Satisfyingly difficult and lengthy, one of the most solid action games ever, and the best of the best on xbox.
User Rating: 9.4 | Ninja Gaiden XBOX
If you are even remotely interested in action games, or video games in general I would strongly suggest this game. Ninja Gaiden is a series revived from arcades from years ago that I hardly remember playing. Well now its back in black. NG follows the story of a ninja named Ryu. One thing you must be ready for before you play this game is that it is very difficult, VERY difficult. I can't even imagine playing this on the highest difficulty level. NG is mostly a sword slashing game with endless hordes of potent enemies. Thankfully, this game is far from a button jamming fest. Ryu sports a wide array of attacks, many of which you only see a few times throughout the game and spend 20 minutes trying to figure out how you accomplished. If you try to jam the slash attack and beat this game, you will fail miserably. NG requires you to learn your enemies attack patterns and strike when their defenses are down, so in a way its a strategic action game. This game also takes a page out of Prince of Persia's book with some cool jumping and wall running puzzles, which can be equally difficult to the fighting at times. Enough with the introductions..... The graphics are possibly thing you will remember about this game when you have completed it(If you can). Amongst xbox games, it is argueably the best looking game on the console. The Ryu character model is particularly good, and all his attack animations are top notch. Suprisingly, the NPC's look about as good as Ryu and their attack animations aren't very lacking in the smoothness department either. What makes all this even better is the fact that the frame rate stays very stable throughout the insanely fast paced battles. NG was definitely the best looking xbox game when it launched on the xbox, and only Halo 2 can really give it a run for its money. The sound is up to par with the rest of the game but is nothing particularly special in my opinion. The voices, weapons, and other things of that nature are all good. The music fits well with the rest of the game, but can be forgettable. This game is a blast to play and will keep you playing for a very long time, especially because you are repeating areas quite often. Ryu has access to a huge array of awesome moves that will leave you wanting to have another swarm of enemies to decapitate. Once you start playing, it is fairly hard to stop. As for finishing the game again, you will probably end up beating it twice. Either you loved it so much that you just want to play it again or you have xbox live and you can download the Hurricane Packs to enhance the experience the second time through, or maybe both. Besides the graphics, you will likely notice that this game has few glaring faults, unless you consider the difficulty a fault, which I most definitely do not. Because of all the above mentioned, Ninja Gaiden will likely become the staple action game for this generation. 
