Currently on chapter 5 in master ninja. This is the first girl chapter and honestly, it's not fun. This character just feels sluggish and clunky to play and now that the enemies 2 shot me, the deaths don't feel fair. On mentor these girl chapter were alright distractions I guess, but now they just fucking suck. Not really encouraging me to continue this run when Vanilla NG2 is installed on my console.
The female chapters in an initial master ninja run of NGS2 can indeed be a little frustrating due to the jarring differences in gameplay and combat attributes. Additionally, the female MC chapters have limited resources and essence drops to content with, so it’s not always possible to simply abuse healing items to damage boost through tough encounters.
However, just like with Ryu, the female MC’s have abusable tech that can trivialize their chapters regardless of difficulty.
Momiji: Abuse her double jump into UT. Though the kill rate is low, the delimb that comes from the level 1 or 2 UT is valuable. When essence is not available on the battlefield, using “XXY” to fish for a de-limb chance can also be key.
Rachel: She’s ridiculously OP and can coast through pretty much every encounter by abusing her easy “XYY” izuna style combo. If there is any kind of distance between her and the enemy, feel free to abuse her ability to shoot her machine gun via the third-person over the shoulder mode (L2+R2, if I’m not mistaken); the machine gun has infinite ammo and can easily outright kill enemies from a distance due to the bullet’s ability to stunlock enemies. Her on-landing UT is also viable up close.
Ayane: Simply abuse her flying swallow style attack constantly. The decap rate on this move is enough to see to it that enemies fall much faster lol
Overall, even compared to Sigma 2, NG2B has been the easiest master ninja run of the mainline series so far (aside from Ninja Gaiden DS) due to the regained ability to upgrade weapons sooner via essence at Murasa Shops, starting players with izuna drop by default in chapter 1, reduced enemy health, and the reduced amount of boss encounters overall compared to NGS2. Another huge change is that dogs in NGS2 were capable of instant kills from any unblockable bite-grab attack; mercifully, this is no longer the case in NG2B as their grab attack can be escaped now without triggering an instant death. This makes all encounters involving the dogs much easier to fight through and the entire master ninja run much less frustrating as a whole.
With all of that said, oddly enough, all of these changes are still magnitudes easier than NG2’s master ninja mode with it’s constant infinite rockets/explosive arrows that bombard you constantly through walls and incendiary shurikens that explode instantly on wall contact, boss battles that feature additional incendiary shuriken spamming enemies, etc etc
