MS(g)B's answer to the difficulty problem - Ninja Gaiden Sigma

After he jumps from a mountaintop, bringing his sword through an enemy, Ryu (the main character of Ninja Gaiden Sigma) comments that the Ninja he just fucked up to the serious "had gaping holes in his defenses," and "He never would have been able to survive in this world anyway."
You also get all your arrows from dead ninjas. You get them by pulling them out of their bodies, reciting a tear-jerking epithet, "While I regret doing this... he's not using them."
There is no respect for the dead when the holder of the Dark Dragon blade slaughters your ninja tribe. There can only be vengeance. There is no time to mourn.
This game is about getting your ass kicked, and not every once and a while. Every fucking battle with anyone will easily get you killed. Actually, compared with the numerous ninja waiting in alleys, boss battles are easy. This one set of three black spider ninjas almost consistently kills me either through their speed and numbers or the fucking timed-mine-kunai they stick into you. These motherfuckers can also grab Ryu and shove a sword into him, which, for whatever reason, is not a one-hit kill.
To counter the fact that the enemies are l33t as shit at killing you and also to make boss fights significantly easier, the guide I read suggested the following method to mitigate constant-death anxiety. It's similar to PS2's Shinobi's Tate system whereby chaining murders increased your damage bit-by-bit to help you take down bosses and stronger enemies.
Step 1: Kill yourself an enemy
Step 2: Hold down Triangle to absorb the enemy's death orb to power up your Ultimate Techniques
Step 3: Kill another enemy with the ultimate technique
Step 4: Repeat endlessly
The guide neglected to mention steps between the steps like "Dodge your fucking ass off! Them motherfuckers don't give you time to absorb shit!" and "Release the triangle button real fucking now or he's gonna...oh shit...you just wasted a health orb, and now he...oh...he hit you again. Hope you like load times, corpse." Jumping off an enemy's head and hitting the charge attack button (triangle) as soon as you land skims microseconds off the time to charge but is damn essential and a pretty good strategy to put distance between you and your future victims even though it's repetitive to perform the same pattern of movements over and over.
However, if you really want your Home avatar's bare penis to drag against the ground on the leaderboards, performing the above trick can get you there.
I...like this game? In the old days games were harder, presumably to increase their value as games were much shorter and a harder game meant more time spent relative to money thrown out. Also, games nowadays tend to tell a much deeper story than they did back then, and so the end-goal and incentive to play the game is different. Before, it was just to play the game and hopefully to beat it. Now, the end objective is the end of the game, the completion of the story. Harder difficulties are mainly to relive gameplay (Exception is Resistance: Fall of Man's Hard difficulty which is mad fun). It's somewhat demanded of gaming companies to enable the everyman to defeat your everyday action game on normal difficulty in 20 hours or so (::cough, cough:: MGS4) with moderate hiccups. Not that this necessarily makes a value judgment on said games. Twenty hours is a decent chunk of time, and sometimes even that is too long for a game (Uncharted). So, Ninja Gaiden is a black sheep in the gaming and especially casual-gaming (whatever that means) market.
It's super black sheep for me. This is the second time I've bought this game. The first time, I got the Xbox version, and lemme tell you, the graphics for the most part look the same as they did then...like Dynasty Warriors 4 dated. Now some of the PS3's titles have been ugly, but they still are ages past the black blob that is Ryu; however, the new material with Rachel (those boobies are my calling in life) looks supremely better. Anyway, back then on the XBOX, I got to the burning man on the burning horse that breathes fire boss fight, and could go no further. I quit, gave up. The sight of the Ninja Gaiden gamecase brought guilt and regret at just not having the stones. Then I played massive amounts of Super Smash Bros Melee. Then I actually learned how to counter due to the easy interface of Assassin's Creed. Then I fucked shit up in Heavenly Sword. Ninja Gaiden Sigma seemed more attainable, and it is. I'm proud to say that I toasted the firey guy and his fire horse in the first four hours. That was only the second level though, and things continue to get increasingly harder. If I stop for a bit and come back to Sigma, it seems like my ability to perceive and react to situations within Sigma improves, but since Sigma requires a massive amount of concentration, this kind of double-thinking distracts and weakens my performance. Yeah, I guess it's like sex in that way.
Sex requires you to act on an instinctual level and not let little things like "he's not wearing a condom" or "i gotta call my mom" affect your enjoyment. Ninja Gaiden requires the same. If you don't understand instinctively to roll away just as an enemy attacks or jump over said enemy as they attack to get the drop on them, then you or your partner will not cum or stay erect.
Getting that instinctual-level knowledge, unlike sex, comes from massive amounts of repetition, so Ninja Gaiden, like old school, is a game that requires a lot of time to make small strides, so it's taking me a long time to complete it, but I think I enjoy the process or will enjoy it when I can actually dispatch foes with consistent BALLAness. Until then, just like with Warhawk, I'm a slave to the learning curve.

ummM...don't tell peopleS if you can tell its (g)one Been a long time...

Lynny-Jo