mcz117chief
Member
Yeah, the gameplay of Yaiba is pretty decent with a very fun mechanic of combining elements to exploit weaknesses of enemies. Really enjoyed it.
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So is the Ninja Gaiden series dead?
- Thread starter too much eslim
- Start date
PhilipDoesMatter
Member
No more than NeoGaf, but yeah, pretty much dead.
cireza
Member
Or simply having them BC and X enhanced on Xbox would already do wonders.
I loved Razor's Edge and hope that they are working on a fourth entry.
Angry_Megalodon
Member
Dead, buried and gone to heaven. Pretty much yes.
iconmaster
Banned
Any game franchise can always make a surprise return.
Except Mass Effect. That one's done.
Except Mass Effect. That one's done.
Shifty
Member
Open-world is the antithesis of the tight, structured design on show in a game like Ninja Gaiden. I can't imagine a bigger way to bomb the series (again) than taking a 7 year hiatus and then coming back with a totally different game under the same name.
The key lies in identifiying what the series did well then doubling down on that as hard as possible and executing it flawlessly, not throwing it out in favour of homogenous industry trends.
And, when you say the action genre is crowded, what examples are you basing that on? To my mind, Bayonetta 3 and DMCV are the only things on the horizon that fill a similar niche to Ninja Gaiden's fast technical action.
Shifty
Member
Microsofts Hunert Smoke
Banned
Never really liked the series much, especially the NES ones. NG is from a gone era, the time of hiding poorly designed games under the term "challenge" has been over for years. Souls is the series that's the last of its kind to sell well.
Gander
Banned
So you are gonna going to overlook God of War, Assassin's Creed and Horizon Zero Dawn?
cireza
Member
Sure. I simply meant that the easiest way right now to re-release these games is on Xbox since pretty much zero work is required.
And PC too while they're at it.
Paracelsus
Member
Way to prove his point. The gameplay of all three isn't even remotely beginning to be worthy of licking NInja Gaiden Black's boots.
Ninja garden black was combat perfection. Unfortunately it only got worse from there. Although I’d still be down for a collection remaster. But honestly, who the hell would buy it really.
Nioh is the current hotness and much better than the last couple of ninja gaidens
Nioh is the current hotness and much better than the last couple of ninja gaidens
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Shifty
Member
Bless
Horizon is a ranged & trap-based combat game focused on guerilla tactics with next to nothing in the way of interesting melee options- melee being a key component of NG and games like it. It's not even in the same subgenre.
Assassin's Creed combat only semi-recently graduated from 'mash the counter button to win', and while the new systems are decent, they still don't come close to the character action / spectacle fighter / hard fast action (delete as appropriate) genre in terms of mechanical depth and challenge.
Not to mention being riddled with soft-balanced RPG systems that turn character power into a function of time spent leveling rather than a function of player skill. So again, it's not the same.
God of War is probably the most interesting example of the three given its recent successful genre shift into a zelda-like hub world structure and the accompanying systems overhaul, but it's an action RPG much like AC now.
(Granted, a better implemented one thanks to levels being tied to gear instead of an XP bar, but combat is still trivialized the further you progress in the game.)
That leaves even more room for entries in the character action subgenre that the series came close to in GoW 3, but abandoned in favour of something more mainstream-friendly.
If anything, NieR: Automata, Nioh, Souls, Sekiro, and Ghost of Tsushima are better comparisons to make in terms of the melee action genre being crowded, but each one occupies a different set of niches from Ninja Gaiden, DMC, Bayonetta, etc. in terms of gameplay speed, realism, character progression and scope.
The NES games were Nintendo Hard from top to bottom, but I can't say I played enough to know if it was cheap difficulty.
You are straight up crazy if you're equating challenge to poor design in the case of 3D Ninja Gaiden or Souls though.
Those games are, for the most part, meticulously designed and entirely fair once you understand their systems. Dismissing them as 'bad design' because they have a learning curve is scrubquotes material.
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shinkai
Member
Came in to say this exact thing. Vanilla NG3 screwed over the series so much and RE was released as an apology for their screw up but at that point it was too late to save the series. Then they released Yaiba and at that point they were just kicked a dead body. Also I want to say it didn't help the series for them to initially release NG3:RE on the Wii U.
Ellis
Member
Because they are completely different games and feel nothing alike.
Shifty
Member
Mmm yes, nothing I love more than lugging around the fifty hattori hanzo katanas I found lying on the ground so I can sell them for pennies next time I hit up the blacksmith shop.
And don't get me started on how much I enjoy having to worry about stat growth, equip weight, and RNG loot farming. Boy howdy.
Get outta here with this blatantly inflammatory shit.
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Dthomp
Member
Let’s just hope it stays there. I don’t feel like there are any companies out there anymore that can deliver rpgs like we had back in the snes/ps1 and slightly ps2 days.
The Pleasure
Member
It's okay. Idea Factory can fulfill that niche with Hyperdimension Pantytunia with sisters and stuff. But in all fairness, do we really play RPGS? Games are meant to be enjoyed with people. Family, Friends, competitors. That's why fighting games are the true glory days. That's why Ryu be fighting in DOA. Because he knows people play those games.
Dthomp
Member
Personally for me the rpg era of the ps1 was the best time to be a gamer. If I want a bunch of social stuff, I’d go visit friends or family. The reason rpgs have fallen as a genre has less to do with the gamer and much more to do with the great storytellers moving on and rpgs beginning to worry about their flashy graphics more then making a great story to enjoy.
Shifty
Member
I'd love to see that happen, though I don't expect it for one minute.
Does anyone even know what happened to Itagaki after he put out Devil's Third? He seems to have dropped off the planet as far as google is concerned.
Unless KT brought him back and he's secretly been working on the mother of all reboots this whole time
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Mista
Banned
Haven’t read about him nor seen him in awhileI'd love to see that happen, though I don't expect it for one minute.
Does anyone even know what happened to Itagaki after he put out Devil's Third? He seems to have dropped off the planet as far as google is concerned.
Unless KT brought him back and he's secretly been working on the mother of all reboots this whole time
DunDunDunpachi
Patient MembeR
Is there any entry in the franchise other than Ninja Gaiden Black that anyone considers worth mastering?
Because I think that's part of the problem. The game is 14 years old.
Because I think that's part of the problem. The game is 14 years old.
The Pleasure
Member
Let's be real with the "great" storylines of the super nintendo era. They were better than the vast majority of games at the time, but they were still quite simplistic when one actually looks at them in depth. They're steak compared to the hamburger of action games, but gameplay wise, they don't hold up. Their gameplay is rather limited and boring. More modern rpgs have better gameplay, but when you can realize the graphics, they become trite anime garbage and their storyline suffered because of that. I personally enjoy NES-PS1 rpgs more than modern rpgs simply due to imagination running wild. But their gameplay? It wasn't ever really that good.
kevin_trinh
Member
Metal gear rising is the closest NG game
Shifty
Member
That's a challenging question, because outside of Black being broadly heralded as the best, each entry has its own list of notable strengths and weaknesses. It gets weird, there hasn't really been a definitive one since.
First step is to strike Yaiba and vanilla NG3 off the list: The former was a joke on multiple levels, and the latter pulled a DMC2 and tossed out most of the series' best mechanics and themes after a severe case of misunderstanding the source material.
That leaves NG Sigma, NG 2, NG Sigma 2, and NG 3: Razor's Edge.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma
NG Sigma is the PS3-exclusive 'enhanced' port of Black. It runs in HD, adds quick access to weapons and items and features some new enemies, a new dual katana weapon, as well as a few new sequences - some of which are played from the perspective of leading lady Rachel.
It also remixes certain old areas for the worse, makes unnecessary balance tweaks, adds a bunch of gameplay interrupting mid-level loads, redesigns the UI to be quite garish, and removes decapitation. Also, Rachel's 3-chapter segment is bad.
It's still a good game, but tried to fix what wasn't broke in the course of bringing the series to Playstation. I wouldn't recommend this over Black unless you don't have the means to play it.
Ninja Gaiden 2
NG 2 is 360-exclusive and functions as a direct sequel to Black. It refocuses the game mechanics on relentless offense, dismemberment and gory instakills instead of the more balanced defensive tactics encouraged by the original.
Some people love it and say it's better than Black- it's certainly the fastest and most visceral game in the genre. You feel like a whirling dervish tearing through the game's larger enemy crowds, there's nothing quite like it.
However, its development suffered due to director Tomonobu Itagaki leaving the company on bad terms toward the end, and it shows. It's notably less polished than Black, has really busted balance in places, and contains some of the most unfair boss fights in the series.
It's also not as optimized as it should be, exhibiting the old 'break it like a super nintendo' slowdown when things get too crazy. But, it does use that to its advantage in what has to be the coolest staircase to a final boss ever to feature in a videogame:
Look at that slowdown when the corpses start piling up. The bad guys are desparate to stop you, and they're throwing enough bodies your way to bring the engine to its knees.
Some people hate this, but I think the slow-mo is what makes it great. I'll come back to vanilla 2 after a bit of context from the next title-
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2
NG Sigma 2 is a direct sequel to NG Sigma (see? told you it would get weird) and is to 2 what Sigma was to Black, mostly. It skips bigger aesthetic changes in favour of subtle lighting improvements, opting instead to rebalance the game, fix or replace the broken bosses, add some new enemies and bosses, playable female ninjas, a new greatsword weapon, and generally shores things up into a more finished experience.
Unfortunately, limited processing power meant that the enemy count was drastically reduced in the process, causing the developers to make them tankier and break the balancing around dismemberment and its accompanying instakill mechanics- the lynchpin of vanilla NG2's combat.
The overall feel of the game is slower and more deliberate, and it feels worse for it. The stairs fight now runs at a solid framerate, but is nowhere near as exciting. Team Ninja made a better, fairer game in Sigma 2, but they inadvertently made it less fun.
So, Sigma 2 is divisive. Ask a super hardcore fan and they'll tell you that it's garbage and to play vanilla 2 instead. Ask anyone else, and they'll tell you to play Sigma 2.
In retrospect, I say the Sigma version of 2 is once again the lesser. However, I wouldn't have finished the vanilla game without playing through this one first.
I owned vanilla NG 2 for years and absolutely loathed it- a broken and unfair sequel to the most polished full-package character action game ever made.
Playing Sigma 2 got me confident enough with the core gameplay to go back and finish the vanilla game, and it was worthwhile. I like it more. It's a busted, fucked up gem of a game that outshines its better-presented cousin through the simple virtue of being fun as all hell to play once you break through the skill barrier.
Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge
What would happen if Capcom retroactively patched the gameplay of Devil May Cry 3 into Devil May Cry 2, but didn't change anything about the story? Then you'd have Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge, of course!
I kid, though even in doing that I'm underselling how hard they patched this game. Vanilla Ninja Gaiden 3 is a hole I'll let you dive into on your own time, but safe to say they removed, changed and added a metric ton of stuff to try and fix it.
It plays like a less-stiff version of Ninja Gaiden 2, which is to say it plays well. There are a few tweaks here that feel kind of strange at first, and enemy density / fragility is roughly halfway between 2 and Sigma 2, but overall it's a smooth gameplay experience.
It has a bunch of weapons, the ability to play any chapter as any of the three characters (a series first), a create-your-own-ninja mission mode, and reinstates series staples such as aggressive enemies that don't cower in fear, a wide arsenal of weapons, proper ninpo magic supers, upgrades, and buckets of blood and gore.
Unfortunately, the base campaign content is where the game lets itself down. Team Ninja polished this turd harder than anybody has ever polished a turd, but it is what it is. The gameplay is fun, but you're still running through Londonesque streets and Middle-Eastern desert cities that wouldn't look out of place in CoD4, and wondering to yourself why oh why did they decide to set this in the Dead or Alive universe instead of the perfectly good ninja-centric offshoot? Why did they decide to give Ryu a face when the mask worked so well for him as a player avatar? Why is the story rewriting history to make killing my way through the first two games an act I should be repentant for? Fuck sake. This is stupid. Hayashi you ninja dog why did you do this.
It's still fun to play though. Once you start ignoring the cutscenes and focusing on the intricacies of the gameplay, it's good in its own right. I had plenty of hours of fun out of it, and might go back sometime.
Conclusion
So, which one to pick? Well.
Having written all of this out.
Considering the ups-and-downs of each game in the series past the original.
And despite kind of wanting to boot up Razor's Edge again because I never made a dent in the reams upon reams of extra content in that game.
I'm going to have to say...
...
...
...
Play Ninja Gaiden Black, damn it! It's been 14 years and nothing's even come close!
It's so good! It's the best game ever made!
Itagaki IS A GENIUS!
FANDOM REJOICE!
ASFAHDSFJHSDKAJFHL!
(I'm extremely biased, because it's my legit no-questions-asked favourite game. Plays well on 360 / XBO back-compat)
...
...
Play Ninja Gaiden Black, damn it! It's been 14 years and nothing's even come close!
It's so good! It's the best game ever made!
Itagaki IS A GENIUS!
FANDOM REJOICE!
ASFAHDSFJHSDKAJFHL!
(I'm extremely biased, because it's my legit no-questions-asked favourite game. Plays well on 360 / XBO back-compat
)
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Northeastmonk
Gold Member
Sigma felt like it suffered from issues even though the ports felt alright at the time. I remember getting Sigma on PS3 and thinking the Xbox version ran better.
That stair sequence in Ninja Gaiden II was awesome on 360, but I remember the Sigma version was slowed down and there wasn't enough blood.
I like the bosses in Ninja Gaiden II even if they kinda felt like they had an easy strategy to defeat them. That dang water level and boss could have been left out of Ninja Gaiden II.
Edit: Ninja Gaiden II on 360 is the ultimate experience for that game and I feel like there are aspects to that version that triumph over Black in some ways. I'd say Black is definitely the main title showing off how amazing the series can be, but Ninja Gaiden II shows how brutal a series can get. I loved it when it was raining blood and I could just cut everything up around me.
That stair sequence in Ninja Gaiden II was awesome on 360, but I remember the Sigma version was slowed down and there wasn't enough blood.
I like the bosses in Ninja Gaiden II even if they kinda felt like they had an easy strategy to defeat them. That dang water level and boss could have been left out of Ninja Gaiden II.
Edit: Ninja Gaiden II on 360 is the ultimate experience for that game and I feel like there are aspects to that version that triumph over Black in some ways. I'd say Black is definitely the main title showing off how amazing the series can be, but Ninja Gaiden II shows how brutal a series can get. I loved it when it was raining blood and I could just cut everything up around me.
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Iced Arcade
Member
Been dead since they tossed Itagak
Punished Miku
Gold Member
I think in the next few years for sure. Nioh 2 is going to dominate a bit of 2019 for them though. But hell, maybe they'll drop some more Hayabusa / demon lore in Nioh 2.
mcz117chief
Member
He always had a face, since at least the second Dead or Alive. Actually his default costume in DoA2 is without a mask.
Shifty
Member
I know, I just don't think NG needed to move in that direction given that Black and 2 managed to make him a good character without it.
"Please be my daddy, mister ruthless killing machine." Character assasination of the highest order, I tell ya!
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mcz117chief
Member
I honestly don't see it as an issue. The only point of taking off the mask was to be more relatable, but not for the player primarily, but for the other characters. At least that is my take from it.