Ninja Gaiden 4 - Ch. 15 (Master Ninja) New Game

Описание: Finally getting our hands dirty with Ryu! I wasn't quite anticipating Chapter 15 to be as intense as it was. They really threw a ton of enemies at us here, and I'm all for it! Ryu plays a lot differently than Yakumo, and it definitely took some practice in the training room to get the hang of his moves. I'm still fairly disappointed that they removed so many of his core moves from Razor's Edge. Ryu not having his basic forward light and heavy attacks is NOT COOL, not to mention his lack of a charged heavy input. I've gotten a lot more used to the "motion" inputs in NG4, but it's just not the same. No flame wheel drop! That's probably one of the coolest attacks Ryu ever had with the dragon sword, and it's just NOT HERE. Kinda lame, Platinum Games... His ninpo attacks are insanely powerful and too easy to abuse. His UTs are crazy strong too. On the other hand, it's not easy to play with our food since most of the enemies will just straight up block or counter his normal attacks and leave you exposed to damage that can end the fun almost instantly here.

For this chapter, I spent a fair bit of time exploring to make sure I didn't miss any chests, and I hope I didn't! His combat skills are unlocked by finding these chests, so it's unfairly critical to make sure we track them all down. I'm not sure why Platinum decided to do it this way. I rarely use items, so Ninja Coin is all but useless while playing with Ryu. Allowing us to use them to purchase his skills would've made a lot more sense to me at least. I dunno, why give us ALL of his ninpo attacks right out the gate? They could've allowed us to find those rather than his combat skills. His gleam form is mostly used to interrupt power attacks here. Other than his ninpo, he really doesn't have any ranged "gleam" attacks, so you kind of need to be up close and personal with the enemies when you use his gleam form. He's not invulnerable in gleam form either, and I'm not sure if they can auto-counter the same way as Yakumo's BR attacks can. This chapter makes it very easy to miss things, so as you'll see, I do some backtracking to double check and make sure I got everything.

The boss of this chapter is Cetus (the shark daemon), and he felt significantly easier facing off against him as Ryu. I messed up at the very end and let a ghost fish grab me which wound up getting me killed, but luckily, I had a revive available, so I used it. One last thing of note is the fact that you have access to all of the accessories that you've collected throughout the game as Yakumo. I was debating whether or not to even use them, but ultimately decided to equip some of them. The one which gives me extra skill points will come in handy for getting all of the dragon swords moves unlocked as quickly as possible. This was a fun chapter overall, but I still can't shake that feeling of being let down by how basic Ryu is in this game. I know it may seem like I'm being negative or overly nitpicky, but I really do love this game. To me, Ryu feels pretty "tacked on" to an otherwise incredibly fun experience, and it's just a bit of a bummer is all.

Hope you enjoy the show. Thanks for watching!