Backlog Cleanup Duty continues. This week I finally finished Ninja Gaiden 4 on Hard. That last boss was a real struggle for me, I actually didn’t think I was going to make it for a long time. I think maybe I should have replayed the whole last level as I didn’t realise it was a boss rush in the end and I used up too many items on the first of the three final bosses (luckily the middle boss was a cakewalk). I still have to play the DLC but I may come back for that later.
Honestly, I have a lot of thoughts about this game. The best way I can sum it up is: NG4 has absolutely great combat, but it should have been a spin-off called Ninja Gaiden: Blood Raven instead of Ninja Gaiden 4. They should have completely removed Ryu from this game and let Platinum Games do their own thing with Yakumo without it needing to impede on the mainline franchise.
Now, as you may have noticed, I have not yet said that NG4 is a great game. Because when it comes to non-combat elements I have quite a lot of issues with it. The level design is bland - it’s basically just a bunch of corridors, sometimes with a side path. The art direction is also way less interesting than previous games. This is just your regular Japanese cyberpunk setting. It is better than NG3, but nowhere near NG1&2. This is also one of the worst cases of Yellow Paint-itis I’ve ever seen (literally all levels are just hallways, why the fuck is this much yellow paint slathered everywhere?). There are way too many visual effects - I was forced to install a shader level mod to remove a bunch because I literally couldn’t see what the fuck was happening in the combat disco. The story is bad - but not really fun bad, just boring. The love interest angle is weak and unnecessary. English voice acting is pretty flat. The new protagonist Yakumo is not compelling at all, he’s just a grumpy emo kid. There is a bunch of annoying “parkour” and rail grinding and surfing and shit which is effectively just QTEs with some makeup - we don’t want that in our Ninja Gaidens we want to kill a bunch of mooks. There are a bunch of small QOL problems that piss me off because they would be so easy to fix but nobody bothered. The save “system” is a prime example: not only is it autosave only, but the save points are idiotic. It will often autosave just before you reach a shop, so each time you die or reload you have to re-buy everything and turn in/accept new missions all over again. If you’re doing Purgatory Trials and die the reload point is before entering the arena. So every time you die you have to walk up, again re-buy whatever you want in the shop and then once again sit through the title card slowdown of starting a trial. And you will die a lot in purgatory trials. I could go on.
…buuut at the same time, the moment-to-moment combat of this game is absolutely great! It’s fast, perhaps faster than any Ninja Gaiden before it. It’s brutal. It has more freedom of creative expression with fluid combos than any previous Ninja Gaiden. Does it feel like a mainline Ninja Gaiden title? No. It feels like a spin-off. It feels like exactly what it is: a Platinum Games take on Ninja Gaiden. But that is still most likely the very best action combat of any game released in the past couple of years. And if you’re a CAG fan, if you’re an action gamer, does anything else matter?
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
A gaming community free from the hype and oversaturation of current releases, catering to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game. Whether it’s price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don’t meet the system requirements, or just haven’t had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
Backlog Cleanup Duty continues. This week I finally finished Ninja Gaiden 4 on Hard. That last boss was a real struggle for me, I actually didn’t think I was going to make it for a long time. I think maybe I should have replayed the whole last level as I didn’t realise it was a boss rush in the end and I used up too many items on the first of the three final bosses (luckily the middle boss was a cakewalk). I still have to play the DLC but I may come back for that later.
Honestly, I have a lot of thoughts about this game. The best way I can sum it up is: NG4 has absolutely great combat, but it should have been a spin-off called Ninja Gaiden: Blood Raven instead of Ninja Gaiden 4. They should have completely removed Ryu from this game and let Platinum Games do their own thing with Yakumo without it needing to impede on the mainline franchise.
Now, as you may have noticed, I have not yet said that NG4 is a great game. Because when it comes to non-combat elements I have quite a lot of issues with it. The level design is bland - it’s basically just a bunch of corridors, sometimes with a side path. The art direction is also way less interesting than previous games. This is just your regular Japanese cyberpunk setting. It is better than NG3, but nowhere near NG1&2. This is also one of the worst cases of Yellow Paint-itis I’ve ever seen (literally all levels are just hallways, why the fuck is this much yellow paint slathered everywhere?). There are way too many visual effects - I was forced to install a shader level mod to remove a bunch because I literally couldn’t see what the fuck was happening in the combat disco. The story is bad - but not really fun bad, just boring. The love interest angle is weak and unnecessary. English voice acting is pretty flat. The new protagonist Yakumo is not compelling at all, he’s just a grumpy emo kid. There is a bunch of annoying “parkour” and rail grinding and surfing and shit which is effectively just QTEs with some makeup - we don’t want that in our Ninja Gaidens we want to kill a bunch of mooks. There are a bunch of small QOL problems that piss me off because they would be so easy to fix but nobody bothered. The save “system” is a prime example: not only is it autosave only, but the save points are idiotic. It will often autosave just before you reach a shop, so each time you die or reload you have to re-buy everything and turn in/accept new missions all over again. If you’re doing Purgatory Trials and die the reload point is before entering the arena. So every time you die you have to walk up, again re-buy whatever you want in the shop and then once again sit through the title card slowdown of starting a trial. And you will die a lot in purgatory trials. I could go on.
…buuut at the same time, the moment-to-moment combat of this game is absolutely great! It’s fast, perhaps faster than any Ninja Gaiden before it. It’s brutal. It has more freedom of creative expression with fluid combos than any previous Ninja Gaiden. Does it feel like a mainline Ninja Gaiden title? No. It feels like a spin-off. It feels like exactly what it is: a Platinum Games take on Ninja Gaiden. But that is still most likely the very best action combat of any game released in the past couple of years. And if you’re a CAG fan, if you’re an action gamer, does anything else matter?