game that bring down the game in value, Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword should remain as the prime example of what a third party can do with the Nintendo DS. It makes use of just about every capability the system has, and it wasn’t just for the sake of using each feature either. On top of that, the developers at Team Ninja have succeeded at making an action game on the handheld worthy of the Ninja Gaiden name. The game is a bit short since it should take about 6 to 7 hours to complete, but that's the case with a lot of action games these days. As for the game's difficulty, it does pick up towards the middle of the game (but if you really want to up the ante, beat it once to unlock the Hard difficulty, and be warned—it really is hard). So if you’re looking for a DS game that really makes use of what it’s capable of, or if you just want some ninja action that has nothing to do with a blond-haired, blue-eyed brat during the wait for Ninja Gaiden II, look no further than Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword.

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