The more credit you give "Ninja Gaiden 3" for respecting your ability to play it, the likelier it is to make you rue the thought.
That alone makes "Ninja Gaiden 3" -- a beautiful, blazingly fast action game that's also a descendent of one of the most perfect action games ever made -- a crushing letdown.
Superficially, "Ninja Gaiden 3" looks a lot like 2004's "Ninja Gaiden," a game so cherished that Tecmo keeps reissuing it (most recently, for the PlayStation Vita in February). Ryu Hayabusa (that's your character) remains one of gaming's most agile action heroes. The places you'll visit are beautiful and diverse, and while many of the enemies you face look like reskinned versions of enemies you saw already, the bosses -- from a T. rex to a giant witch whose body becomes a level unto itself -- are satisfactorily outrageous.
In flashes, "Ninja Gaiden 3" also fights like the original "Gaiden," which treated every enemy as a significant danger and provided the ingredients -- a healthy offensive and defensive arsenal for Ryu, cunning intelligence for his enemies -- to turn the most ordinary fight into a showdown more tense than many games' boss encounters.
But those flashes -- where you're evading a pattern of attack in perfect time and countering to turn the tide -- are fleeting. "Ninja Gaiden 3's" tendency to crowd every encounter with roughly six to 10 mindless grunts leaves little room for showdowns. Respecting your enemies' intelligence simply leads to cheap, frustrating barrages of knockdowns where the game effectively strips control from you. You're better off just mashing the controller buttons mindlessly and relentlessly -- which is about as much fun as it sounds.
The game looks spectacular, in part because "Ninja Gaiden 3" uses interactive movie scenes to add flair to Ryu's kills. But the satisfaction of a grueling fight intelligently won -- the main pillar of the original "Gaiden" and, to a dampened degree, its sequel -- is just about gone.
Boss fights, sadly, rarely fare better. There is a gem or two, and the one-on-one format provides badly needed focus to the action, but sloppiness and repeat encounters abound. More often than not, the same rule of engagement applies: Give a boss enemy's attack pattern more credit than it deserves and prepare to get burned, and then just mash away on the next (and likely successful) attempt.
Elsewhere, "Ninja Gaiden 3" takes steps forward and backward to settle comfortably into mediocrity. A surprising attempt to tell a more personal Ryu story results in the usual incoherence.
