NINJA THEORIES

NINJA GAIDEN 4 struggles to balance PlatinumGames excess with classic Ninja Gaiden

- By Wes Fenlon

Ninja Gaiden 4 has a very specific crisis of identity: it is simultaneously too much, and not enough, like the seminal 1993 action comedy Surf Ninjas. Surely Ninja Gaiden 4 has virtually nothing (aside from ninjas) in common with a notorious flop of a kid's film costarring Rob Schneider and a magical Sega Game Gear, you might be thinking. Well, my friend: guess what happens in this videogame when you get to the water level.

I spent the 15 hours it took to slay 2,580 enemies in Ninja Gaiden 4 hoping that I'd arrive at the answers to two questions: does it feel like a proper sequel to Ninja Gaiden (2004) and Ninja Gaiden 2 (2008), which are both on my shortlist of the finest action games ever made? And if not—if this new iteration, made by PlatinumGames rather than Team Ninja, reworks the series in its own edgier image, rather than in the mold of Ninja Gaiden of old—how much does that matter? Riding my ninja surfboard out of a demon dimension and directly into a Tokyo nightclub to pulverize ghost piranhas with a giant hammer while a rave oontzed in the background cemented that NG4 feels more like a Platinum game than old Ninja Gaiden, and in its best moments that's a strength. But too often it reins itself in, giving the impression of a band performing a workmanlike cover song: they're playing the right notes, but it just doesn't grip the soul in quite the same way.

NINJA SCROLLS

Where Ninja Gaiden's early 2000s contemporaries such as Devil May Cry and Bayonetta are expressive in presentation, it was instead purely expressive in execution. Ninja Gaiden 1 and