Ninja Gaiden Series

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I like Chapter 13 as well, but I just feel that the level design itself is really bland in the sense that it feels like a filler chapter. I do love it for the ability to free-form small groups of enemies at your will, though.

The Archfiend's first form is actually really easy. All you have to do is charge a UT with your bow and use the auto-aiming feature. I hope that you aren't manually aiming at the boss, since the auto-aim works perfectly on it and makes it FAR easier to deal with. Other than that, all you have to do is quickly dash to the other side of the screen every single time that you hit it, so that you can avoid its attacks and charge up and hit it with another shot before it has a chance to attack you again. If it happens to summon those spirits on you, all you have to do is activate your Flame Phoenix ninpo to shield yourself from their attacks (it works just fine even if its only at level 1). Its actually a really easy boss fight at its core.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Recently I sat down and played some classic Ninja Gaiden II for old time's sake. To any modern gamer who has never played a side-scroller like this before and has been conditioned to the easy hand-holding of modern games, this would be one of the WORST games to use to introduce them to classic gaming. And you know what? I love this game for that. It kicks your ass right from the start. Its not insanely hard or anything once you practice with it, and its considerably easier and less cheap than the first NG game, but its still ruthless and unforgiving to those just starting out the game, or in my case since I was really rusty with the game I died quite a few times in the 2nd level alone. What I like about the game, though, is that there almost always seems to be a perfect way to maneuver through a crowd of enemies and make a flawless path for yourself without getting touched and being as quick and efficient as possible with supreme ninja acrobatics. This is a game that earns the right to have the world "ninja" in its title.

I really wish Tecmo would've made a Ninja Gaiden IV in the same vein that Capcom made Mega Man 9 and 10. I'd love a good throw-back game that brought back the spirit of the classic games. Of course I'm a huge fan of Itagaki's 3D NG games, and to be honest I do consider those to be superior games on the whole, but the retro gamer in me just wants some classic style Ninja Gaiden right now.

Something else that I would REALLY appreciate, though, if a creative and talented enough developer were to make it, would be a 16-bit "Super" Ninja Gaiden. That is to say, I would like to see the 16-bit evolution of the classic side-scrolling NG game that I had always wanted but never got. Other great series like Mario, Castlevania, Contra, and many others that were hits in the 8-bit era got fantastic new installments in the SNES and Genesis era that really took them to new tiers and let them explore all new kinds of gameplay elements while still sticking true to their classic formulas. I REALLY wanted to see that happen for Ninja Gaiden but never got it. Its something that I'm sure will never happen, but if I were to name the number one most wanted game that I would want to get made, it would be Super Ninja Gaiden (with the Super being what I would expect an SNES Ninja Gaiden title to be called, being that it was what every other big Nintendo franchise making the jump to 16-bit was getting stuck in their title).

Sadly, Ninja Gaiden fans like myself get shitty developers like Hayashi making crappy games like the NG3 that we just got, which shits all over the fundamentals of the entire series from the NES games to Itagaki's NG games. Its a sad time to be fan of this series.

[gunswordfist]

Beat Archfiend and of course the game at 3 pm today. Beat that Dagai jackass with the right amt of items left, actually used auto aim and easily beat AF's 1st form. After something over 10 tries I beat his 2nd form with the staff. lol at Ryu accidentally reviving him.Do you have to do new game plus on the same difficulty?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Yeah, the new game + feature only works on the difficulty that you beat the game on. There are 2 options you have: You can do a successive play and keep you're arsenal just the way it was when you beat the game (with basically all or most of your weapons upgraded, as well as you're health bar and ninpo slots), or you can choose to start out again with all of your weapons at their base stats/forms (basically they all start out at level one) and lose all items you were carrying on you in addition to starting out with your original-sized health bar and only 3 ninpo slots (this mode is basically only something you would choose if you want to actually be able to upload your Karma scores online or if you want to do a handicap run but don't want to be limited to just the Dragon Sword).

If you start a new game on a harder difficulty setting, you'll have to beat that difficulty from the ground up before you can unlock new game + for it. The reason its not the same as how DMC lets you carry you're weapons and abilities to the next difficulty level is because its meant to be a challenge and you have to earn those weapons again by starting out with your base-stats once again when you start a higher difficulty for the first time. It makes the first few stages extremely challenging, but it also makes you multiple times better at the game if you can make it past the first few chapters since it forces you to dramatically improve you're most essential skills before you can earn the higher-powered weapons and increased health and ninpo to give you a much better advantage in the tougher fights later on in the game.

[Foggle]

NG 3 now has a downloadable demo. You gonna' grab it, EK?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I heard about this on the NG board yesterday, and I honestly checked for it but didn't find any demo up. Either it got taken down after a brief amount of time or for some reason Team Ninja decided to pull the XBOX360 version of the NG3 demo while leaving it up for PS3 users. Either way, I can't locate any demo, and I've looked everywhere for it.

That isn't to say that I'm at all eager to play this game, but as a huge Ninja Gaiden fan I'm at least curious enough to want to try the worst game in the franchise (well, OK, to be fair the Game Gear NG is probably the worst one, but still, this game is a travesty).

[Rynnec]

Just played the demo. The few good things I can say about it are: The music is good (particularly the main menu theme), and the combat looks cool, if nothing else. Everything else is just bleh. The enemies are so easy it's pathetic, the boss was a joke, the stealth segments are ass, and the kunai climbing is a pain.

Pretty much what I was expecting from the game.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

Having played the first game rather recently, how would you say that this game compares to that in terms of combat mechanics and its overall level of fun, from your perspective?

To be more specific, does the combat seem as responsive and precise as the first game, or does this game clearly feel like it was made by an entirely different team than the one that made the first game?

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

I just played a bit of NG2 since I was in the mood (and on Acolyte, no less), being that I'm burned out for the day and won't be able to resume studying until the evening since I just need a few hours to chill out and get back into the mood to hit the books (which is basically what I've been doing all semester, anyways, so I deserve a break every now and then).

I was messing around with the Vigoorian Flails, among other weapons. First off, aside from this weapon getting a MAJOR upgrade from the flails in the first game (and I liked those weapons as they were in the first game), I just have to give this game credit for its massively improved combat system (and once again, I already thought it was a good combat system as it was in NGB). Everything just feels so much faster without sacrificing any of the precision and depth of the first game. Hell, this game has far deeper combat that just about trumps the first game in every way in terms of both fluidity and general mechanics. That said, I do see how some people would be turned off by the over-the-top nature of the dismemberment in this game, but Ninja Gaiden has always been a more "cartoony" kind of game to me since the NES days, and I feel that the absurd nature of having enemies easily dismembered fits in just fine with a Ninja Gaiden game. The thing I like about it so much, though, is that its not purely just a visual aesthetic as so many onlookers of the series seem to think. It has a very mechanical and strategic element to it that really influences how you play the game on the higher difficulties. You'll want to learn what specific weapons have higher dismemberment rates than others on which specific enemies, and which moves for each specific weapon bring that dismemberment rate to its max. Its all about efficiency rather than just stringing together combos (basically, take your enemies out as fast and effectively as possible before they have a chance to do some serious damage to you), but the beauty of this game is that, aside from MNM, you can play with a free-flow comb-heavy style if you so choose to, as well. This game doesn't limit you to just one play-style (once again, except for MNM, which I'm OK with since Mentor still provides plenty of challenge and replay value on its own), and in general I feel like the game's combat alone offers you up so much variety that it never really feels repetitive (unless you just play it safe and stick with the Dragon Sword the whole time if only for the sake of familiarity). Even weapons which I used to dislike turn out to be brilliant and have their uses once I experiment with them a little bit, such as the Kusari-Gama.

Even without having played it, I can tell that Ninja Gaiden 3 clearly missed the point of all of that. I wanted to see the game improve on NG2's weaknesses while still retaining its amazing combat system. Hell, that's what just about EVERYBODY wanted, especially Ninja Gaiden fans. How Team Ninja decides to instead regress with the combat system and do nothing to improve the weaknesses of the previous games in any conceivable way is beyond me. It seems so simple, but I guess that team really is clueless on how to make a video game without Itagaki and the other third or so of the team that he took with him when he left. Quite clearly it must have been the only good third of the team. The rest of them just have just been there strictly for the labor part of the programming, rather than for any of the creative parts of it.

[Rynnec]

It definitely feels more sluggish than the first game. The game feels slower in general really.

In terms of the combats fun factor, it has a few good things going for it. Its flashy and over-the-top (the pseudo-finishing move animations are particularly fun to watch), and some of the choreogrophy is good (sans the steel-on-bone miscreant), and the combos look pretty kickass in and of themselves. Of course, this all of this is mitigated by the fact that you're just mindlessly mashing one button, two buttons when you get bored, without regard for even the most basic of strategy. It gets to the point where you just want to use your Ninpo just to get things done and over with.  If this games enemies were as tough as Sigma's, I'd deliberately ignore any easy-tickets like Ninpo so I could test my abilities against them. I hardly remember blocking all that much either, in Sigma blocking was a vital part of the combat, here I just blocked once or twice.

The game also becomes harder the more you clear out enemies. So say you're fighting like two dozen mooks, and you manage to dwindle them down to two, those two enemies will give you a harder time as a duo than they did as a large group. ProjectARK goes into slightly more detail on this in his playthrough of the game.

And this is a minor nitpick, but when the game forces you to kill the soldier, it automatically equips the Dragon Sword, regardless of what weapon you had equipped before. If the game's gonna force me to be a dick for no reason, at least let me go Grim Reaper on the guys ass.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

So, I finally played the demo.

Its even WORSE than I expected, if you can believe that. I was expecting a mindless hack n' slash game, which was bad enough, but this game can't even FUNCTION right. I encountered slow-down occurring on and off whenever the game felt like it, in the middle of battles. That is  to say, the game would only be responsive to me when it wanted to, and it really hampered my controller input, so there were at least 1 out of every 3 or so times I tried to pull off a move that ended up failing because of a mixture of slow-down in the frame rate and unresponsive controls. NEITHER of the first 2 games had this problem at all, and I found this problem occurring in a POST-RELEASE demo of this game, for crying out loud. I shudder to think just how bad the actual game must be to play if its like this the whole fucking time.

I tried out all 3 weapons, and I have to say that the Scythe in particular was HORRIBLY butchered in this game. I don't mind that the move-set works differently, as its a sequel and it should be different. That said, I hate the fact that this weapon clearly does NOT work with their SoB mechanic in mind. Its way too powerful so after just 1 or 2 hits I already involuntarily enter an SoB animation, and end up killing an enemy even if I don't want to. its out of my control.

In fact, "control" is the key word of the day, here. Easy or not, I could at least still enjoy this game if I felt I was mostly in control of my own actions like in the first 2 games. Over here, I honestly feel more like the game is playing itself for me if all I do  to give my own input is to press X repeated, and maybe through a Y in there when I feel like it if I want to see a slight bit of variation. The other major control issue I have with this game is the idiotic decision they made to have you automatically enter an OT animation whenever an enemy is in a near death state, regardless of whether you press X or Y (in the 2nd game you specifically had to press Y to do so, because it was supposed to be in your control), and regardless even of whether you are already in the middle of a combo or not. This leads to many moments in which I'm trying to set up a combo string for myself and automatically have it interrupted by a finishing move that's been pulled off against my will.

Another thing I hate about this game is that it becomes so lenient with the button-timing for combos that it actually actively pulls off combos for you that were the same ones that took MUCH more skill and precision to pull off in NG2. I was infuriated to see that I unintentionally pulled off one of my favorite moves with the Falcon's Talons in NG3 that took me some practice to get down in NG2, and I really wasn't even trying to do that.

I absolutely detest that this game thinks so lowly of the average player (even the typical gamer isn't that pathetically unskilled that they need the game to do everything for them) that it downright takes the responsive controls from the previous games out of their hands and instead just rewards them for tapping X repeatedly. To put things into perspective, even God of War has FAR more precision than this game. Hell, even NINJA BLADE of all things is more responsive than this piece of garbage. I hope that Yosuke Hayashi and everyone at Tecmo who had a hand in making the key decisions for this game's design end up realizing just how terrible they are as game designers. I hope that they realize that they don't belong in the video game industry and leave it entirely to pursue other interests, because they really should NOT be making games. I have never been so pissed off at a game in my life, but this game is so actively stupid its insulting. I mean, its not just that they made bad design decisions in general and made a far inferior game in that regard, but they even fucked with the one thing that the first 2 games got definitively right with both fans and critics alike, the combat system. This game completely fucked with it and made it infuriatingly unresponsive and basically turned one of the best combat systems of all time into a combat system that's even worse than the average hack n' slash game of this generation. Truly, if there were any doubts before, it can now be seen that the first 2 games were good BECAUSE of Itagaki and his key members who he took with him after leaving Tecmo. Its just so blatantly obvious by how bad this game is, or this is at least the case for Ninja Gaiden, since to be fair I can't judge DOA5 being that I'm not even much of a fan of the previous games and don't really have anything to compare it to. Still, I would not be one bit surprised if they manage to fuck that game up, too.

[Foggle]

DOA 5 has QTEs.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

DOA 5 has QTEs.

Actually, it does not. It just has a new mechanic that is its equivalent of the "special attacks" that are common in fighting games these days. They are called "power blows" and they are completely under player control (so even if you have one that's ready to use, you don't have to). If you do choose to do it then there is a moment where you choose to press one of 2 buttons to attack or throw, while you're opponent presses one of 2 buttons to guard or block, but those aren't QTE either but rather just an extension of the rock-paper-scissor system that the DOA games have with their combat system. In this regard, even Team Ninja isn't stupid enough to put QTEs into a fighting game that's based off of precision and player control. At least I hope they aren't that stupid, but so far they haven't shown anything like that in the game, yet.

[Foggle]

I heard it did, but that was from GameFAQs people. Can never trust them.

Hopefully they'll get DOA 5 right. Some of my friends liked the 3DS one.

[Dr. Ensatsu-ken]

The funny thing about the 3DS one is that while it got decent reviews and reception, many long-time fans have pointed out that it completely recycles both stages and characters from previous games. That is to say, everything about it that is good still essentially comes from material in Itagaki's DOA games. This is the first DOA game that's made completely without Itagaki.

For what its worth, it doesn't look nearly ad bad as NG3, and fans of DOA who know and love previous DOA games have been responding quite positively so far to both the demo and the footage of this game. It also has a different half of the team working on it than the one that worked on Ninja Gaiden (Team Ninja was effectively splint into 2 since they were working on both projects simultaneously), and of course the director of DOA5 is different from NG3. So, lets just hope for Team Ninja's sake that its the good half of the team, if it DOES indeed have a good half.