Ninja Gaiden 3

Finally completed the demo (it's weird to say that it took me a week to complete a demo…)

I only got one thing to say: TN, forget Ryu, give Kasumi her own freakin' game.

Game the demo a try.

Hmm. It's leagues ahead of Vanilla 3 but still doesn't compare to 2. I'll get it eventually, if only to complete my NG set but... Well, I hope Ninja Gaiden Z sees the smouldering corpse of Vanilla 3 and steers well clear of what it became. You cannot pander to the Lowest Common Denominator with a genre like this.

There are still some fundamental problems. The health system is borked, with me requiring to load the checkpoint if I lose too much in an early skirmish. It's also still weirdly stupid to have two separate super attacks that power up as you damage enemies. The new Steel-on-Bone isn't as bad as I thought it might be, it actually adds a bit of strategy to the game. If it lets me clear out four enemies at once later on though it might be something I would rely on too much...

All that is moot compared to the new enemies though. And they are new. They might look like the ones from Vanilla 3, but they are fast and deadly now. They fight like enemies in a NG game should fight. And they fly apart like enemies in an NG game should too. Don't think I've ever met enemies this... Dodgy before. Kind of annoying, but I'll take them over what we had before any day.

You need to all S rank it on hard for Kasumi? Geez, that's not going to happen. Well, actually maybe with some weapon upgrades.

Finished story mode of the full game (which was 40€, thankfully). Hum, where to begin…

Well, I'll talk about the weapons first:

• The Lunar has incredibly fast combos with little-to-no recovery frames. Ideal to fight big mooks, pretty decent for crowd control (notably the SS>SSS combo) and… not very efficient against bosses, for what I tried. It doesn't have a steel-on-bone attack, but a devastating counter-attack instead.
• The scythe is unrecognizable from Vanilla 3. It's faster, more fluid, with a vastly expanded movelist; yet, paradoxically it's not nearly as game-breaking as it was in Vanilla. The main reason being that infinite SoB chains and "suriken + on-landing circle-attack" combos have been removed (and I'm still frustrated about the latter). It's decent for crowd-control − notably the boomerang attack − but I must say I'm not a big fan of it so far.
• The Kusari-gama… holy CRAP. It was already my favorite weapon in NG2 but now it's just… beautiful. It has single-target combos, crowd-control attacks, and can switch from one to the other in the blink of an eye. The thing eats alchemists for breakfast. I didn't try it against bosses though…

Speaking about bosses:

• The Regent has no warm-up phase, he's in brutal mode from the get go. And he does a lot more damage than in Vanilla. You can no longer launch him and he will always block or dodge counter-attacks. You really have to attack at the right time to stun him. A Wake-Up Call Boss in all its glory.
• The T-Rex has been fixed… kinda sorta. He's better in the first half of the fight because he trips less often, doesn't stay down as long and gets up immediately if he or the "shockwave" hits you when he falls (even if you guard). So you're encouraged to attack the legs rather than just wait for him to fall. The problem is that in the last phase of the fight you cannot attack its legs, and that sucker will sometimes refuse to fall, forcing you to run around like an idiot for 5 minutes (if he didn't kill you before that). There might be some trick to make him trip, but I didn't find it, which made that last phase unnecessarily long.
• The incomplete goddess is more aggressive than in Vanilla, and pretty fun to fight overall, even if the boss isn't terribly memorable.
• The Epigonos is pretty tough. You can still Izuna Drop him, but it's not as easy as before. He's more aggressive too, and has more attacks I think.
• One-Winged Angel Cliff is as forgettable as ever. Nothing much to say.
• The Goddess would be okay, if the gauge for the True Inferno didn't take forever to fill up. Once that part is done with though, I kind of like this fight. I'll take that over the Archfiend at least.

Poor Doku isn't quite as tough as in NG1. Not because he is weaker (he still deals quite a lot of damage) but because Ryu has like 3 times the movelist he had back then, and much fewer recovery frames. The 4 Greater Fiends and Genshin are pretty much the same as in NG2 (Zedonius' stomp attack has just been made easier to avoid). I didn't fight Alma, maybe because I didn't find the crystal skulls in Day 3 and 7…

One great benefit of the return of life-bars is that you can at last see which combos deal the most damage. That makes the bosses shorter overall.

Oh, and Momiji and Kasumi are unlocked directly when you finish story mode.

edited 9th Apr '13 1:38:47 AM by Lyendith

Good to see that it's... Well, fun. Vanilla 3 wasn't really.

So, Chapter Challenge mode removes all the cutscenes, all the dialogues, and almost all the scripted sequences… which has the weird consequence of making Theodore the final boss… you don't fight the Goddess in CC mode. Also, the bosses are fought in one go, instead of Story mode's Sequential Bosses (the Dino-Mecha has only one form instead of three for example). I suppose nobody misses the cutscenes, but on the other hand, doing the levels without any trace of context is a bit strange. There are some sequences in Story Mode that give a bit of variation from the usual fighting, so it's a pity to remove them in CC.

Momiji's weapon is quite devastating overall; makes most bosses a breeze in Normal mode as long as you use the right combos (yes, even the Regent). Either that, or I'm getting better at the game.

edited 16th Apr '13 12:05:54 PM by Lyendith

So there's no eighth day with Bonus Boss I take it? No expansion on the story?

Well, Ayane's chapters do give a little more explanations on some parts, but that pretty much it… the Sword Alchemists and the mini-Goddesses both become Degraded Bosses later.

Unless you count the old bosses fought in the tests of valor as "bonus bosses".

edited 16th Apr '13 12:08:14 PM by Lyendith

Well I guess I meant something more along the lines of a True Final Boss since the goddess is ultimately pretty disappointing... She's a strationary boss after all.

Not sure who it would be, mind. Maybe one last bout with Regent, with him going Super Saiyan. The other NG games always had some ridiculously impossible challenge as a bonus somewhere, like taking all the four fiends on at once or expecting you to beat a fight that was a Hopeless Boss Fight in the campaign, but with 3's greater emphasis on storytelling I was kinda hoping they'd do something tied into the plot this time.

Do any of you know where I can find a good video playthrough that explains the game mechanics and basically can walk a complete newbie to the franchise like me through how to play this game? The game looks cool from the videos that I've come across, but I don't want to buy the game and then end up finding that I'm ill-suited for the kind of gameplay it requires to be able to... well, play the game and have fun doing so.

It's not hard to get into for a guy with no experience in the genre. It was my first action game, and after a few hours of just dying repeatedly in the first chapter, i picked it up and was able to roll with it pretty well. It more or less teaches itself.

Yeah, well, it would still help me decide how high or low of a priority I should place on getting this game if I knew what to expect of it, features-wise. I mean, I'm a fan of Dead Or Alive, which by extension made me take interest in Ryu's franchise of origin (especially since Kasumi and Ayane ended up becoming playable characters in it), and so I am likely to eventually buy the game for that reason alone; if the gameplay features are attractive enough, it may persuade me to buy it sooner than I would otherwise. Thus why I am looking for a video that showcases the features that this game has to offer.

I'd reccomend staying far away from this game, as well as Ninja Gaiden Z. You're better off getting the Ninja Gaiden Sigma games. They're balls breakingly hard, but their gameplay is far more polished than either version of Ninja Gaiden 3.