Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki, who died last week on the age of 58, was as soon as well-known for trolling his rivals in interviews. He listed Tekken 1-5 as his “most hated” video games and had public “feuds” with Tekken’s Katsuhiro Harada and Satan Could Cry’s Hideki Kamiya. Whereas engaged on 2005’s Ninja Gaiden Black, he said that Satan Could Cry 3 director Hideaki Itsuno—who went on to make DMC 4, 5, and Dragon’s Dogma—”did fairly effectively for a younger man” and “may make one thing even higher subsequent time.”
Behind the blustery facade, Itagaki seemingly revered his motion recreation friends an ideal deal; roasting them was his means of projecting the picture of a real Grasp Ninja. However as I attempted to convey in my Ninja Gaiden 4 review, Itagaki’s video games had been totally different from those his rivals had been making. It wasn’t simply that they tended to be more difficult, however that they took themselves so severely; the winking tone that Kamiya favored with DMC’s Dante and later Bayonetta had been nowhere to be present in Itagaki’s video games. His humorousness was including a better “Ninja Canine” mode to Ninja Gaiden for gamers who died too many occasions on the primary stage.
I wrote in my review that Ninja Gaiden 4 “is simultaneously too much, and not enough, like the seminal 1993 action comedy Surf Ninjas,” a movie I couldn’t get off my mind when I got to the part of Ninja Gaiden 4 where, yeah, you do a bit of surfing. It’s silly as hell, but at that point a bit of silliness is exactly what the game needs, because its earlier levels are disappointingly bland.
Protagonist Yakumo is dead weight; other characters chatter at you over the radio to deliver story details no one will care about; the cyberpunky take on Tokyo mostly just serves to make the first few stages annoyingly dark to fight enemies in. But the second Yakumo jumped on a surf board, it felt like PlatinumGames had jolted awake and started having fun themselves.
Boss fight against a giant shark? Weird zombie enemies? A disco dance floor killing field? Portals that leap you between the real world and the demon dimension? When it gives itself permission to be silly, Ninja Gaiden 4 gets a lot more fun.
Shortly after, Yakumo gets his hands on a weapon that strikes me as extremely Devil May Cry 5-coded. It’s a magic box of ninja tools called the Kage-Hiruko from which he can pull giant shurikens, bombs, and all sorts of blades attached to an extra pair of mechanical arms. The immediate power-up you feel from getting this weapon is meant to be a big, exciting moment as you begin an assault on the enemy base—and it mirrors the extra pair of spectral arms DMC5’s Nero grows when he transforms into a full-on demon.
When you can swap between weapons rapidly in Ninja Gaiden 4, a staple of Satan Could Cry hero Dante, utilizing the Kage-Hiruko feels prefer it melds a number of weapons into one. Its ranged assaults outdamage your primary shurikens, its bombs can blast a complete room to items, and its up-close melee instakills on weakened foes are the nastiest within the recreation.
Whereas I appreciated the previous weapons Yakumo collects tremendous, this one recontextualized them and made me surprise what number of different outlandish concepts Platinum had that did not make the lower, both for lack of time or as a result of they felt too misplaced for Ninja Gaiden. Did they’ve a model of Dante fusing his motorbike with a demon after which splitting it in half to beat dudes up?
After introducing this weapon, Ninja Gaiden 4 goes again to taking part in every part depressingly straight, with narrative beats that lack a lot punch. However there is a second close to the very finish the place it could actually’t assist however wink once more; as Yakumo wall-jumps up a rattling skyscraper, the digicam pulls again to focus on the epic scale of the second whereas his hup hup hup leaping sound impact performs out over and over. A greater model of this recreation would’ve had its tongue in its cheek much more usually.
Would it not have felt like Ninja Gaiden? Nah, not likely. However it appears unlikely that anybody’s ever actually going to make a recreation that absolutely captures the character and priorities of Tomonobu Itagaki.
On the similar time, the friends he as soon as labored so exhausting to finest have largely left their very own legendary collection behind. Kamiya departed PlatinumGames, and with out him a brand new Bayonetta appears unlikely. Itsuno departed Capcom, which means Satan Could Cry is probably going in hibernation for the close to future. If getting slightly goofier is what it takes for Ninja Gaiden to fill the hole left by their absence, then I hope Yakumo reveals up in full clown face for his subsequent outing.
