Ryo Hayabusa makes its comeback to Nintendo consoles with an adventure that tries to inovate, but it’s not ninja enough. There’s been quite some time since Ninja Gaiden left the Nintendo 8 bits and became stronger on the original Xbox (with a sequel planned for the Xbox 360), and the time away from home was good for it to mature.

We have a relatively simple adventure with lots of action and an atempt of inovation in the controls that works sometimes and it’s not that deep at others. Tomonobu Itagaki, the series’ creator, was interested in creating something new for the Nintendo DS, managing to make a nice action game with pretty impressive visuals.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword is one of those few games that you play with the DS on vertical, book style, made it popular by the likes of Brain Training and Hotel Dusk, allowing you to have a wider field of vision of what’s ahead of youand interact with the game without the trouble of your hand getting in front of the screen. The story is pretty basic, involving an evil dragon, creatures from the underwould, an enemy ninja clan and the kidnapping of a ninja from the village that have to be rescued.

The biggest addition to the portable version is the full control trough the touch screen, from simple movements like walking, to more complex ones like jumping and attacking. The only moment you’ll press any button is to block or dodge. Simple movements like touching an enemy or scratching it, to shot shurikens or attack it with your sword, work well, but put several enemies on screen and skill begins to play a minor role.

Movements like walking are not much of a problem until the game presents you with some traps, there are not a lot of them, but it’s not logic to ask for precision if you’re not providing it. Jumps and aerial attacks also became kinda random. You won’t always be able to do exactly what you was planning to, but you’ll probably end up killing your foes in the same way.

The gameplay is too basic and doesn’t evolve even a tiny bit during the game, leaving too much space for boredom even during extreme action scenes. This could’ve been solved with deeper puzzles that involved more than lighting some torches or bosses that were a little more complex and couldn’t be defeated by just attacking them directly. While there’s a good number of different enemies, there’s not a lot of different behaviors between them.

You can still summon some magic that you aquire during the game by scrathing symbols on the touch screen, it’s pretty rudimentary, since you don’t even have to follow the drawing. Sometimes you use magic to solve puzzles, but they are so simple that "puzzle" looks like a bit to much, usually you just explode some obstacle or light a torch.

There has been a primorous work at the graphic area, with models way above the usual, and some of the best graphics on the Nintendo DS, with great textures. The backgrounds are most pre-rendered, 2D images simulating 3D, but there are some moments where they are full 3D, mostly at boss fights where even with big detailed models the background still looks great.

At the sound sector we have a lot of quality suffering from strong repetition. Aside from some random moments, there are no voiceovers in the game, just Ryo and his enemies screaming. The songs offer a good battle rhythm but they also became repetitive over time.

Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword is a little short, around six hours of ninja action, altought, they’re only cutting and slashing your way without much depth, and keeping yourself alive won’t be such a challenge, something that goes a little against the franchise history. After you finish there are some extras, but nothing interesting with the exception of the characters diaries, there’s nothing to encourage you to play it again. It’s a good way to kill time, but it’s not a new classic.