Andrew Fitch: "As a gamer who grew up with the intense ninja action of Ninja Gaiden on the NES, I’ve got to admit that it’s bothered me a bit that controversial developer Tomonobu Itagaki has become synonymous with the franchise in recent years. After all, the series existed long before Itagaki’s arrival at Tecmo—he was still in college when the original trilogy released. For me, this is what it all boils down to: The NES Ninja Gaiden entries were all about ninja assassin Ryu Hayabusa. The post-2004 releases were all about Tomonobu Itagaki."
Screen Rant Writes: Team Ninja knows fans want a new Ninja Gaiden game, but if Ryu Hayabusa is going to come back, there are some things that the series needs to fix.
- Better story, not that it has to be very deep though
- Better level design, on par or even exceed NG1
- Better enemies design, NG3's enemies design were boring and repetitive
Bring back the difficulty of the first game both 3 and Yaiba (yes I played that POS game) had laughably easy difficulty that it wasn't even funny.
In the conclusion to a three part series, CV takes a look at the most recent Ninja Gaiden games, for better and for worse.
They need to make a true sequel to Ninja Gaiden 2, that was the most satisfying combat I've experienced in a hack n slash game.
been playing 1&2 on and off since they were released. I usually will play until I get frustrated then take another year off lol. Nver tried 3 or the 4th one even though they are in my backlog.
I tried to go back to Sigma but good god those controls are just insufferable. Couldn't do it.
Phil writes, "Sometimes all it takes is one game to make a long-running or promising franchise become dead in the water, maligned to irrelevancy and just a memory in the annals of gaming history. It's a dog-eat-dog industry where it doesn't matter if the franchise has been around for ages or for milliseconds--just one or two failures and you're done. That's the case with these franchises, all of which I'm sad to see are currently nowhere to be found. Whether any of these will return for a kick-ass comeback or not is up in the air, but what is known is that for many, these franchises met truly unfortunate ends."
For Tony Hawk's Pro Skater really the first 3 were really the only good ones. After that they sort of went downhill.
Klonoa was great but released at a bad time on just 1 system with no marketing. Razors Edge fixed many issues with NG3 vanilla and is a guilty pleasure. Another one that killed a franchise is Lost Planet 3. The better game was Japan only in EX Troopers on PS3. I also would say Marvel vs Capcom Infinite killed the series. I know it's less than a year old but the writing is on the wall. Silent Hill series as soon as Konami gave it to western devs and also made mobile spinoffs.
I loved the dead space 1+2 hated 3. Played through them so many times but found number 3 such a bore to get through, really hope they pick this back up.