Finally beat the game without Life Upgrades and without Ninpo on Master Ninja.

Added rule was no UT-chaining outside of the more bonkers fights, only using them when I felt it fit in the battle as it were. Really wanted to focus on playing more flawlessly and avoid savescumming as well. Also did all fights except some Tests of Valor.

Really, really fun run. Think this might've been my favourite run barring a few fights that were really difficult. Favourite chapter is a toss up between Chapter 7 which I always enjoyed and the intro of Chapter 11. I always try to do it with just the True Dragon Sword which is just a ton of fun.

Hardest fight was by a metric mile the Rasetsu fight in Chapter 11. Ended up just dodging around, letting them kill the IS ninjas for me and then focus on Lunar UT'ing the spiders down slowly. Fact that you have to do two fights afterwards is even more scary. Runner up was Dagra Dai who I ended up face-tanking and Zedonius who just never wants to play ball with me it seems like.

All in all I can recommend the run to those who want to get better at NGII, really urges you to rely less on the overpowered tools and more on your own skill!

Sounds like fun times, how many playthroughs did it take you to get good enough to do this? Game is still super intimidating to me.

I have around 20-30 runs under the belt in Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, so a lot of knowledge of how each individual enemy works transfered over. Screwed me over with some bosses though since they're changed.

In this version I have about 8 runs now. Warrior, Mentor, Master Ninja, then Master Ninja twice on NG+ to derp around with all weapons, BotA only run on Master Ninja, Claws only run, this run. Something like that.

The game will always be intimidating though. Working on my Dragon Sword only run now and face-tanked some deaths against Gigadeath yesterday too. Sometimes the game just hates you haha!

Good job! How come you only did some Tests of Valor and not all of them?

Some are fun and challenging with some easy rewards, but some are also just dull repeats of the same tactic for a long time where a single mistake would spell doom thanks to OLB. If I was younger I'd have attempted it, but I mostly wanted to focus on the main game.