Sunday, May 27, 2012

MNGN FAIL & Ninja Gaiden 3

Last night was gamenight, unfortunately, while my friends played games like Quarrel and SoulCalibur V, I was sound asleep dreaming of the fucked up things I dream about. Not much to really talk about in the way of gaming with the exception of Ninja Gaiden 3. 

Im a huge NG fan, and I knew that NG3 was coming, I just didn't realize how close it was until yesterday. It turns out that the release date is March the 20th. I also stumbled upon the collector's edition over at GameInformer.com, which looks pretty sweet. So I went to GameStop yesterday and reserved myself a CE. I reserved the Xbox360 version of the game, as NG has been an Xbox franchise since its rebirth on the original Xbox. With that said, after the departure of Team Ninja head Tomonobu Itagaki and a large portion of the Team Ninja team, the team is now headed up by Yosuke Hayashi and what remains of the original team. I've heard that most of the folks that stayed consisted of Mr. Hayashi's team, the same folks responsible for both of the PS3 NG games, otherwise known as the Sigma games. This would explain why much of what has been shown thus far of NG3 has been of the PS3 version of the game. I don't really see this as a refocusing on PS3, but more of a keeping with what that team was used to.

   

What I've seen of the game looks pretty awesome so far. I am particularly interested in the new multiplayer mode. From the trailer they released it appears to be Halo with ninjas. It looked like a team slayer kind of game type with ninjas running around slashing each other to bits, casting ninpo, and doing some kind of gliding maneuver to quickly traverse the maps. There also appeared to be some kind of cloaking or invisibility being used by certain ninjas as well. There were multiple outfit colors, head pieces, hats, masks, etc. shown, leaving me to believe that players will be able to fully customize his or her ninja.

The graphics look very nice and far more detailed than NG2. NG2's graphics, while still great, didn't look much better than that of Ninja Gaiden Sigma. The screenshots I've seen of Ninja Gaiden 3 are very detailed and look like what I thought Ninja Gaiden 2 should've looked like. One of the things that made the last two NG games special, graphically speaking, was the bright and diverse color palette, the art style, and the interesting characters and environments. Ninja Gaiden 3 seems to be keeping with that tradition from what has been shown so far.


It will be interesting to see how the story fares with Itagaki gone and Yosuke Hayashi at the helm. Ninja Gaiden has never been known for it's stories, but rather it's beautiful graphics, lighting fast gameplay, and unique characters. In the previous two games the stories were hard to follow, especially in NG2, to which I still don't know what the story was about, and I beat it more than once. So we'll see if Hayashi is able to prove himself to be a better storyteller than his predecessor. 

I'm pretty excited for Ninja Gaiden 3. The last two NG games are some of my favorite games of the last decade. I have every iteration released of NG and NG2, including the collector's editions of Sigma and Sigma2 (technically the proper wording would have been to call it Ninja Gaiden 2 Sigma, but whatever, lol). I have no doubt in Yosuke Hayashi and the rest of Team Ninja's ability to make a bad ass NG game. After all, all the things added to NGS and NGS2 only made those games better. I've even thought about getting a PS Vita for a portable NG experience. 

                             

So how about it, anybody else looking forward to this?

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