Set six months after Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox, leather-loving ninja elite Ryu Hayabusa's kicking around his recently rebuilt village when the Black Spider Ninja Clan kidnaps fellow villager and female ninja-in-training Momiji. After experiencing the kidnapping during a training level, players spend the rest of the game scribbling with the DS's stylus to maneuver Ryu through villages, forests, monasteries and caves in an attempt to track down Momiji, thwart her kidnappers and solve the mystery behind the Dark Dragonstones—objects that hold the substance of a Dark Dragon.

Holding the DS sideways like a book, players interact with the game almost entirely with the stylus. Basic attacks are triggered by dragging the stylus down or sideways across enemies, while more advanced moves require a certain amount of calligraphic finesse. Tag an enemy then whip the stylus up to fling an opponent skyward and finish with a body slam. Tap a target rapidly from on the ground or in the air to launch a stream of throwing stars. Scribble madly over Ryu and he'll start building power levels to launch his screen-ravaging "Ultimate Technique." Sketch Sanskrit characters onscreen before time runs out to trigger devastating magic attacks. And so on. Ryu's arsenal of abilities grows as the story advances, along with sword and spell-casting powers, both of which can be upgraded by spending yellow orbs absorbed from slain enemies.

Too short, but brilliant for the duration

Translating a martial-arts brawler as nuanced and critically beloved as Ninja Gaiden from its console apogee on the Xbox to a low-res two-screen hand-held takes guts, but coaxing it to play like it belongs nowhere else involves a certain amount of mad genius. Surprisingly, Team Ninja brings off the latter and even makes you wonder whether Ninja Gaiden 2 wouldn't have been more interesting were it bound for the idiosyncratic Nintendo Wii instead of the more powerful but vanilla-interface Xbox 360.

You'd think a scribble-driven fighting game couldn't work, that it would end up compromising the precision associated with a "serious" fighter and wind up just a "friendly" casual in-between. Leave it to series designer Tomonobu Itagaki to challenge that thinking. The game came about in part because Itagaki's children wanted a version of the Ninja Gaiden series for their hand-held of choice, but also because the somewhat flamboyant designer says he wanted simply "to challenge [him]self."

Realizing that challenge required figuring out just how forgiving to be with the DS's gesture-recognition controls without transforming the gameplay into a sloppy scribble-fest. To that end, where you tap, how far you drag, how fast you segue to a new gesture and even whether you lift before scribbling again all register in full. Yes, it's possible to make a certain amount of headway by slashing madly, just as it's possible to button-mash your way to a kill in the console version. But making Ryu do exactly what you want him to, getting every combo to flow smoothly, making your enemies react to you (as opposed to the other way around) and controlling where they're at onscreen—all of that requires digital finesse with a stylus that's every bit the analogue of timing button presses on a gamepad.

To be fair, Dragon Sword isn't much of a challenge at its default difficulty settings, an issue exacerbated by the game's startling brevity (it runs six or seven hours, start to finish). Once you unlock "hard," however, the game requires total mastery of the stylus and nearly balletic gesture flow, more than redressing "normal" mode's cushiness.

That said, it's too bad you can't pick the higher setting at the outset. Then again, Itagaki's known for making his games arbitrarily as well as tactically challenging, and while the easier-play angle obviously dovetails with Tecmo's interests in terms of appealing to the DS's casual on-the-go audience, making vets play a half-dozen hours before getting to the "real thing" is perhaps just another way for Itagaki to say "bring it on."