While the lack of limb severing attacks this time around is a bummer, the game is nonetheless bloody, and full of absolutely brutal looking attacks that become even more so when you slice straight into an enemy, and find yourself mashing buttons to cut through whatever bone your sword happens to run into. It's depressing, because you can see glimmers of good ideas buried within the monotonous gameplay. Instead of scaling back a little bit here and there to try and ease a new audience in, it just veers straight off a cliff. The issue here is that Team Ninja went completely in the other direction. After all, those earlier games could be punishing well beyond reason. Look, the idea of making Ninja Gaiden more accessible isn't a horrible one. This might be a lot more tolerable were the underlying combat more fun, but combined with the brainless real-time action, it gives one the impression that Team Ninja intended for this game to be played by those who have never played video games before. One boss fight, in fact, ends with you literally holding down both trigger buttons for like 20 seconds. Yes, you'll see anti-hero Ryu Hayabusa fly through the air, land on moving helicopters, slash them into exploding debris, and land perfectly on two feet while killing enemies on the ground in the process, but in order to do all of that, you just press a button, or maybe two. ![]() ![]() Much has been made of the abundance of quick time events spread throughout Ninja Gaiden 3's campaign, and with good reason-they're remarkably dull. This makes the additional difficulty siphoning steps taken by Team Ninja all the more baffling. As for the weapons, remember when Ninja Gaiden used to let you use all sorts of crazy weaponry? That's not the case anymore. It also makes the combat even easier, since it lays such effective waste to pretty much whatever happens to be standing in the room with you. While I certainly enjoyed watching a giant flaming dragon emerge from my hands and swallow up all the enemies around me, it did, in fact, get old some time before the umpteenth time seeing this. This game is far more Dynasty Warriors than Ninja Gaiden.Įven most of the spells and specialty weapons that made the earlier games so awesome are just altogether missing here. Alternate between the two attack buttons as you please, as it matters not what combination you hit them in. The combat system, long the standard-bearer for action games of this type, has been reduced to a miserable, button-mashy bore. Yes, there is a hard difficulty, and while that does make the enemy AI tougher, it fails to address the fundamental problem with Ninja Gaiden 3: there is just no depth to it. And when I did find myself getting beat up, it was usually because the attack buttons aren't always as responsive as they should be. Mostly, I just cut through the blade fodder in my way for the eight or nine hour duration of the campaign, with only a pitiful amount of resistance in front of me. I died a few times during particularly disorienting boss fights, but those moments were rarities. On the normal difficulty, Ninja Gaiden 3 is a total breeze. I'm not talking about the easy mode, either. Where previous games in this series made me feel like the world's worst ninja time and time again, Ninja Gaiden 3 made me feel like pretty much nothing could kill me because by and large, nothing could. The only explanation I can think of for Ninja Gaiden 3's existence is some mandated need to make Ninja Gaiden more accessible than its predecessors. Clearly that's not true, as there are any number of fan-service-oriented moments peppered throughout the campaign, but I wouldn't be surprised if most diehard fans never saw them, due to just quitting this thing out of disgust. Certainly the loss of series creator Tomonobu Itagaki must have had some bearing on it, but Ninja Gaiden 3 is such a sharp left turn for the series that you'd almost think nobody who worked on this thing had ever played a game in the series before. I don't really know what would inspire Team Ninja to head in this direction. Ninja Gaiden 3 is pretty much the Beverly Hills Cop 3 of Ninja Gaiden games. In place of truly thrilling moments of action, it's rife with brain-dead button mashing and enough haphazard quick time events to make Asura's Wrath blush. Instead of any of these things, Ninja Gaiden 3 offers up an experience that practically holds your hand from beginning to end. Namely, its stiff challenge, deep and brutal combo system, and overwhelming sensation of ninja bad-assery. ![]() It's ill-conceived from top to bottom, seemingly completely unaware of what it was that made Ninja Gaiden interesting to begin with. Ninja Gaiden 3 is a sequel that tosses aside nearly every single thing you might have liked about its predecessors.
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