Just a note to all the people whining about this review purely because they liked the game... Deal with it.
Yahtzee had a damn valid point about difficulty VS poor design, even if he could have gone into more depth. No one who played Ninja Gaiden 1 could possibly like 2, because it was better in almost every way. The boss fights were less about luck and more about actually planning a strategy, the balance was mostly more spot on, and the game was harder. Not more bullshit, just harder.
Case in point: The fight/s with Alexei in NG2. They were utter RUBBISH. If you tried to do ANYTHING strategic against him, he'd throw a bunch of projectiles then grapple you in the middle of you dodging or blocking them. It was almost impossible to avoid unless you just plain got lucky.
Now, I must've tried this fight about 50 times before I gave up and went for a Video Walkthrough off Youtube. You know what the strategy was? "Button mash". That's about it. You just get up into his face, spam attacks, and when he teleports, run up to him as quickly as you can and repeat. You can basically stunlock him, and not even take enough damage to need to heal.
NG2 isn't hard. It's just stupid. It still takes just as many tries to beat a stage because you need to get lucky as hell, but you take less damage because of that. It's hard, but in an accessable way. It's hard in a way where a hardcore gamer and a casual gamer would probably have the exact same amount of trouble with it.
And that's why NG2 sucked... Hm... I think I went off-topic a bit.