Ninja Gaiden 4 Review
After the moderate disaster that was 2012’s Ninja Gaiden 3 I’d basically given up seeing the number four next to the words “Ninja Gaiden,” but here we are. Platinum Games brought my dreams back from the brink with Metal Gear Rising and they’ve done it again with Ninja Gaiden 4. Given the state Platinum Games has been in recently it’s even more of a surprise that it’s actually good! How good? Well I can’t wait to tell you. The initial thing you’ll notice from playing Ninja Gaiden 4 is that it FEELS like a Ninja Gaiden game, at least once you go into the control settings and switch left trigger to block as god intended. This might not sound like an accomplishment (and for many reviewers complaining about “old school design philosophies” it isn’t) but after a decade away and in the hands of a different studio it wasn’t always a guarantee. It’s still as fast and hard as well,…
Let’s Talk About Silksong
At some point in the late 2000s I made playing hard games part of my identity. Reading articles about the reboot of Ninja Gaiden on the original Xbox and how so many people couldn’t even get past the first boss just grabbed my imagination with the thought of “but what if I could?” And so I did, and I kept doing it through multiple Ninja Gaidens, Devil May Crys, Bayonettas, and all sorts of flavors of Dark Souls. As such I’m not really the most unbiased when it comes to talking about hard games, and on top of that everyone has talked TO DEATH about Silksong already and how unfairly hard it is. But I just finished it, got the true ending, and beat all but three bosses (still counted as 100% completion, don’t ask me why) so I want to talk about it too! Hollow Knight wasn’t a game that I…