What Even Is Ninja Gaiden 4?
It's got Ninja, but where's the Gaiden? (guy who doesn't know what Gaiden means)
More Like Ninja Gaiden Snore!
Years after being in cryosleep, the Ninja Gaiden franchise re-awakens and drops three games in one year. The first was Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, which is just a re-release of Sigma for the ninth time, Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, which is a fun 2D action platformer, and the holy grail that is Ninja Gaiden 4. The long-awaited numbered sequel to the disappointing Ninja Gaiden 3. Team Ninja teamed up with none other than the Platinum games to bring us a new entry in a legendary franchise? A weapon to surpass Ninja Gaiden 2? Sign me up!
The game dropped and everyone lost their collective minds. It was the best action game ever. The gods at Platinum, who were responsible for classics like Bayonetta, Metal Gear Rising and Nier: Automata, with Tomonobu Itagaki’s blessing, had bestowed on us peak gaming. Action gaming perfection.
Then I played it and said “this isn’t Ninja Gaiden”.
Today I’ll be exploring why I don’t think this game feels like a Ninja Gaiden game in terms of combat design. Why does it feel more like a Batman Arkham game than Ninja Gaiden? Does it really need seven types of parries? Is this me being a boring contrarian, or am I getting baited by hundreds of Ninja Gaiden fans who are playing Ninja Gaiden for the first time?
All this and more are coming up, but first we have to answer a simple question: What is Ninja Gaiden? The quickest way to do this is to compare it to what it’s not.
First, a disclaimer.
This isn’t a Review of NG4
Even though I’m about to spend an entire full-length article complaining about the game, this isn’t a full review. I’m just moaning about the combat and how it doesn’t feel like NG. I’m not going in-depth on anything else, no mention of the graphics, sound, level design, encounter design, progression or the overall experience. I’m just saying the combat kind of sucks.
Ninja Gaiden is not Devil May Cry
On the surface, the two games might look similar. They’re both shining examples of the vaguely defined Hack and Slash or Character Action genre. They’re both relatively complicated, have a large variety of weapons, attacks and techniques, among other things.
They’re both comparable to fighting games, but from different schools of thought. Devil May Cry is like Guilty Gear or Capcom’s own Versus series; you have a lot of techniques that require precise cancelling and interacting with different mechanics to overwhelm your opponent. Ninja Gaiden is more like a 3D fighting game, like Dead or Alive or Virtua Fighter. You have a long list of strings, but you mostly use your basic pokes to create an opening, and once you do, you use your more complex options.
Ninja Gaiden has combos, but they’re not like the ones in Devil May Cry. Again, this is from the 3D fighting game school of design. If you look at a move list in Dead or Alive, Tekken or Virtua Fighter, you’ll see a bunch of attacks that are a long sequence of punches and kicks with directional inputs thrown in. These are strings. They are combinations of attacks with specific purposes. They start from an attack with specific properties and end in a specific way that leaves you and your opponent at a particular state. For example, an attack string that starts with a quick punch and ends in a specific stance, which isn’t useful all the time, but when it’s needed, it gets the job done perfectly.
When you see a six input combo in Ninja Gaiden 2, it’s not there for you to mash the attack button and make the combo counter go up, it has a specific purpose. For example, the Lunar Staff’s directional combo. You use it to poke from a distance. If the first attack lands and puts your target in hit stun, you can confirm the hit and go for the rest of the combo. If it doesn’t, or you’re about to be attacked by someone else during the combo, you can stop it during the first two hits and deal with the incoming threat. Each attack also has its own direction, which affects the chance of delimbing an enemy, which is a whole ‘nother mechanic I’ll get into later.
This gives Ninja Gaiden’s combat a more deliberate feel. It’s more of a dance between the player and the enemies, where the player pokes around with safe moves, until they find an opening and go for a more damaging combo. You pick the correct string for the correct moment, so you can deal the most damage and end up in the safest position.
The reason why you’d need such a meticulous attack system was alluded to earlier: the enemies. Tomonobu Itagaki, the director of the 3D Ninja Gaiden games, once said that the enemies in Ninja Gaiden are threats, and the ones in Devil May Cry are targets. Every enemy in Ninja Gaiden wants Ryu dead, the instant they see him. You turn a corner and get jumped by angry ninjas hell-bent on killing you, even if it means blowing themselves up. They won’t let you be stylish. They won’t even let you breathe.
Ninja Gaiden 4 Thinks it’s Devil May Cry...?
The carefully considered combos are gone, replaced by long attack sequences that only serve to do damage. In any of the previous 3D Ninja Gaiden games, if you mashed the light attack button over and over, you’d get hit out of your ineffective combo. In Ninja Gaiden 4, mashing light attack is the way to go. Who cares about specific attacks with unique properties and delimb values? This is all about style, baby!
You can even switch weapons now! Finally! The thing everyone (who doesn’t play Ninja Gaiden) has been asking for for years. Why can’t Ryu just switch weapons mid-combo, right? Now Yakumo can switch weapons in NG4, because it’s hip and stylish.
The implication here is that you can go from the sword to the drill without missing a beat.
You’re not supposed to patiently poke at your enemies and move around them, you’re supposed to overwhelm them with attacks and aggression. We switched from Dead or Alive to BlazBlue.
This is what action games are all about, right? You press buttons, switch weapons and do long, flashy combos on brain-dead enemies that just sit there and stare while you turn their buddy into a plate of sashimi.
...but It Can’t Do That, Either
Have you ever seen those guys that dress in suits and fedoras? The ones that try to imitate that classy, old-school look? Remember that one time where some guys tried to make pocket watches a thing again? Why didn’t that catch on?
Because it looks dorky. Why does it look dorky, though? Why does Don Draper look so good in a three-piece suit, but when I wear it to the mall I look like a kid who raided his dad’s closet? Why does a hard-boiled detective from a noir film look good in a fedora, but when you see a guy wearing it at your local card shop, he looks like Reddit personified?
It’s because the imitation lacks an understanding of the fundamentals of style. Don Draper looks good in a suit because he wears clothes that are tailored to him. Someone who knows about shapes, colors and textures put together an outfit that fits him in every sense of the word. The shape complements his, the color goes well with his skin tone, the subtle details draw the eye in ways 90% of people won’t consciously notice. When a cool guy wears a pocket watch, his confidence and overall sense of style carries it. When some shmuck grabs an ill-fitting vest from JC Penney and combines it with his $20 watch he got at Hot Topic, he’s going to look like a complete chimp. He has no style, he has no grace.
Devil May Cry is Don Draper, while Ninja Gaiden 4 is some dude wearing an ill-fitting suit and top hat at the mall food court. NG4 does away with everything that makes it a Ninja Gaiden game, to imitate DMC. In the process, it shows it has a fundamental misunderstanding of why DMC works in the first place. It’s the layman’s interpretation of Devil May Cry. You mash buttons and do long combos for style.
Weapon switching? In Devil May Cry you have to know what weapon you’re switching to and how it contributes to the combo. Each weapon has its own attacks and properties. You can switch between them willy-nilly and mash like an ape, but you won’t get anywhere doing that.
In NG4, you switch from the sword to the drill mid-combo, and nothing changes except for how much damage you’re doing. You’re still mashing light attack. The string is the same. The attack’s properties are the same, because their only purpose is to do damage.
“Isn’t that what an attack is for? To do damage?” That’s the fundamental misunderstanding at play here. Sure, attacks are for doing damage, but the reason why Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden have these long movelists isn’t to give you twelve different flavors of doing the same thing, it’s because each one has its own application. Granted, not every combo is a unique snowflake that exists for one purpose only. Some are going to overlap, out of necessity, but having attacks that you mash out just to do damage with only some slight changes in animation is what a bad action game would do.
If Ninja Gaiden 4 doesn’t have the careful poke-heavy gameplay of Ninja Gaiden, and its stylish combat is nowhere near as interesting or well thought out as Devil May Cry, what is it, then?
It’s A Modern Action Game
In recent years, there has been a split in action game combat design. You have the Souls-like on one side, and the Modern Action Game on the other.
You’re probably familiar with Souls-like. This is a more slow-paced approach to combat. One or two simple attack combos, light and heavy attacks, a heavy emphasis on blocking and dodging using rolls with generous invincibility frames. You poke at your enemy and dodge. It kind of sounds like Ninja Gaiden (I’m getting tired of writing NG. I need to find some synonyms), but it’s not like Shinobi Side-Story. It’s heavier, slower, even more deliberate. Animations have a lot more start up and recovery. When you press a button, it’s a commitment. You put a ring on that heavy attack and stick with it until the bitter end.
Stamina is another component of the Souls-like combat system. You can’t mash a button because you’re limited by stamina. Not all souls-like games have this feature. Sekiro, for example, omits stamina altogether.
The other school of design, the Modern Action Game, is an amalgamation of souls-like with other bad ideas. It’s like if someone saw ice cream and thought “what if we made that, but with raw sewage?”.
Remember all that yapping I did about specific attacks with purpose? Yeah, get rid of that. One button for light attacks, maybe one for heavy attacks, if you’ve been good. What do they do? You press them. What happens when you press them? Damage.
There’s a chance you might miss your attack when you press the button. That would make you feel bad, wouldn’t it? Let’s get rid of any space constraints. If you press a button, you should be rewarded with it hitting something, even if you attacked an enemy that was twenty feet away. If it’s far, then you fly to the enemy. You needn’t worry your pretty little head about anything other than jackhammering that attack button, because that’s combat.
Wait, if you’re just attacking like a rabid ape, what do the enemies do? Do they get locked in hit-stun forever? That’d be bad. Get rid of hit-stun. You can flail at an enemy all you want and they’ll get staggered at some point. Maybe during a scripted sequence, or when you use a huge attack that’s limited by a cooldown, or you can break the enemy’s guard by depleting a meter. Solve the problem by getting rid of it.
These things you’re hitting should hit back, right? If they just stand there doing nothing, you might as well be fighting pre-schoolers. The enemies hit back sometimes, and when they do, they have all the advantages the player has. Their attacks are unstoppable, and they’re incapable of missing since they home in on the player like they’re magnetic. If an enemy starts an attack and you get behind him, he’ll do a 180 spin on one heel like Michael Jackson and smack you in the head without missing a beat.
The player needs something to defend against all these overpowered offensive options. There are two choices: Dodge and Parry. Having a dodge that moves the player around sounds like a good idea, but figuring out the distance, and how long it should take and all that sounds like hard work, so let’s just make it invincible. You press the button, and you’re not really dodging by getting out of the way, you become a ghost and attacks go through you while you’re dodging. That way the enemies can still have magnetic attacks and we won’t have to worry about balancing those.
If you can’t dodge for some reason, you can parry. That’s always fun. It’s an active form of defense. Instead of holding block while you get hit, you can time a parry and get a reward. Since parrying is really hard, we should give the player a huge bonus for getting it right. Maybe time slows down and you can do a counter-attack for massive damage.
That might make the game more passive, since the player gets punished for attacking, so they’ll just sit there and wait for the enemy to attack so they can parry, but notice I said might. Okay, it will make the combat a waiting game of parries, but if you think that’s boring, that’s your problem, player. We only made the game. You’re the one who wanted to play it.
Oh and, before I forget, this may be an action game, but let’s balance all that combat out with something else. Constantly fighting is too basic, too primitive. It might get repetitive. Heaven forbid someone buys a game for its combat, and they find that the game makes them do combat. Put something between each combat encounter. Maybe some traversal. Make the player walk down hallways, or squeeze through narrow openings. If we’re feeling spicy, we can throw in a basic puzzle. Just make sure the split between combat and non-combat is almost 50/50. We can’t give our players too much gameplay, or they might get bored.
Make the gameplay less boring? What? That sounds like work.
These games also love their color-coded enemies. These aren’t always literally color-coded, but are enemies that can only be defeated in one very specific way, such as with a specific weapon or by doing a pre-programmed series of steps. You can’t use this attack against this guy, and you can’t damage him unless you use the Super Technique on his shield to stagger him and then do damage. That sort of thing.
The color-coding extends to other things, too, such as attacks. These games love to have a Simon Says color system where an enemy will flash a specific color, and you have to react in a predetermined way. Enemy flashes red? Push the dodge button. Enemy flashes yellow? You can’t dodge that because the dodge doesn’t actually get you out of the way of the attack, it just makes you invincible, and this move was coded to do damage even through the invincibility.
That’s the Modern Action Game. Your attacks just do damage, they don’t put the enemy into hit-stun unless it’s under very specific circumstances, you don’t have to worry about spacing since your attacks (and the enemies’) magnetize to their target, and there’s a lot of extraneous non-combat stuff to pad the game out. Examples of this style include Evil West, God of War 2018, the newer Assassin’s Creed games, Morbid Metal and- hey look, it’s Ninja Gaiden 4!
To be fair, NG4 has hit-stun, at least. On most enemies. I’ll give it that, but it does everything else mentioned here.
But it has the Ninja Gaiden name, does it do anything with it?
It’s Not Ninja Gaiden
It has a lot of the systems from the previous NG games, but done poorly. It goes back to the rizzless man metaphor I used earlier. Yakumo can’t pull off a three-piece suit.
It has the execution/Obliteration Technique and delimb system from NG2. Except there aren’t specific delimbs. Enemies won’t lose arms or legs, which affect how they act. Each enemy will always delimb in the same way. Tengu will always lose their legs, the shield guys will always get cut in half horizontally, and the annoying ghost dog enemies just get bloodied while staying intact. Your combos don’t target specific body parts anymore. It’s just attack until you see their leg fall off, or hear a the sound of a watermelon being crushed, and press Y to execute them. The deliberate nature of the system is gone.
Some of the more useful, niche aspects of Obliteration Techniques are missing. In the previous games, you could execute an enemy as it was dying, which gave you some a free, invincible execution you could use to dodge through danger. Obliteration techniques were also a real attack that happened in the game’s world; while performing the execution, you could hit other enemies that were nearby. This did a bit of damage in an area, and interrupted enemies that snuck in while you were in the execution animation, and gave you a chance to attack when it finished. This was absent in Ninja Gaiden 3.
There are Ultimate Techniques, like in the previous games. Hold the heavy attack button to charge a powerful area of effect attack that mangles everything near you. You’re completely invincible while doing the attack, but it requires a long charge up, and getting hit while charging cancels it. This was too complex for NG4, so now you have super armor while charging, which means enemy attacks can’t cancel it. You take damage, but charging the UT is free. The people who claim NG2 is an i-frame fest where you spam UT and nimpo can say this about NG4. Granted, the people who say that have probably never played any of these games.
When you defeat an enemy, they drop essence orbs. You can collect these for money, health or magic, depending on their color. If you charge an Ultimate Technique near one, it gets absorbed, making your UT charge instantly, but you miss out on the orb’s benefit. If it’s a health orb, you absorb it for a quick UT charge, but you don’t get any additional health.
This was too much for NG4, so instead there’s only one type of essence, red, which heals you for a laughable amount. Their sole purpose is to charge your UT. No more risk/reward. They kept the mechanic where you don’t absorb essence as long as you hold block, for some reason. That was used in the previous games to choose which orbs you’d absorb and when.
Those are very niche mechanics related to the previous games, but some more general things are changed. These games had parries, but they were very limited and something you’d use as a way to get out of certain situations. You would never sit and wait for a parry, you were rewarded for going on the offensive on your own terms. The dodge was also a good way to defend, since enemy attacks didn’t track very well, and you could move out of the way. In NG4, parries are a lot stronger, and dodging is more for the invincibility frames and not to reposition, since positioning doesn’t matter when you can fly to an enemy by pressing a button, and the enemies can practically teleport to you as well.
Repeating Past Mistakes
Ninja Gaiden 3 is often considered the worst in the series, with good reason. The original release of the game had only one weapon, a ton of flow-breaking traversal sections, quick time events, horrible enemy balance and a lot of other mistakes. The backlash against it was so overwhelming, that it got an updated re-release titled “Razor’s Edge”, which fixed around 80% of the game, bringing it from a 4/10, to a respectable 7/10 experience.
Some of the bad things the game still kept were: tanky/unfun enemies, a lot of gimmicky traversal sections, some annoying bosses, basic moves like the enemy step, flying swallow and guillotine throw had to be purchased as upgrades, there was a separate upgrade tab for Ryu and for the weapons, and the Steel on Bone system (which was a sort of rage mode you went into that let you insta-kill enemies, especially useful for all the tanky damage sponges they threw at you.) relied on charging a special gauge to make more powerful attacks.
All of these things are in Ninja Gaiden 4. You need to buy upgrades for Yakumo, including basic things like flying swallow and the guillotine throw, while also upgrading your weapons separately. A lot of enemies are tanky and unfun to fight. You use the blood raven form to do real damage, and it’s tied to a gauge. It even has a rage mode that lets you do Steel On Bone style one-hit executions on basic enemies.
It’s full of traversal, too. You fight two enemies, then you spend the next minute going through the level, sliding on rails, riding on wind currents or jumping up ledges. It happens more often than in Ninja Gaiden 3, which was criticized for that same thing.
In fact, the traversal seems to be the game’s focus, even over the combat. You can skip combat sections, entire arenas, constantly. There’s one level, one of the many samey stages in the wind mountains area (that’s another thing, this game’s levels are visually uninteresting, and they make you spend a really long time in each area- but wait, this isn’t the full review, this is about combat. Where was I? Right, skipping combat) in that area, I skipped around 90% of the combat encounters. The real meat of the game is its horribly weak traversal.
“But Roger, you dumb, ignorant ape. You can skip the traversal. There’s an option in the menus, but you couldn’t see it because you can’t read, you fake gamer.”
Great! Now I can skip the combat and the traversal. What’s left, then? Cutscenese? I skip those, too.
I don’t get how people can say that NG3 is bad, but say they like 4 in the same breath. I mean, I can understand if they’ve never played 3 and are only parroting an opinion they got from someone else, but a reasonable person wouldn’t do that, right?
Conclusion
Ninja Gaiden 4 isn’t a Ninja Gaiden game. The combat is too loose and mashy. It doesn’t have the same measured poke-based gameplay. Its original design philosophy isn’t anywhere to be found. Even though it has long, stylish combos, air combos, weapon switching and gives you a SSS letter grade at the end of a mission, it’s not Devil May Cry. The combat isn’t as deep, the weapons aren’t varied and it doesn’t have any of the technicality those games have. You can mash one button and pull off the kind of combo you see in a montage.
It’s a modern action game. Its combat is sticky. You press one button and you fly across the arena to attack an enemy, and enemies do the same, so positioning doesn’t matter. In fact, whenever I move around in the arena, I don’t do it consciously. I dodge, the game throws me in the direction it wants, and it doesn’t matter. I didn’t move to get to a better spot, or to get out of an enemy’s range, I dodged for the invincibility frames. Once I move, I press a button and Yakumo flies to whatever enemy he’s looking at, and my position doesn’t matter.
Most of the time the targeting feels random. You can fight an enemy for a bit, dodge an incoming attack, then try to continue fighting the same enemy, only for your character to fly across the arena to an enemy you didn’t even know was there, and he starts beating it up. It’s like abruptly switching dance partners mid-tango.
There are different parries, but they all work roughly the same. There’s a perfect block, an attack parry and a blood attack parry. The attack parry is done by attacking at the same time as an enemy, making your attacks clash and letting you counter. Since what you’re doing 99% of the time in this game is mashing the attack button, I found myself getting random parries in the middle of a combo and free damage. It was dumb. The blood parry is like the regular parry, but stronger, and the perfect block is like the parry, but the same. Why do you need three for the same thing? Well, uh, because you know, well, ah, you see- it’s… it’s a parry.
What little Ninja Gaiden DNA is here is very shallow and simplified. The signs are there, but there are no signifiers.
If I had to give one compliment to the game, it’d be that it’s at least challenging. The enemies attack often and aren’t pushovers. Sure, it’s nowhere near the same as in the previous games; enemies don’t use varied tactics to get you, they don’t move into better positions to attack, they don’t flank, etc, but they do try to kill you, which is more than I can say for most modern action games.
The reason why this isn’t a full review of the game is because I like to play a game for a good while before writing a full review of it. I try to see everything in it, and play it in different ways to come up with a complete opinion. I haven’t done this for Ninja Gaiden 4 because I don’t like the game. I don’t like playing it. Every time I boot it up, I remember I could be doing laundry, or getting some other work done. I’d rather alphabetize my pantry. I find the game to be extremely boring. It’s not just that it’s not like the precious Ninja Gaiden slop I love so much, it’s because it’s a generic modern action game with some fancy set-dressing. There are better parry-slop ninja games out there. In fact, Platinum themselves made one of the best parry games ever: Metal Gear Rising (the other is Sekiro). It’s like they forgot everything they learned during MGR when making this game, which solidifies my theory that the Platinum Games we have now is a shell of its former self, with no one from the original team still working there.
In conclusion, I don’t recommend Ninja Gaiden 4, but I can’t say that 100%. There’s an infinitely small chance that I’ll chance my opinion after 10 or 12 more hours with it, which I will do at some point. If I plan on reviewing it in full, I’ll take my usual three or four attempts at liking the game, playing on its terms, going in from the perspective of someone who wants to enjoy it, but from what I’ve played, I’m not impressed or entertained, really. I’d rather go back to NG2, or Metal Gear Rising. Heck, I’d rather play Wanted: Dead for the twentieth time.
If you want to know more about a game I tried, and tried to like, but failed, check out my review for Gungrave GORE.
I explain what Wanted: Dead is, and why it’s simultaneously crap and great in the review.
At least Ninja Gaiden 4 better than Yaiba.
