I won’t get into detail because I don’t want to spoil the surprise but let’s just say the dual swords play a very important part in the story of the game as well. So we think that people will more likely find a weapon that they really like and stick to that instead of falling back on the Dragon Sword all of the time. In order to counteract that with Ninja Gaiden 2 what we’ve tried to do is make every weapon unique and powerful in its own right, so they feel different, some are faster, some are slower, but they all have a breadth of moves in order that you can basically play the entire game through with any of the weapons. There are on average three power levels to each weapon and the visuals change as well as the number of moves you can do.Īnother thing that we believe was the case in Ninja Gaiden was that while you received a lot of different weapons throughout the game you always fell back on the Dragon Sword because it always felt the most stable, powerful and had the widest variety of moves. There’s a shop scattered in several places in each stage where you can go to the blacksmith and rework your weapons and make them stronger. : Can you tell us about the different weapons? Obviously the skill improves as you go along. Here what we’re looking for, to give an example from another publisher, like Onimusha, if you’re able to beat one of those you should be able to make it through this. You not only had to be versed in action games, but you had to know about fighting games and understand how all of the combat works. The previous Ninja Gaiden, you really had to be hardcore. Itagaki-san: What we’ve gone for is a difficulty on the default setting where basically if you like action games you should be able to play it all the way through.

: How does the difficulty curve of this game compare with the last one?

The sequel to the world’s premier hack and slash, Ninja Gaiden 2, is almost here, and to celebrate we caught up with the game’s legendary creator, Tomonobu Itagaki, during a recent press trip to London to have one last chat before we bust open the final game in the ultra hard, iconic Japanese series, and, no doubt, Sonia’s bra.

Ninja gaiden 2 weapon locations