Last year was the year I fell in love with Ninja Gaiden. As a fan of the early God of War games, and nearly every Platinum game, the hack and slash genre has always been one of my favorites, but Team Ninja’s formerly flagship franchise has always been a blind spot until I picked it up last year. The announcement of Ninja Gaiden 4, and the shadow drop of Ninja Gaiden II Black ignited a thirst for digital bloodshed within me. I opened last year by playing through Ninja Gaiden Black for the first time, and followed it up with the aforementioned freshly released remake of the sequel. My time with them led them to both become some of my favorite action games of all time. I had many reasons for loving them, but sometimes you don’t truly know just how much you love something until you try a different, worse version of it. That worse version is the black sheep of the mainline series: Ninja Gaiden 3.

Ninja Gaiden 3 is one of those titles I held in a different tier from the rest of the franchise. Before even playing them, I understood NG1 and 2 as cult classics that were some of the best in the genre when they were released. I knew NG3 didn’t get anywhere near the same level of acclaim, so instead of it sitting next to the Devil May Crys and God of Wars in the Hack and Slash Hall of Fame, it sat neglected in the bargain bin of mediocrity with the Marlow Briggs’ and the X-Blades. However, I have a special spot in my heart for that exact type of game. I adore the aforementioned Marlow Briggs and the Mask of Death despite the low budget jank, and I love Dante’s Inferno, despite it having nowhere near the cultural impact that its polish, IP, developer, and publisher were expected to earn it. So, I needed to know, was Ninja Gaiden 3 relegated to the margins of gaming history because it was overlooked, or because it was judged poorly once it was looked at?

I’ll cut to the chase: it was judged poorly. And for good reason.

Ninja Gaiden has always been an incredibly fast paced franchise. Enemies are quick to punish the wrong dodge or block with massive damage, so you have to be able to read enemies in a fraction of a second. This fact, and the elaborate, sometimes direction-specific, attack combos make combat often feel more like a fighting game at times, which is appropriate considering Team Ninja is also behind the Dead or Alive series. NG3 continues this pace of combat, but nearly all of the flexibility is gone. These games are very difficult, often in a way that feels unfair or mean. Even during my first playthrough of Ninja Gaiden Black, I had to reload a previous save from hours before a boss fight, just to play conservatively enough to carry some healing items into the battle. But that’s the thing about those first two games, you had a chance to adapt that difficulty with healing items. Of course, you also had health upgrades, some of which would heal you once used. But if you ever got stuck on a certain challenge, you could sacrifice the same currency used to upgrade weapons and abilities to purchase healing items and Nippo (magic) abilities to keep you topped off in a fight.

Ninja Gaiden 3 lacks any real way to prepare for a battle in the same way. While there is still a quick menu accessible at any time to swap weapons and Nippo abilities, there are no health items either purchasable or findable in the world. This means whatever health you walk into an encounter with, even if you barely got out with your life last time, is all you have. Now, similar to Batman Arkham Asylum, you do regenerate your full health bar after each fight or wave, but every time you take damage, a fraction of your maximum health is broken off, and it only recovers upon reaching one of the few save points along the linear path. These elements combine to punish players disproportionately and remove most of the potential for strategy in the combat. There is no swapping between weapons to find out what you enjoy using the most, there is only the quest to find what’s most efficient, especially when you spend your second hour still stuck on the same boss because you can’t manage to take more than 3 hits.

However, those choices didn’t come out of nowhere, as they both exist to prop up the biggest new mechanic in the game, Steel on Bone. Whenever an enemy does a grab attack, some of the most iconic moves in the franchise, you can counter it by dodging toward it while hitting the strong attack button. This triggers the screen to zoom in close to Ryu and focus on the visceral sound and feel of him spilling foe’s marrow. If there happen to be other enemies nearby, this can often be chained into up to 3 other enemies for the same effect, and depending on how many you get in this chain, you receive health back for nailing the attack. Using Nippo attacks, which take several kills to recharge between uses, also replenish health. Both of these mechanics come in handy, but each of them are pretty inconsistent to use reliably.

Steel on Bone is finicky to trigger as it is directionally dependent and also depends on a combination of buttons that must be pressed within a window of only a few frames. I am sad to report that I am not quite that dexterous, at least not at this age, so I could never reliably depend on the mechanic, and I found myself triggering it most often by accident when my health bar isn’t even an active concern. Well, then I can just lean on my Nippo attacks then? Well, I did, and once I spilled enough blood to recharge them I would often hold onto them for long stretches just to use as a last minute get out of jail free card. But the kicker is, Nippo only gives you health when used on organic enemies, not mechanical ones. And guess which game’s final few bosses are almost entirely robotic?

All of these mechanics and gameplay choices make for an experience that only becomes more frustrating as you play. I’ve played little of the From Software catalog, but I understand that games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring are painfully difficult, but allow you to bring any potions, spells, weapons, or summons you can find to a fight to try and balance out any potential deficiencies in reaction time or stats you may have. That understanding that no matter how hard some paths may be to travel, there is always a path forward in those games is the main reason I plan to return to both after dropping off of them fairly early on. NG3 lacks any of this adaptability to the point where it feels like a test of skill in the truest sense. On some level, I see the appeal of that kind of design, as Sekiro is widely loved for being a similar kind of test. But in the case of NG3, it just makes the game come off as overly rigid, and that impression is backed up by the level design and story.

Gone are the days of Ninja Gaiden 1’s Dark Soulsian level design, complete with doors that open to previously traveled areas and hidden collectables only found when backtracking near the end of the game. Ninja Gaiden 2 was also much more linear, but Ninja Gaiden 3 takes it to a whole new level. Often levels are just one hallway with one possible path, with combat arenas often being one big room with a single entrance and exit. Even when secrets are nearby, which you can often see down yonder from the main path, the fun doesn’t often come from trying to figure out how to get to it, but just trying to nail the precise platforming to get there. The path is always obvious, complete with a button to jolt your camera towards the main objective whenever you want, and these choices make the game feel more like a rollercoaster ride than an actual adventure where the possibility space feels much wider. Hell, even the extravagant hell dimensions, tombs, and slimy caves of the first two games are largely replaced by the militaristic set pieces of the second game and vaguely approximate recreations of real world locations. For a game about a guy who can pile drive dudes so hard the top half of their bodies explode, this much more grounded level design also leaves a lot to be desired.

What leaves even more to be desired is the story; well actually, perhaps that’s not even the best way to put it. The story is much more prominent in this game compared to the prior titles, but for all of its better directed cutscenes, mocapped performances, and oodles of recorded dialogue, I can’t say it’s much better. Ninja Gaiden as a series (at least in Team Ninja’s hands since I’ve yet to touch the originals) was only ever supposed to be about a cool ninja doing cool shit. Sure, there was always a story and lore to absorb, but any and all of that that wasn’t in service of an epic narrative moment or gameplay set piece was relegated to text in menus. But this focus on being a game that defined itself with its gameplay over its narrative is what gave the franchise its charm. The first two games didn’t need you to meet Ryu’s son or give Ryu a surrogate daughter for the game to toy with your emotions, as trying to slice through those hallways full of ghost piranhas does plenty to engage your emotions mechanically. Having a game that feels nearly Kojima-esque in tone, pretention, and long-windedness gives the impression that the combat itself, the defining trait of the series, is not good enough to attract thumbs to the sticks. It feels like the game is trying really hard to be “as good” as so many other games of this era, with some sequences even forcing you into a slow, third person walk like the Gears of War and Uncharted games that were trending at the time. Instead, the more the game feels like its contemporaries, the less it feels like itself.

On top of all of that, the story is bad! It’s actually not the worst story I’ve ever seen. It tells the tale of an evil plot to take over the world enacted by one man and the aristocratic manly man supporting him. However, that one man’s brother tries to stop him, dies alongside his wife, and they both leave behind a child. That child is taken in by the sister of the mom and the brother of the dad, whom you might expect eventually betrays everyone and turns that girl into a giant monster that only Ryu is designed to stop from destroying the planet. It’s an unnecessarily convoluted plot told differently than how I’ve laid it out for dramatic effect, but the ultimate effect is indifference. I’ve played through plots just like this, but none of the characters are distinctive or fleshed out enough to care about their personal drama. For a game that tried so hard to have a “real” story this time around, it sucks that the best they could do was a family tragedy that is only tangentially related to Ryu. It feels bizarre to have this nearly mute character suddenly talking up a storm not just in cutscenes, where he surprisingly removes his mask at times, but in gameplay as well. Some levels are even played through with a companion at your side slicing up enemies over conversational worldbuilding. It’s strange seeing someone who seems so to himself in prior games change into someone warm enough to quickly earn the trust of a child he’s never met. And all of this change in characterization in service of a story that would be nearly unchanged without his presence.

What makes this story so bizarre is that a later sequence has Ryu return to his village in Japan. In this slow walk through the past, you see that he not only has a whole community of people who love and respect him, but a supportive wife and charmingly eager-to-fight son as well. Ryu does indeed have more to him than the stoic badass we knew him as, but outside of this admittedly sweet sequence, we don’t see much of that in Ninja Gaiden 3. I think the reason for this is hinted at in the other moments that Ninja Gaiden 3 farms for franchise nostalgia. Hidden away in some levels are crystal skulls surrounded by blue flame, and when interacted with they open up a new environment for an arena challenge that, once complete gains you karma to spend on upgrades. Almost every one of these skulls I found took me to a level from one of the first two Ninja Gaiden games. Even in the narrative itself, when you are kidnapped and put into a combat simulation, your captor taunts you by simulating other iconic combat arenas from the first two games. They may taunt Ryu by asking him if these places “look familiar” but to any player who is a fan like me, they will not only look familiar, but serve as a reminder of the gulf in quality between Ninja Gaiden 3 and the games prior to it. Bringing up these locations attempts to call back to nostalgia that players have for the franchise, but they are all shallow and don’t pull on any deeper connection to the franchise besides surface level recognition.

So, the game is mid. Middling games is not a new phenomenon, not even a particularly notable one. Then why did I feel compelled to write over 2000 words about it? Well, I knew since last year that I loved those first Ninja Gaiden games, but I don’t think it was until now that I truly understood how masterful the craft of them were. The combat threw my metaphorical dick in the metaphorical dirt time and time again, but it never truly felt unfair, as there was always extra effort or craftiness on my end I wasn’t deploying. The story was campy nonsense, but it took up so little space that the level design and gameplay were allowed to speak loudest. There’s not much in the first two games that could be found in other corners of pop culture, but something about its specific vibe still feels unique today. But Ninja Gaiden 3 follows so few of these cues from its legacy. The story spends a little too long saying not much of substance with eloquence no one asked from it. Its tone is muddied by its attempt to ape other action games in its own era. And its gameplay is unforgiving and pushing to such an extreme that the power fantasy is almost fully dispelled.

But worst of all, I wrote so much about this game not only because I’m invested in the series, but because there are many times where Ninja Gaiden 3 is actually really fuckin fun. Despite being finicky to pull off, the Steel on Bone animation is immensely satisfying, even when it triggers on items and enemies that definitively do not have any bones. There are still satisfying combos to learn and execute and a diverse (though less diverse than prior games) rogues gallery to use them on. You can really feel the fun of the combat most in the few chapters where you play as slightly overpowered guest characters. Plus, the added pressure of fewer sources of health forced me to lock in even harder on the most challenging boss fights. If I could have just brute forced my way through a boss fight halfway through the game in an underground lab, I would have never learned that I could cut off a quarter of its health right at the start by charging an attack instead of just rushing in. But then I get to an encounter like the final boss, which is just a bombardment of magic missiles and swinging arms you must kill regular enemies in to charge up a newly acquired Nippo attack and the taste of sugar I had turns again to vinegar immediately.

So, yes, Ninja Gaiden 3 is a middling game. But goddamn, is it built on one hell of a solid foundation. The foundation is what I truly love in this case, and I can’t wait to see what the developers of the future get to build on top of it. Well, with exception to the fourth game, which I will continue to boycott until it’s publisher, Microsoft, stops contributing technology and funding to Israel for its ongoing genocide in Palestine.