Now let us return to our normal broadcasted material.

Alright so if you like sushi, hentai and slicing up hordes of demons and dinosaurs than you might make it in the Ninja field.

Starting salary $45,000 USD per year (Sorry Japan and the UK are all out of openings).

There are also some great benefits such as the ability to decimate enemies with your extremely powerful ninjutsu. By doing so you will cause all sorts of gruesome decapitations and dismemberments of the anatomy. This is all complete with body parts galore lying on the ground after business with your clients is taken care of.

As a ninja you must really emphasize strategy and awareness. The fact that you will occasionally lop off arms and legs is not merely for gruesome titillation. See an armless ninja is a significantly more dangerous ninja, because he knows he's going to die, and he's going to take you with him by means of suicide bomb. So whenever you see half a ninja crawling toward you as his guts spill out onto the floor, you need to finish him off immediately without the sense of guilt or question.

Also as a ninja you will be introduced to what is called "lasting damage." While your health bar refills after every encounter, if you've been lazy and taken too much damage too quickly, you will only get back a portion of your life until you use a healing item or save the game.

The bad part of all this is the game’s designers seem to have focused all their energy onto perfecting the combat – almost to the point where they omitted all the other tangibles that make a third-person action game entertaining.

You will see a variety of different locations ranging from cherry blossom trees scattered all over fields near dojos to eclectic rain forest and the occasional river beds of water flowing in and out every ebb and creek. Too bad some of the locations you will witness lack texture and attention to detail so tour wisely…and like a trip to Los Angeles expect to sometimes be amazed but more often than not disgusted by your wasteful surroundings. You will come across mainly repetitive rows of walls and corridors without insignia or other touches of interest.

The task of a running shinobi is not an easy one. Before Tomonobu Itagaki got all pissed off and decided to leave as Tecmo’s reigning sensei he was intent on making the most difficult path for only the most battle-tested and willing souls to go through. As a sop to the 99 percent of human beings who do not fall into this category (myself included), You will have a much lesser path to choose, called "Path of the Acolyte," which is still a significant challenge.

Your quest is not as open-ended as one might think. It's actually a relentlessly linear one. You’ll never be able to break the confines of your actual destination and there is only one way to get there.

Your point-of-vision (camera people work with me here) is also really bad too. You have to constantly babysit it with the right thumbstick, and it seems to always be totally in the wrong place. To see enemies behind you, you have to manually swing it back around. One of the most powerful moves in the game, the Flying Swallow, sends your ninja hero flying back and forth through enemies – kick ass idea except he always finishes the move on the wrong side of the camera. Ouch!

One other thing, ninjas do not in particular enjoy interesting literature. Your quest will be devoid of any true moments of epic struggle and peril worth noting. The faces you come in contact with also are exasperated of any character. What you get here is a at best a throwaway good-versus-evil tale, and at worst puerile and fetishistic, with a female character who seems to exist solely for the purpose of ferrying a massive pair of half-exposed breasts from scene to scene.

Expect to try over and over again as a ninja must exercise an excellent amount of patience in order to proceed onward. A ninja must also have no life and plenty of advil to spare…

So I guess in the end the whole journey doesn’t really sound all that appealing and trust me it isn’t. Of course if you can put aside some of the short comings like bland visuals and a what-is-going-on narrative so you can enjoy the deep combat with loads of action.

Too bad it’s more enjoyable to be a tattooed-bald Greek Warrior in Ancient times and plow your way with two knifes than it is to be a ninja.