Oh, Ninja Gaiden. While you have given me nothing but a frustrated youth, I am somehow still excited to hear news of a new game in your series. My experience with a “modern” Ninja Gaiden is really limited to Dragon Sword on the DS and Ninja Gaiden II on the Xbox 360. Given the series’ notorious history of being quite difficult, I was a bit afraid to approach the Ninja Gaiden 3 demo stations.
The demo opens asking “Normal” or “Hard” mode. Still terrified, I think we all know which one I picked. The game then starts with a cut scene explaining… something, I don’t know, skip skip skip, lets murder things! The first thing I noticed about the game, is that it felt much more “quck-time-y” than I remembered Ninja Gaiden II being. Ryu starts off jumping from a building, prompted by quick time events as he soars above his unsuspecting foes. The game provides a lower-third overlay to explain his available abilities as you start slicing and dicing fools, done mostly with “normal” and “strong” attack combinations. These could then later be chained into a dodge move plus strong or weak attack.
But, for the life of me, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to what buttons I pushed; it all equated to incomprehensible insanity on the screen. This is the part of the preview where I should say “whoever Tecmo hired to set up the demo stations should be fired.” The screen I was playing had the contrast and color settings so blown out that frankly the only thing I remember seeing is red and black. My particular station was an Xbox 360, though the Ninja Gaiden booth had stations for both HD consoles.
After my playthrough, I went around to some other screens and realized that none of them looked all that great. The brightness was either too high and colors were washed out, or it was like with my situation where the sharpness, contrast and color equated to a mess. Now, that doesn’t seem to be of any fault with the game, but I did want to explain that the conditions for my demo were less than ideal.
What I did like about the game was the ability to “sense” the correct path by pushing down on the analog stick. I found this helpful for when I got completely turned around hacking and slashing punks and wanted to just get on to the next portion. There was a section of the demo in particular where Ryu enters into fog and has to use his “senses” to navigate. This stretch of the game was basically littered with quicktime events as you would inevitably be grabbed from behind and then would stylishly break free and puncture your enemy through the gut, all with a timed specific press.
The demo ended with a boss battle against a robotic spider where I needed to hack the crap out of its legs before delivering a final blow to some glowing part of the body. Again, accomplished through a quick time like event.
As strange as it sounds, despite the poor conditions I played under and the kind of button-mashy and quicktime-filled gameplay I described, I am still intrigued to play more. There is a certain je ne sais quoi about this game, and I feel deeper gameplay is just below the surface if I had more time to spend with it.
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