For those wondering (I was), it's a (maybe surprising) acknowledgement from KT that Hayashi's directorial vision of
Ninja Gaiden 2 (which he took over after Itagaki was fired, taking some other Team Ninja veterans with him to set out on their own) was not actually the "definitive" or even "best" one.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 was re-engineered port of the Xbox 360 title, a few years later, onto Playstation 3, with some deliberate artistic alterations and additional content. It also encountered the same problem
most Xbox 360 to Playstation 3 port--and even many multiplatform launch releases, like
GTA4 after it--namely, significantly worst performance even without considering Sony's design specification for a higher HD upscale than Microsoft's own Xbox (
Final Fantasy XIII is another useful case study--it runs as a higher resolution on Playstation, but is far more successful maintaining 30 FPS on Xbox).
Given that the original 2004 Xbox predecessor was considered a technical marvel, and ran at 60 FPS, and that was the
intended goal of much-more-advanced sequel in 2008 on Xbox 360, this put Hayashi in an obvious problem. The game ran into regular slowdown 60 FPS on Xbox 360, owed largely to
extremely high enemy counts in certain areas and/or copious dismemberment and volumetric blood effects (dismemberment is actually a gameplay mechanic; a visual cue for enemy's behavioral state, and also an improvised weapon for some who can pick up limbs of fallen brethren). The PS3 port, as expected, ran worse (I can't really find an example of an Xbox 360 port to Playstation 3 that doesn't, but there probably is somewhere), and Hayashi wanted additional lighting effects, higher fidelity player models (for new costumes), and additional content. The new content--levels for Rachel, Ayane, and franchise newcomer Momiji--weren't really the issue, the state of
the rest of the game was.
So basically, at Hayashi's direction all volumetric blood effects were cut (and replaced with much cheaper "glow" effects), dismemberment and corpse physics removed, and enemy counts were culled by varying amounts, sometimes half, sometimes more.
From his perspective, presumably, this was a great solution: even substantially raising HP counts with the remaining enemies, the game was generally easier (since Hayabusa's move set was only slightly expanded and not handicapped, Team Ninja had actually gotten a lot of complaints about violence in the franchise (I realize that seems quaint, with the success of chainsaw-driven
Gears of War, and the outright comedic levels of gore and sex in
God of War) and had to do things like remove decapitations for certain regions.
It also made the "rest of the game" substantially
worse. In a game where, just like
Devil May Cry or
God of War or Bayonetta, the entire gameplay loop is managing large volumes of enemies, recovering, and advancing the next encounter, halving or even outright removing entire enemy encounters
in fact results in less game. Despite its flaws and the move from a
Castlevania-style game world to more conventional distinct levels,
Ninja Gaiden 2 on Xbox 36 was still, in fact, extremely well received; Itagaki knew what he was doing.
Sigma 2, alluding to Hayashi's earlier Playstation-port in
Ninja Gaiden Sigma, intended to be the definitive edition of Itagaki's sequel, is....a worse version of a really good game, and for many, many years, the only way to play Itagaki's sequel if you didn't own an Xbox 360 (or, later, subsequent Xbox consoles, which could play the title in backwards compatibility and brute force the periodic slowdown). And it still has performance problems on Playstation 3, because that's just how the seventh console generation was. And, because why not, there's a
worse version, of a
worse version, of Itagaki's very good game, the PS Vita release (which is technically impressive, but honestly pretty terrible).
Apparently Koei-Tecmo came out and said they called it "
Ninja Gaiden Black 2" as a deliberate nod to "the definitive version of
Ninja Gaiden", which
isn't Hayashi's
Ninja Gaiden Sigma. It's
Ninja Gaiden Black, which was a sort of "GOTY" version of
Ninja Gaiden, for Xbox (and Xbox 360), that proceeded it by years. Sorry Hayashi, you dun' goof'd, apparently.
That ended up being a lot more explanation than I planned for. I've played a couple hours of
Black 2 via game pass on Xbox
; its presentation is very clearly alluding to the Xbox 360 title, but with the
Sigma 2 content (which...I like playing as Ayane and Rachel, it's just not really a tradeoff for the rest of the game) presented as a bonus content. The co-op challenges introduced in
Sigma 2 are also present (NG2 had only singleplayer challenges). And, probably most importantly....the enemy counts
are different. Unsurprisingly, the move to Unreal Engine on hardware almost 20 year newer has answered most of the questions about console slowdown, but likewise, there was no "switch" to flip to restore the original enemy counts; especially if KT's claim that Team Ninja "lost" the Xbox 360 source files is actually true. But there are more enemies, still distributed in successive waves.
So, it's better than
Sigma 2. It certainly looks better than both games, without a doubt, though it's not a straight-out port of NG2. If you want that (which, almost twenty years later, you probably don't), you can play NG2 on the new Xbox Series consoles with zero slowdown and untouched enemy counts; it's still part of the Xbox One store (or you can use a disc).
As you can tell, I've thought a lot about
Ninja Gaiden over the last 21 years. It's my
Devil May Cry (well, except even
Ninja Gaiden 3 is probably not
Devil May Cry 2 terrible...maybe). As for
Ninja Gaiden 4, without Itagaki I have no idea if KT or Platinum really have it in them to overcome NG3RE and capture that magic again. I think that window came and went, but who knows? I never expected a NG4 either.
