Completion Thread 2012: Hai! Dekimashita!

[Fe 26]

beat Resident Evil Operation Racoon City and a few characters in SF vs Tekken

[Tain]

16. Ninja Ryukenden III



Yeah, should have played the US release this time. I had heard that this was a step down, difficulty-wise, but I was kinda shocked at how big of a drop it is from even the second game. You get so much ninpo, you get this crazy sword hitbox powerup, you can hang from the bottoms of moving platforms, there are a good number of repeated 1ups, and probably most importantly, the enemies spawn way less aggressively. I'm pretty sure I only ran into two screens that gave me trouble. The visuals and music might be the best in the trilogy, though. Way less sloppy, tech-wise, than the first game, and there are a lot of cool effects that I don't remember being matched in the second.

[bbobb]

They went to far making the US version hard.

[Compass]

English teacher.

[bbobb]

Incorrect, financial advisor.

[Diff-chan]

3. Saints Row The Third - this game's missions are the best I've seen in an open world game. They are really fun with lots of variety in a ton of settings. I never really got bored. Every time the game fell back on something from a recent mission it changed the setting or threw in some twists to make it feel new.

But the open-world stuff is a definite step back from Saints Row 2. The city is boring, there aren't a lot of stores, clothing options are sparse, and the side quests lack the variety of SR2. Mayhem and Insurance Fraud are as fun as ever but I've been playing that stuff since the original. And Snatch/Escort are still horrible. Volition/THQ hyped this as the ultimate in out-of-control open world games but it's really not.

[MechDeus]

Yeah, should have played the US release this time.

They literally don't give you enough time to finish the last stage. They bumped up the difficulty but didn't actually check to see if it made sense.

[bbobb]

Limiting the continues was the worst thing about it. Who the fuck thinks limited continues in a Ninja Gaiden game is a good idea?

[GohanX]

I don't think I've gotten past level 3 or 4 of the US release, ever. I've been meaning to play through the Japanese version with English text sometime. I played the first couple of levels and it was a cakewalk.

[Rocca]

I think that a lot of the complaints about Ninja Gaiden 3 voiced up to the game's release were off the mark. Normal mode being easy never struck me as a big deal since the series usually has well designed difficulty levels and we knew 3 would start with Hard mode unlocked. The QTEs (both the mid-fight prompts and the ones between battles) are largely brief and unoffensive. The story was never going to matter very much. Hell, I even think the lack of healing items works better for the series overall.

Still, Ninja Gaiden 3 is the first game in ages that I've returned. I played about halfway through Hard mode, and I could never have guessed how little variety the game would have. Most of my time with the game was staying in the air to avoid getting thrown, as the throws were pretty much the only threat I faced. Staying in the air and Izuna dropping seems to be the way to go for every humanoid enemy in the game, and there are an awful lot of those. And the waves of similar enemies just never ended! It wasn't even that you'd be fighting a boatload of them at once, but instead you'd fight like 25 of them in groups of 3 at a time! I don't think it's a 3/10, sure, but I just couldn't bring myself to finish it.

Wound up getting Armored Core V for it, which Destructoid wound up giving 3/10, lol.

Pretty much agree on these points. I'm playing Sigma again and I find that many of the complaints are things which were kind of already in the series to begin with or things they improved on (like regenerative health, which is actually a smarter underpinning then say, finding healing items, since it doesn't offrail the player from the action). I'm playing Sigma on Normal and even there I find a lot of the enemies can be Izuna Dropped as an almost always certain edge. More AI dodging in the original, though.

Really want to pick up ACV, too. Then again, I've wanted to buy every From Software game immediately since Otogi. Sure you understand. Post some thoughts when you're fulfilled with it!