Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki, who died last week at the age of 58, was once famous for trolling his competitors in interviews. He listed Tekken 1-5 as his "most hated" games and had public "feuds" with Tekken's Katsuhiro Harada and Devil May Cry's Hideki Kamiya. While working on 2005's Ninja Gaiden Black, he said that Devil May Cry 3 director Hideaki Itsuno—who went on to make DMC 4, 5, and Dragon's Dogma—"did pretty well for a young guy" and "might make something even better next time."
Behind the blustery facade, Itagaki seemingly respected his action game peers a great deal; roasting them was his way of projecting the image of a true Master Ninja. But as I tried to convey in my Ninja Gaiden 4 review, Itagaki's games were different from the ones his competitors were making. It wasn't just that they tended to be more challenging, but that they took themselves so seriously; the winking tone that Kamiya favored with DMC's Dante and later Bayonetta were nowhere to be found in Itagaki's games. His sense of humor was adding an easier "Ninja Dog" mode to Ninja Gaiden for players who died too many times on the first level.
I wrote in my review that Ninja Gaiden 4 "is simultaneously too much, and not enough, like the seminal 1993 action comedy Surf Ninjas," a movie I couldn't get off my mind when I got to the part of Ninja Gaiden 4 where, yeah, you do a bit of surfing. It's silly as hell, but at that point a bit of silliness is exactly what the game needs, because its earlier levels are disappointingly bland.
Protagonist Yakumo is dead weight; other characters chatter at you over the radio to deliver story details no one will care about; the cyberpunky take on Tokyo mostly just serves to make the first few stages annoyingly dark to fight enemies in. But the second Yakumo jumped on a surf board, it felt like PlatinumGames had jolted awake and started having fun themselves.
Boss fight against a giant shark? Weird zombie enemies? A disco dance floor killing field? Portals that leap you between the real world and the demon dimension? When it gives itself permission to be silly, Ninja Gaiden 4 gets a lot more fun.
Shortly after, Yakumo gets his hands on a weapon that strikes me as extremely Devil May Cry 5-coded. It's a magic box of ninja tools called the Kage-Hiruko from which he can pull giant shurikens, bombs, and all sorts of blades attached to an extra pair of mechanical arms. The immediate power-up you feel from getting this weapon is meant to be a big, exciting moment as you begin an assault on the enemy base—and it mirrors the extra pair of spectral arms DMC5's Nero grows when he transforms into a full-on demon.
While you can swap between weapons quickly in Ninja Gaiden 4, a staple of Devil May Cry hero Dante, using the Kage-Hiruko feels like it melds multiple weapons into one. Its ranged attacks outdamage your basic shurikens, its bombs can blast a whole room to pieces, and its up-close melee instakills on weakened foes are the nastiest in the game.
While I liked the preceding weapons Yakumo collects fine, this one recontextualized them and made me wonder how many other outlandish ideas Platinum had that didn't make the cut, either for lack of time or because they felt too out of place for Ninja Gaiden. Did they have a version of Dante fusing his motorcycle with a demon and then splitting it in half to beat dudes up?
After introducing this weapon, Ninja Gaiden 4 goes back to playing everything depressingly straight, with narrative beats that lack much punch. But there's a moment near the very end where it can't help but wink again; as Yakumo wall-jumps up a damn skyscraper, the camera pulls back to highlight the epic scale of the moment while his hup hup hup jumping sound effect plays out over and over again. A better version of this game would've had its tongue in its cheek far more often.
Would it have felt like Ninja Gaiden? Nah, not really. But it seems unlikely that anyone's ever really going to make a game that fully captures the personality and priorities of Tomonobu Itagaki.
At the same time, the peers he once worked so hard to best have mostly left their own legendary series behind. Kamiya departed PlatinumGames, and without him a new Bayonetta seems unlikely. Itsuno departed Capcom, meaning Devil May Cry is likely in hibernation for the near future. If getting a little goofier is what it takes for Ninja Gaiden to fill the gap left by their absence, then I hope Yakumo shows up in full clown face for his next outing.
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