NINJA THEORIES

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

- By Wes Fenlon

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 mould 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 pulverise 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 2 are games about pressing the exact right buttons in the right order to stay alive and feeling briefly like you are the baddest dude to have ever lived when you do. They do not have a berserk gauge that fills up to let you become an invincible killing machine – you’ve just gotta do that the hard way. Nearly all core combat abilities are available to you from minute one; you get better by internalising when to mash out a seven-hit flurry on weaklings and which enemies are best dispatched with a twirling, skull-pulping Izuna Drop from midair.