What are your impressions of the changes so far, sir?
Though I personally don’t like seeing the game being made easier without a toggle option for masochists such as myself, the balance changes made to the female chapters are fair for players who were struggling through them. Ayane in particular will benefit from the buffs the most and players will no longer have to mainly rely on her decapitation rate to consistently complete her chapter. The character buffs will go a long way towards helping the female chapters not feel like such an unforgiving slog for those who dread those chapters on higher difficulties.
It’s the handling of the enemy count adjustments that I feel mixed about. Increasing the enemy counts on Chapters 13 and 14 was a much needed change and those chapters now feel more intense and less sparse as a result. However…
Simply increasing the amount of overall enemies in an encounter such as the staircase has produced an unintended consequence (tested on Master Ninja difficulty). Now that more enemies spawn on the staircase (some drop from above, while others run down the stairs towards the player), the increased amount of enemies does help the encounter feel more epic, but since the HP values and delimb rates remain the same, the staircase now feels like a bit of a slog since enemies still survive multiple izuna drops and can still take forever to die. In contrast, though the xbox360 original infamously threw tons of enemies at the player in this segment, the enemies themselves could be dispatched quickly due to their higher de-limb rates and lower overall HP. Since NG2B has inherited the NGS2/NGS2+ “less enemies, but they have more HP and don’t de-limb as quickly” approach to encounter balancing, simply increasing enemy spawns doesn’t produce the same feel as the encounters in the xbox360. Fighting a larger number of spoungier enemies makes this fight feel more tedious than intended. The final large wave of IS claw ninjas they added at the end of the staircase fight was a nice touch though.
Overall, I think these changes are a step in the right direction and changes like this go a long way towards showing the audience that Team Ninja really is trying to make this a more definitive version of Ninja Gaiden 2.
Personally, I still want to see the incendiary shuriken, windmill shuriken, and Tests of Valor added back in. Opinions on balance is one thing, but missing weapons and content doesn’t benefit anyone imho.
I’m looking forward to future updates.
