Ninja Gaiden III Review

There is a game that comes around every so often that I am really excited for, that completely lets me down. Ninja Gaiden III does more than just let me down, it upsets me. This game is so bad, it doesn't even deserve to be connected in any way to it's predecessors.



Visually the game looks worse than Ninja Gaiden II, which doesn't make sense because that game came out almost four years ago. The game is extremely low res and there are frequent frame rate drops, especially in large battle situations. What I found was most annoying was the sporadic camera during battles. The game tries to be cool and stylish by zooming in on over stylized kills, but ends up hurting itself. How am I supposed to plan my next attack when I can't even see my enemies because of terrible camera angles? That's a question Team Ninja should've asked themselves when they decided to incorporate this feature in the game.

Gameplay has been completely stripped down leaving almost no depth in the game. They decided to take out awesome features of the game for some reason like multiple weapons and multiple ninpo attacks. Instead you have one weapon that you don't even upgrade and one ninpo attack that allows you to turn into a fire dragon (or at least what looked like a fire dragon to me). The shop has also been taken out, leaving you with nowhere to buy or sell items, removing another layer of depth. Most importantly, the combat is just plain boring. It isn't as careful and combo oriented as the past installments, all you really need to do to be successful in battle is mash buttons. Instead of open combat, you are just locked in an arena and fight off waves of enemies. It's not bad, but it really gets mundane after a couple of hours. Battle also gets annoying as Ryu will get caught behind objects or stuck between walls because he is moving too fast, and the camera is too sporadic.

A trademark of this series is the brutality. Ryu used to be able to slice and dice his foes until they were just a headless, limbless torso. Now decapitations have been taken out of the game, leaving this game feeling unfamiliar. I didn't think I would care that much, but while playing this game, I just wanted to see some limbs go flying for old time sake. Boss battles are also less impressive. The last two installments offered stimulating boss battles in which each boss differed from one and other. In Ninja Gaiden 3, you fight a bunch of giant robots and machines, making boss battles redundant.

The story is terrible and the dialogue is laughable. You really don't care at all about what is going on and don't feel compelled to even try to care. Ryu's arm is infected by the blood of all of the people he has ever killed and only has a week to live, so he has to do a bunch of killing in order to complete his goal apparently. They could have used this to show a compassionate and emotional side to Ryu, and they almost do it. In one part, a soldier is cowering in fear after Ryu kills his whole squad. You control Ryu as the soldier keeps backing away and begging for his life. Instead of giving the players the option to let the man live, you are forced to corner him and murder him. This does nothing but make Ryu look like an emotionless, heartless bastard, so why should I care if he is dying? Dialogue and voice acting have never been great in the series, but they are especially terrible in this one. In one line Ryu actually says "I will borrow your soul, Lord of the Dark Ninja." What does that even mean?

This game is downright awful and to be honest, I didn't enjoy one bit of it. Being a huge fan of Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden II, I felt cheated by this lazy attempt to keep the series going. After Tomonobu Itagaki left Team Ninja, I was still confident that they would be able to keep the Ninja Gaiden series great, but man was I wrong. Don't play this game, especially if you're like me and loved the first two.