I am fully on board with the year of the ninja. A month ago I was pleading with my PC Gamer colleagues to consider Ninja Gaiden 2 Black for this year’s Top 100 list of the finest computer games to play right now; I’ve played dozens of hours of Assassin’s Creed Shadows for the stealth takedowns; and the announcement of Ninja Gaiden 4 alongside Black 2 activated the “Un-Follow Me Now, This Is Gonna Be The Only Thing I Tweet About For The Next Week” side of my personality.
Now that I’ve played it, I’m Izuna Dropping my expectations back to earth.
Xbox offered up a demo of Ninja Gaiden 4 that covers its first few stages, so I spent a few hours playing on both normal and hard to get a feel for where PlatinumGames, with Team Ninja’s backing, has taken a series that embarrassed itself into a decade-long coma in 2012. My gut feeling based on those couple hours is that this will be a fun action game and nothing close to the disaster that was Ninja Gaiden 3… but I was surprised how much it made me want to go back to playing Ninja Gaiden 2 Black. The core combat here is frenetic, but I think it might lean a little too far towards the “stylish qualities of Platinum” despite what the developers have said about their partnership.
I hope the full game brings me around, but I’m not head over heels in love like I thought I would be. Here’s how it’s sitting with me after a few hours.
That’s so ninja:
👍Blood, blood, and more blood. This feels like the kind of sentence that gets me put on a bad list, but damn is Ninja Gaiden 4 bloody, and I love it. The showers of gore really sell the lethality; I am absolutely slicing these dudes to ribbons.
👍Ninja Gaiden 2’s Obliteration techniques remain a treat. Ninja Gaiden 2’s whole thing was letting you perform a finishing move on any enemy that has lost a limb, and that’s back in NG4. I still personally consider Ninja Gaiden 2’s combat to be the pinnacle of this style of action game, so this pleases me. Of course, Platinum had to go and one-up the Obliteration techniques with their own thing
👍The new instakills are very stylish. Enter rage mode and hit an enemy with a powered-up attack and you’ll instantly annihilate them, the screen flashing blood red and splashed with ink saying “Damn dude you just killed the shit out of them.” (Note: I cannot actually read Japanese.)
👍The generous accessibility options are a welcome change for this genre. These sorts of action games rarely offer much flexibility beyond difficulty options; heck, 20 years ago Ninja Gaiden’s creator famously made fun of players who couldn’t hack it in the first game with the “Ninja Dog” difficulty unlocked by dying too many times on the first level.
Ninja Gaiden 4 has much more modern sensibilities. In addition to multiple difficulty options, it also offers tons of options, from auto blocking and healing to highlighting enemies and interactive objects. There are toggles for blood and hitstop, and even an option to auto-skip cutscenes which I’m sure will be getting heavy use for players who run through this game half a dozen times.
👍Ryu still mostly feels like Ryu. The series’ longtime hero has been relegated to second playable character status here, but you can choose to play as him through the level select menu and combat trials, and he mostly feels familiar to me in a good way. Compared to the lightweight protagonist Yakumo (more on that below) he’s got some good heft to his movements and I was pretty quickly able to get into the old Ninja Gaiden groove.
Still, there’s a bit of a “this one goes to 11” vibe to some of his animations. Throwing out a powered-up hit now makes him do a series of lightning fast slashes, leaving a flickering afterimage behind him—not a new visual treat for Ninja Gaiden, but it used to be deployed a bit more selectively. I guess you’ve gotta escalate the sequel somehow!
Not so ninja:
👎Walk-and-talk sections. These were mercifully brief in the first couple levels I got to demo, but it is borderline sinful to make a ninja game in which your ninja slows to a stroll and puts his hand to his earpiece to talk to his anime sidekick about the guys he’s gotta go kill. I’d already be freakin’ killing them if you weren’t blabbing at me!! This honestly really annoys me, because it feels like Platinum has just taken an overused feature of modern game design and plastered it onto their ninja game without doing anything unique with it. And nobody’s gonna care about the story anyway.
👎Yellow paint. Yellow paint everywhere. This is a largely linear game that immediately tutorializes jumping and wallrunning. So why is so much of it slathered in yellow paint? The surfaces you can wall run along all look the same! There’s only one or two directions to go at any given time! Presumably players were confused in focus testing because the environment is too visually noisy, but Ninja Gaiden 4 lays it on so thick it feels like it’s parodying the yellow paint discourse. (And no, there’s no option to turn it off).
👎Bosses that launch AOE attacks the same color as the floor. I really don’t know what they were thinking with this one. The bosses of the first two stages love to throw out this blue crackling energy AOE attack that blends right in with the floor in their arenas. Why didn’t they make that yellow, huh?
👎Yakumo moves like a weightless toy. I recently spent a good bit of time playing the upcoming Chinese action game Phantom Blade Zero, and the difference in physicality going to NG4 is pretty striking. Phantom Blade Zero wants to make you feel like a real martial arts master, and they have a human weight to them even when you’re leaping through the air. By contrast, Ninja Gaiden 4’s new protagonist feels much less like a person and more like a little plaything moving at fast-forward speeds. In the earlier Ninja Gaidens, Ryu certainly didn’t have the same fidelity of motion captured movement as the protagonist in Phantom Blade Zero, but he was definitely heftier. This is just one of the small ways in which NG4 feels more like a Platinum game and less like the Ninja Gaiden of old, to me.
👎There’s a parry and it feels… bad? I am not a parrying hater. Sekiro is one of my favorite games of all time. I think the combat system in Platinum’s Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, built around parrying, is phenomenal. Parrying makes sense as a higher risk alternative to blocking in games with stamina meters. But here it feels tacked on and, at least after a couple hours of play, really messy—you parry by attacking just as enemies attack you, but the speed at which this game moves seemingly makes it very easy for you to just… hit each other milliseconds apart. Even in the controlled environment of the training room against a single enemy, I found the parry frustratingly hard to land (perhaps exacerbated by playing with a wireless controller on my Xbox rather than PC), and unsatisfying even when I did land it, because I was basically sitting there waiting to attack at the “right” time.
Ninja Gaiden (2004) demanded careful blocking; Ninja Gaiden 2 encouraged dodging and near-constant offense. (These games did have a counterattack, but it was more an extension of blocking rather than a separate mechanic). So far, Ninja Gaiden 4 seems to want you to dodge, block, parry, and do powered-up versions of all three actions by holding down a button at the same time, leading to my initial impression that…
👎Ninja Gaiden 4’s combat feels overstuffed. I hope I’m wrong about this and the action game gurus out there end up making videos about how this is the godliest action game of all time for 37 different reasons and there’s bottomless opportunity for mastery and so on and so forth. But I love the relatively straightforward combo-focused purity of Ninja Gaiden 1&2, and instead of aiming to make a new version of that experience, Team Ninja’s let Platinum go, well, full Platinum.
The old Ninja Gaiden moves are in here, but layered on top there’s a parry, a rage meter, and a Bloodraven transformation button you hold down to do those powered-up versions of attacks (Bloodraven of course has a meter of its own). Dodging at the last second now gives you a bit of slow-mo (sound anything like another Platinum game?). You have to hit enemies with those powered-up attacks to stun them when they’re readying their own big hits, which the game warns you about with a ❗. Oh, and you can charge Bloodraven attacks. Oh, and when you go into rage mode, the Bloodraven moves can instakill some enemies if you charge them. Oh, and there’s a grappling hook, which you’ll likely need to use to avoid those enemy AOEs or pick annoying airborne enemies out of the sky. And this is just the start of the game! I’m not even unlocking stuff yet.
Even if all these combat mechanics are good, it is possible for there to be too much of a good thing, and I’m not feeling a clear or immediate identity for this game’s combat other than a lot, and fast. A lot, and fast can be fun, but it’s not the immediate “hell yeah” I hoped for.
👎And finally: Yakumo looks like he belongs in the third-best shonen anime of the season. Sorry, he is not cool.
