In the collaboration of a lifetime, both Team Ninja and Platinum Games, the developers of some of the best action games ever made, are working together to release the hotly anticipated Ninja Gaiden 4 in a few short months. Of course, October feels like a lifetime away for a game this awaited. Thankfully, we got to check the opening hours of the Ninja series’ big return at PlatinumGames’ offices. Slicing and dicing through waves of ninja until there’s nothing left but giblets and smithereens, the franchise is back bigger than ever. These 2 and a bit months’ wait is going to be incredibly and unbelievably hard.
Ninja Gaiden 4 stars a new protagonist in Yakumo, a young member of the Raven Clan, the adversary of the Hayabusa Clan. Following the events of Ninja Gaiden 3, Yakumo wishes to put a stop to the ruling of the Divine Dragon, travelling across a dilapidated cyberpunk Tokyo, initially on the hunt to eliminate an empress that appears to be the key to stopping this apocalypse. Before long, plans change, and you’re embarking on a wider journey across the lands with the empress and your greater allies in tow.
These opening moments are killer mood-setting that both PlatinumGames and the Ninja Gaiden series are known for. We open with Yakumo atop a bullet train. He’s wading through a relentless assault of cyber ninja, dolled up in futuristic sci-fi armour with blades and rocket launchers. You’re getting drenched in both rain and blood, not quite sure of their source after a while, with the two blurring together. Finally, eliminating the last of the forces as you exit a tunnel and begin rolling towards the heart of the city, the camera pans up as Yakumo surveys the destruction, witnessing the Divine Dragon’s body winding around the city skyline, a mess of machines and cables. A storm rolls in, and the title card ‘Ninja Gaiden 4’ appears on screen amidst the carnage. Ninjas are God-damn cool.
A lot of the vibes and feelings that Ninja Gaiden 4 are evoking so far are the idea of “what was once old is now new.” Yakumo is an excellent fit as a new protagonist, and though he’s marketed to be a means of introducing the world to new players, he’s also primed for veterans to mess around with. His design is leaner than Ryu Hayabusa’s, indicating his junior status as a ninja, but is zippier and speedier in combat as a result. While Ryu Hayabusa is also returning as a playable character, and therefore a lot of the fluid trademark combat moves such as Izuna Drop and Flying Swallow return, Yakumo is the other side of the same coin. He’s, as both Team Ninja and PlatinumGames label him, a ‘mirror’ to Ryu.
“”…what was once old is now new”
This is evident in the fact that Yakumo’s speediness fits into the franchise well. By default, he’s dashing and dodging around an arena and fast with how he mows enemies down. This is occurring with either his rapier or dual katanas. It’s in the suped moves that the fun begins, though. For one, he can transform his ‘Yatousen’ rapier into a blood lance and then drill this into enemies to punctuate and pack on that last devastating hit of a combo to a foe. When you’re chaining this with the sweeping attack of the lance, you’re flying between sturdier hits and jabs, effective for both knocking enemies off their feet or stunlocking them just enough to interrupt them. A lot of these feats are determined by how much charge you have in a gauge, and are pulled off by holding the Left Trigger and X or Y. This is what’s known as Yakumo’s Bloodraven attacks, and combined with the regular devastation fatalities, is a bloody good sight for sore eyes.
Ryu’s stock standard combat feeling might not quite feel as speedy as Yakumo’s, but it’s made up for in his powerful ‘gleam’ state, which sees him devastate everything in front of his eyes in the blink of an eye. You know in anime when a hero unsheathes their sword, then in one second, slices and flurries erupt across the screen, then in the next they’re sheathing it again and all the enemies fall to their feet in a bloody mess? That’s the kind of feeling that this Gleam mode is going for.
This bloody grandiosity expands tenfold when you get to delight in the ‘Berserk’ attacks that both Yakumo and Ryu also have. For Yakumo, you can pause time and, in a flashy, quick cutscene, you’re horizontally slicing all enemies’ bodies in the immediate vicinity in half, leaving pairs of stumbling legs that eventually keel over. Remember when the Ninja Gaiden series would receive a lot of flak for its goriness? Well, it feels damn good; there’s no holds barred this time around.
Ninja Gaiden 4 is an action game co-developed by two studios that know that making the player feel cool and powerful is paramount. It achieves this excellently thus far through the few hours I’ve now played. There’s excellent thematic and visual teaming that is different flavours of each studio. Though of course, the cyber futurism is already quite part and parcel for the Ninja Gaiden name, it’s also incredibly reminiscent of PlatinumGames’ earlier works in titles like 2013’s Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. There’s a cyber samurai boss you fight early on that has a stellar vocalised backing track that is metal as hell, as Yakumo’s sword clashes with metal and steel. At one point, you’re fighting a slow-moving, troll-like character that is also robotic, and begging to be cut down into a million pieces of cord and coils.
Setpieces and what you’re doing in the moment-to-moment gameplay are equally grandiose and exciting. One mission has you navigating a labyrinth of rails in the sky, dodging incoming trains and railroad signs. If you choose to play this as Ryu, he runs along the length of these rails at full sprint. While Yakumo grinds against them as if he were Sonic the Hedgehog. In these moments, the rails bend and warp, corrupted by a demonic entity that sees the rails turn red and offshoot in unpredictable ways. Perhaps the most cinematic thing I’ve done thus far in Ninja Gaiden 4, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that there’s ample variation in the game’s cyber futurism setting, too. A later mission had me navigating a maze of side streets and buildings that were reminiscent of more traditional and older Japanese structures. These were striking sights as I was working towards taking down a large shrine maiden boss that had an army of ghostly lanterns at her defence as she would erratically swing about a mystical umbrella in the climactic fight.
Though we had all abilities already unlocked at our convenience so we could mess about to our own delight, it’s also clear that Ninja Gaiden 4 is aiming to have an approachable experience built on a sense of progression. The first and foremost way this is the case is by providing a whole suite of combat skills and abilities to unlock. Though PlatinumGames reassured me key moves like Izuna Drop, Flying Swallow and even Art of Inferno aren’t hard at all to unlock and can be done so very early on, I’ve yet to see what this looks like in practice. Thankfully, you’re generously and passively earning income for these shops in quick succession, through accumulated kills and exploration in between the main navigating point A-to-B route the levels are largely designed around.
Additional combat challenges occur both in and out of the campaign. In the main menu, there are boss re-runs where you can take another stab at a boss fight (perhaps at a higher difficulty next time around). While in the campaign, you can happen upon Tori gates that send you to an instance known as ‘Purgatory,’ situating your hero in a challenging combat arena. Depending on how much health you choose to enter the challenge with, the higher the reward should you prevail. These certainly caused me to sweat, and in my time thus far, I wasn’t able to clear any of the Purgatory challenges.
It’s clear that Ninja Gaiden 4 is a game both Team Ninja and PlatinumGames want you to replay and tailor at your convenience. Before that sets off any alarm bells in your head, let me reassure you that that doesn’t affect the higher difficulty options. I found the normal difficulty not all that tough until it came to the boss fights. For this, I found the right balance of difficulty coming out of ‘Hard’, the second-highest difficulty option. However, everyone’s got different tastes. It doesn’t suddenly mean that you can sit back and cruise for a level. If anything, I’d encourage giving campaign missions several runs on multiple difficulties; there are ranks for how flawlessly you clear a mission on different difficulties, and there are also side missions that see you hunting down elusive bosses tucked away in corners of a level.
I walked away unbelievably thrilled with my time with Ninja Gaiden 4. Team Ninja and PlatinumGames are evidently working very hard to make it feel akin to the pinnacle of the series, like, say, Ninja Gaiden II Black. I don’t really have any complaints with what I played. Everything that matters most is there so far. Combat feels damn good and bloody while the camera doesn’t get in the way. Wall-running, chained with the grappling hook, makes this a quintessentially fun action game to navigate. Ryu and newcomer Yakumo are wicked cool and rewarding to learn to play.
What remains are the things I haven’t yet seen. We’ve been assured that there will be other locales in-game to distinguish environments; we see as much in trailers when you see Ryu working through a dense, bamboo shoot-filled forest. So far, Team Ninja and PlatinumGames describe these as different parts of Tokyo. Though what exactly does that mean? Can we expect a globe-trotting adventure similar to Ninja Gaiden II? Time will tell.
Ninja Gaiden 4 will release on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on October 21. The wait just became much harder.
After more Ninja Gaiden 4 coverage? Why not check out our interview with the core creative team or the directors?
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Checkpoint Gaming was flown to Tokyo as a guest of Xbox for this Hands-on Preview.
About the Author
Charlie Kelly
She/Her, They/Them
Charlie loves her video games as much as she loves dumb, charming JRPG protagonists: probably way too much. You can often catch her spending too much time being emotional over LGBT stories in games. She also thinks Yakuza 6 is the best one.
