Fans of the Ninja Gaiden series will probably recall the Ninja Dog difficulty level that Team Ninja programmed into Ninja Gaiden Black to help struggling players along. Well, guess what? In a recent interview, Tomonobu Itagaki has stated that the Ninja Gaiden 2 will have a newbie-friendly feature called Path of the Acolyte. It will, however, be different from its predecessor.

According to Itagaki, Team Ninja has tweaked the Ninja Gaiden 2 system and has added four difficulty levels to the game in order to make it cater to several types of players. Path of the Acolyte was designed to assist novice Ninja Gaiden 2 players while, at the same time, making these players still want to see more of the game. Itagaki summed up the differences between the Path of the Acolyte and the Ninja Dog systems this way:

What I want to stress to your readers is that The Path of the Acolyte difficulty level in Ninja Gaiden II is not like Ninja Dog mode from Ninja Gaiden Black. In Ninja Gaiden Black, Ninja Dog difficulty was basically artificially boosted. You would get healing items on a regular basis for free to help you get through the game, so it was almost like performance-enhancing drugs.

That's not the way it should be. Difficulty should be adjusted not through indirect methods, like a Band-Aid on top, but through more direct methods--things that will make the player feel like they want to get further, to see more of the game, and assist them in a way that isn't artificially changing the rules.