Ninja Gaiden Series

[Spark Of Spirit]

I thought QTEs were dying, but this E3 has had more QTEs than I've seen in years.

Why do people enjoy them so much? They blow.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The reason people (usually casual gamers) enjoy them is that they are little mini-game challenge sequences (that really aren't all that hard to begin with as long as you have average reflexes) that basically allow players to do really cool looking moves and actions without having to get good at the game by gaining skill and learning combos. Its basically for lazy gamers who want a lazy form of gameplay. In the case of NG3, it doesn't seem like they totally butchered the combat system, but the QTEs definitely slows down the combat in a bad way, IMO.

Like I said, NG2 already had a MUCH better alternative to QTEs. Why no other games have learned from it and tried to implement some form of OTs is beyond me.

Also, you know what really pisses me off when I think about it? Somehow I bet that critics are going to like this game better than NG2 just because it complies to the demands to make the game play more commonly and turn it into a more generic-style hack n' slash. To be fair, the demo at least still felt enough like a Ninja Gaiden game that I haven't totally been turned off from playing it, but as far as I'm concerned its a step down from the previous NG games, and I'd like to tell Hayashi that I think his gameplay design for this game is far more dated than NG2's personally.

Oddly enough, Hayashi modernizing this game by immersing you into it by getting rid of save statues and instead giving you those hawks that fly down, Ryu being able to perform stealth kills, and having that operative (who is rumored to be Irene, but once again, its only just a "rumor" at this point) talking to Ryu (just like how most games these days has a disembodied voice talking to you as you play) don't bother me at all. I actually find those to be welcome additions to the game since I like those aspects implemented in other games. That said, QTEs are just plain unforgivable in my book.

Actually, the stealth kills do bother me a smidge, since Ryu is supposed to be a bad-ass warrior more than a ninja (he isn't supposed to be a ninja in any realistic sense, but just because it sounds cool), and Itagaki's vision of him as well as the original NES games was that he mowed down any enemies who were in his way as a form of honor, whereas back-stabbing them is dishonorable, but to be honest....I don't mind them going against that since I still think its a fun gameplay mechanic as long as its not implemented too often.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I re-watched the demo and decided to list my likes and dislikes:

Likes

Combat is still fast and fluid (minus the QTEs....)
Sliding
No projectile spam
Camera looks to be much better implemented than in previous games
UTs no longer reliant on essence (which no longer exists in the game); in other words, no more UT spam is possible
Ryu's new voice (this is the 3rd voice actor he has had, and believe it or not, this one seems the most fitting, to me)
New save system (believe it or not, I actually prefer it to the dragon statues for some reason....)
Stealth kills


Dislikes

QTEs
Removal of dismemberment and OTs
pis-poor enemy AI (not only are they less agressive, but they whine and beg for their lives....so annoying)
Wall-climbing (it just slows down the gameplay, and I don't see why Ryu can't just jump from wall-to-wall like in previous games)
Recycling NG2's music (yeah, you lazy bastards at Team Ninja, I noticed that)
Boss is just a QTE-fest with no health-bar
No enemy variety except for humanoid enemies (as of yet)

So far I count 8 likes and 7 dislikes going by the demo....so surprisingly that gives me one positive point on this game, but then I have to subtract one since one of my points is one thing that this game doesn't have that should have been removed to begin with (no projectile spam, which is definitely a good thing), so then it makes 7 positives and 7 negatives, which still makes me really neutral to this game.

You know, I wish Itagaki was still heading the development of these games. Back when I saw the NG2 demo a few years ago, my score was somewhere around +1000 or something like that for me, whereas over here even a +1 score is a bit of a stretch for me to make.

[Spark Of Spirit]

Boss is just a QTE-fest with no health-bar

What in the blue fuck? That seems like the worst news so far.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Yeah, it really does bother me A LOT. Other gamers might not get it....but I really like having boss health-bars. I like the feeling of progress of getting better at a tough boss. Even if I don't beat it on my 10th try, I take satisfaction in how low I got its health to come down since the first time that I fought it (in which case I would initially not have even been able to take out a quarter of its health). With no health bars, these boss fights will just become a pis-poor version of the boss fights from a Zelda game (I like Zelda's boss fights, but only because they are designed for its style of gameplay).

[gunswordfist]

So, I just saw the gameplay demo, and my worst fear came true: Quick Time Events. FUCK YOU HAYASHI!

To be specific, there is an over-abundance of them in combat, and I don't see what the point of that was when he could have just stuck with Oblieration Techniques which are the same general concept but much better implemented since you don't have a fucking button-prompt slowing things down with every single kill. Seriously, just watch some of the kick-ass videos of pros playing NG2 on Master Ninja to see what I mean. You get stylish kills without slowing down the combat. That said, the one genuine good thing I can say about the demo is that aside from the STUPID AS FUCK QTEs (sorry, I just can't get over that), the rest of the combat doesn't seem to have sacrificed its speed at all.

As it stands, I already know for sure that this game won't be nearly as good as NGB or NG2 in my book, but I was already expecting that. It doesn't look terrible, but in a way it is because now it feels more like "Ninja of War" than Ninja Gaiden. **Sigh** (still....even then the combat kicks the crap out of anything you'd find in a God of War game....just sayin').

The other thing that depresses me from this demo is that the enemy AI looks pis-poor compared to the other games. I HOPE that this is remedied on harder difficulty settings. Also, I hope that we still have fiend-killing like in the previous games. Don't get me wrong, I actually "prefer" the humanoid enemies in the 3D NG games (they are simply more well designed and more fun to fight), but I still love the aspect of fighting fiends and it would really tick me off if they totally removed that element of demonic/mystic creatures from the game completely.

So, yeah, I may still be up for playing this game when it comes out, but its definitely not going to be a day one buy for me, and I'm going to know to keep my expectations relatively low when picking it up.

The series is forever dead to me. That's all I needed to read.

[Foggle]

I'm normally fine with QTEs in games (I even like them, sometimes), but they really do not belong in Ninja Gaiden. What the fuck is Hayashi thinking?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Just an update: It turns out the part where Ryu guts his enemies in combat isn't a QTE sequence. The button-prompt only appears the first few times in the demo as a tutorial. After that, it can be used was a regular move in the game without the buttom-prompt (sort of like an OT), so that's one less QTE sequence in the game, but its still fucking stupid because it slows down the overall combat speed and flow. So, yeah, Hayashi can still go fuck himself.

Another thing that was pointed out to me was that the QTE where Ryu slides is one of Ryu's own general abilities rather than having you press a button that does something Ryu can't normally do. But in that case why the fuck would Hayashi make that a QTE sequence? He said he wouldn't dumb the difficulty down for fans, so why can't he just trust that we're smart enough to figure that out on our own. I actually like the addition of the slide maneuver to the game, it actually seems like something that fits NG, but I don't want to be told when I need to slide under a truck flying at me, or something like that. I'd rather die in the process of trying to figure it out by myself.

Oh, and after re-watching the demo yet again, I can already say that the fucking kunai climb has got to go? Why does Ryu even need it? Why can't he just use his flying bird flip maneuver (jumping back and forth between walls to scale them) to get up in like 2 seconds, as opposed to ever so slowly climbing up a simple wall, brick by brick. It seems both unnecessary and downright boring and tedious to do, and its yet another thing that slows down the pace and flow of the game. Uuuugggghhhh. So, yeah, its basically Uncharted Ninja of War. I won't say that its a terrible game, but it no longer feels like a real Ninja Gaiden game to me, so in that regard, I agree with GSF in that "Ninja Gaiden" is dead (at least the gameplay design that I have come to know and love from the series). The sad thing is that I'll still probably play this game anyways just because it happens to share the same title, though.

[Spark Of Spirit]

It's going to be on nintendo's new system.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Yeah, I commented on that on the E3 thread. I'm still pissed off at Hayashi about this game, but the fact that its going to the WiiU is just another reason for me to pick that up and transfer to Nintendo for good.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, according to Hayashi, the QTEs seen in the E3 demo were apparently just moves that Ryu could normally do which are used in the first level for "tutorial" to ease people into Ryu's new abilities in the game (as he put it), and he claims that there won't be any QTEs in future levels of the game past the tutorial stage, or very few of them at that. If this is true, then that will be a HUGE relief for me, but somehow I'm still skeptical since after seeing what still resembles QTEs (at least to my untrained eyes, I suppose), I really don't trust Hayashi too much. But, he did specifically claim on video that there wouldn't be any past the tutorial, so I'm hoping he can at least keep his word about that.

I also watched the demo from someone else playing the game who was apparently much better than the person who played the demo for Game Trailers, and I have to say that the combat is definitely not bad as far as the Dragon Sword goes, as that player was able to chain together many more combos before using the gutting moves that slowed down the flow of the combat, so if more experienced players can use that feature to a minimum and spend more time chaining quick combos together than that will be yet another big relief for me.

As it stands, if those 2 above things are indeed true, then it'll restore just a bit of my faith that this game may be above average. I hope to GOD that their true, because despite what it may seem, I do really want this game to be good being that I am an NG fan, but right now I have very mixed feelings about this game, as I really like some additions but completely loathe some others.

Did anyone else besides me check out the demo? I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts on it besides the pros, who mostly feel the same as me but I have to admit overreact way too much to some things that aren't necessarily bad changes at all, from my point of view.

[Spark Of Spirit]

I was getting annoyed when he was fighting and I kept seeing the action freeze and "B" highlighting the whole screen over and over.

Otherwise, graphically it looks very nice.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The button-prompt that appears in the middle of combat disappears after the first wave of enemies in the demo, so its not actually a QTE but just a tutorial. Still, I think its annoying that it slows down the overall combat, but it didn't look that bad either. What confuses me, though, is that Ryu pulled off some OT moves in the demo (at least they recycled those animations from NG2), so I'm confused as to if they keep those in the game or just integrate that into the new combat system as a "steel-on-bone" move.

Eh, Whatever, the demo looks OK but underwhelming for a 3D NG game. I hope that the gameplay improves in the future with fan feedback, but I won't hold my breath for anything like that to happen.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Wow....I just realized that we likely won't be getting back most weapons from NG2, because Hayashi keeps stressing that the weapons in this game will focus on sword-play, which basically means that any other weapons we get will likely just be the DS with new skins and possibly some unique combos of their own....but that's just plain stupid. In previous NG games we got numerous completely unique and varied weapons which each had their specific uses for strategic situations. If Hayashi is really dumb enough to remove that, then I deeply fear for the future of this series, assuming that it'll even have one after this game.

I know it may seem like I'm way too edgy about this thing and all since I'm sure not many people care whether this game is good or bad, but being a passionate NG fan, I just can't ignore shit like this. I mean, it'd be the equivalent of Capcom releasing Mega Man 11 but then saying that they wanted to focus on Mega Man's own regular M. Buster and then just giving you a different color for what shots look like every time you beat a boss. That'd be pretty lame, wouldn't it? Well, this is the same exact concept applied to Ninja Gaiden, from what I can tell. Its not confirmed yet, but as far as I can tell, its been heavily implied.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Even though I'm not all that excited for NG3, I realized that unlike many other classic game series and franchises, the NG series has never really gotten a proper retrospective except for one series of great articles that I can think of, and I kind of wanted to give my take on the series, and I figured since a new NG game will be coming out within less than a year, it might be as good a time as any to do one for this series, which while classic and popular among many retro and core gamers, seems to be slowly becoming more and more forgotten and distant from a lot of gamers as time goes on. Being that I am a big fan of the series myself, both the classic NES titles as well as the 3D games, I wanted to give my input on each of the games that I have played in the series, and I also plan to research and write about the more obscure games in the series that are nearly impossible to find and that I will likely never get to play, but my main focus will be on the main titles, anyways. I'll even create a separate blog for it (which I may just use for future game reviews that I want to do).

Now, keep in mind that I'm focused on finishing up my AR projects first so I don't plan to start this for a little while (plus I also want to order NGB online and replay the entire game before I write a main article on it). But, I just wanted to post here that I was planning on doing it, and I also was thinking that it'd be interesting if I could get any secondary opinions for anyone here who has played any of the games, not as full articles (unless someone wanted to do a full article of their own), as they could be from a few sentences to a whole essay long depending on how much that person wanted to write, to go along with the main article that I'd write for some of the games just to kind of get more than my opinion in there being that I'm obvious biased towards these games and will make them seem better than most people might find them if only because I love them so much, but it'd be nice to see some opinionated pieces on them to go with what I write about them to give some readers an alternate perspective (I plan to at least link to what I write on other boards that I go to, which is only....2, but I may just link to it on a few boards that I used to go to ages ago just to get some people to read it).

Once again, I'm only going to do this later on in the summer since I'm focused on AR stuff and since I have to work through a hospital rotation for 2 weeks starting from next week (so I'll be busy, then), but if anyone wants to volunteer to write a little something of their own later on, I'd really appreciate it, but either way its all cool.

Oh, BTW, I'm going to create a blog for video-game reviews in general since I want to give my own takes on some games, from classics that I have only gotten to play recently like the Mega Man X games to other modern games that I want to give my own takes on, like the vastly underrated F.E.A.R. 2 (IMO). If anyone else wants in that'll be cool too, but like I said I won't be starting this for at least another month.

And one more thing I'll probably do is post a short article here as to why NGB is my favorite game of all time, just as a warm-up of sorts, I suppose. At any rate, I just thought that I'd get this all out there, since I'm really in the mood to write about some video game related stuff.