The Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection is a blend of great, decent, and disappointing elements. The $39.99 collection includes Ninja Gaiden Sigma, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge, remarkable action games featuring rich, thrilling combat mechanics. Unfortunately, the flaws present in the later games live on in this collection, with no real changes made to improve upon the framework. Worse, this PC game bundle removes the games’ multiplayer modes, and features meager performance-adjusting options. Series newcomers will enjoy the superb action, but veterans looking for these games’ ultimate versions will be left wanting more.
Powerhouse Combat
Ninja Gaiden is an action series that stands apart from its genre counterparts due to its dense combo system and fighting game mechanics. Action games with two-button combo systems are commonplace, but Ninja Gaiden is unique in its mechanical richness. Each combo has a unique series of effects and functions, similar to those in Dead or Alive or Soul Calibur, and mastering these techniques gives you an impressive degree of control over the hordes of demon and ninja foes you encounter across all three titles. Vulnerability states, such as staggering, crumple stuns, spin stuns, partial juggles, full juggles, guard breaks, knock downs, and clear launches, are packed into every combo, resulting in complex combat that very few action games can match.
Ryu Hayabusa is surprisingly committed when attacking, which is quite unlike offense in other action games. Generally, action games feature generous evasive abilities that you can utilize at any time, even if you’ve already started an attack. This makes offense extremely safe, as you can immediately fall back on an evasion move if you attack when you should not. Ninja Gaiden has none of that. Ryu attacks swiftly and decisively, but once he starts an attack, he won’t stop until the animation is finished (or he’s struck and interrupted). To balance this, developer Team Ninja gave Ryu steely defense that’s used to deflect blows from any angle. More importantly, Ryu’s block cancels his attack recovery, letting you immediately follow up almost any strike with a guard. Enemies also operate under these rules, cementing the block as a combat cornerstone.
There are a few other combat aspects that keep things fresh and interesting. Essence is the series’ primary currency, orb-like wisps released from defeated enemies. The Essence color denotes its value: yellow holds monetary value, blue restores health, and red restores Ki. You can spend Essence on weapon upgrades and restorative items, but the energy has a unique combat function, too. Charging a heavy attack near Essence enhances the strike, transforming it into a devastating Ultimate Technique. Enemies killed with Ultimates drop significantly more Essence than normal, incentivizing you to leave Essence on the field during the fight rather than collecting them outright.
Ninja magic, called Ninpo, can be called upon to perform devastating attacks, and it’s powered by Ki. You can replenish Ki by using potions or collecting red Essence. You can’t combo Ninpo with other attacks, but they’re useful for clearing out rooms or enemy groups. Ninpo attacks are the least interesting kit in your repertoire, but they have some utility.
Sigma, The Brightest of the Bunch
Master Collection’s Ninja Gaiden Sigma is the PlayStation 3 port of the Xbox’s Ninja Gaiden Black. It features enhanced visuals, updated character models, new enemies, rebalanced puzzles, a new weapon, and even an additional playable character. While all this sounds rather expansive, Sigma is relatively faithful to the core framework established in Black. Sigma sees young ninja Ryu Hyabusa defeated, and his village destroyed by a demon god’s warrior servants. Vowing revenge, Ryu ventures into Tairon—a secular, fiend-riddled nation—to defeat the monsters that attacked him, and reclaim a treasure snatched from his village.
The bulk of the game takes place in Tairon, a surprisingly expansive map featuring many zones, including flooded ruins, fire and ice caverns, and connected catacombs. The level design is great, and holds up surprisingly well. It’s still satisfying to unlock shortcuts and see how the world connects.
The first Ninja Gaiden is also the most experimental game in the franchise, featuring puzzles and extensive exploration compared to later series entries. The Sigma version included in the Master Collection removes much of the Xbox version’s backtracking and puzzle solving, but there’s still a lot of movement and exploration.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma’s combat is decidedly slower paced compared to the action in subsequent titles, but enemy encounters are balanced around the game’s methodical offense and defense. It is superbly balanced, overall. Sigma-exclusive chapters featuring Rachel, the buxom demon slayer, are bland retreads of Ryu’s missions that are made worse due to her boring combo strings and awful sub-weapon. Yet, even at its most uninspired, Ninja Gaiden’s combat shines brilliantly, so Rachel’s sections don’t overstay their welcome. Ninja Gaiden Sigma is easily the best game in the collection.
The Divisive Sigma 2
Ninja Gaiden 2 built upon the action formula by expanding combos, adding weapons, and introducing enemy dismemberment as a combat element. Ryu’s combos had a random chance to dismember enemy limbs, crippling foes. When maimed, opponents became more passive, but gained access to kamikaze attacks that dealt outrageous damage. To counter this, Ryu could instantly finished weakened foes with a heavy attack. While these seemed like great additions, Ninja Gaiden 2 had some unfortunate flaws that were only made worse when the game was remade for the PS3 as Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 is the version bundled into the Master Collection. Without getting into too much detail, Xbox 360’s Ninja Gaiden 2 was a brutal, challenging, and ultimately unbalanced game that pit a grossly underpowered Ryu against hordes of unrelenting enemies. Despite its cheapness, the game featured thrilling action, so the maniacal difficulty and falcon-swift combat is largely why Ninja Gaiden 2 is so memorable.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 course corrects by rebalancing enemy health pools, reducing enemy encounters per level, and limiting the enemy numbers you face at any given time. The result is an oddly empty action game, with combat that’s more tedious than fun. Sigma 2’s enemy variants resist dismemberment, and have bloated health pools to make up for their thin numbers. Unfortunately, this slows fights into tedious, combo spam sessions against a few damage-sponge enemies. Without dismemberment to keep the momentum going, Sigma 2’s Ryu feels fast, yet ineffective. And without the near-constant stream of enemies to cut through, the game’s theme-park-style levels are now shallow and lifeless, as there’s nothing to see or explore this time around.
On top of that, the PS3’s hardware shortcomings limited the game’s gore, so dismembered limbs evaporate in a stylized purple mist instead of flopping lifelessly to the ground. It looks out of place and silly. Sure, Sigma 2 adds three playable femme fatales, but their moves pale compared to Ryu’s melee-weapon bonanza, and the sluggish pacing makes their unique missions a drag.
Dance Along a Razor’s Edge
Ninja Gaiden 3 is the series’ black sheep. It is generally reviled due to the changes made to the Ninja Gaiden meta, which is why Team Ninja made massive adjustments and improvements to the gameplay when it was rereleased as Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge. Thankfully, Razor’s Edge is the version bundled with the Master Collection.
Razor’s Edge streamlined the gameplay systems introduced in the first two games, for better and for worse. The biggest addition to Ryu’s repertoire is the Steel on Bone attack, a vicious instant-kill technique used to counter unique enemy attacks. Foes have potent special attacks that are telegraphed with a red aura, but by performing a heavy attack on them you can interrupt their special and follow up with a devastating, torso-splitting finisher. If you played Nioh 2, this should feel familiar, as the Yokai Counter is similar in spirit to the Steel on Bone counter. Once triggered, you can chain successive Steel on Bone attacks back to back, quickly eliminating enemy swathes and circumventing one of the biggest pitfalls introduced in Sigma 2: the damage-sponge enemies.
Essence was removed as a currency and gameplay mechanic, and replaced with the Karma point/ranking system. Technically, Karma was in the previous games, but it was arbitrary and served no real purpose outside of bragging rights. In Razor’s Edge, the combat gets rebalanced around Karma, which makes the ranking system feel more in line with Devil May Cry and Bayonetta. You earn Karma by stringing attacks, defeating foes, chaining kills, and landing Ultimate Techniques. Karma earned in combat can be spent on upgrades and new abilities, much like Essence. Because there’s no Essence, Ultimate Techniques can only be charged after you rack up a certain number of kills. This discourages you from spamming them with surplus Essence like in the previous games.
That said, Razor’s Edge has shortcomings, too. It has extremely linear level design like Sigma 2, with nothing to explore aside from a handful of collectibles and challenge arenas. Enemies are more liberally sprinkled into levels, but there are very few new and unique foes to fight. Razor’s Edge reintroduces many enemies from the first two Ninja Gaiden games for the sake of variety, but the foes haven’t been altered much from their previous appearances. This gives the entire game a recycled feeling.
Worse still, Razor’s Edge has hyper-aggressive enemies that rarely miss, with some going as far as swerving mid-attack to nail you in ways that weren’t really possible in earlier games. They don’t obey the fighting game rules established in previous games, either. Enemies immediately recover from stun states they shouldn’t be able to, oftentimes popping right into a guard stance from the ground or when reeling from a major blow. It’s irritating, and the animation isn’t particularly smooth. The only vulnerabilities that human enemies seem to respect are throws and juggles, but even these are difficult to connect due to the bad guys’ strong defenses.
Stark, Uninspiring Ports
Publisher Koei Tecmo tends to catch flack from the PC community for their lazy ports, but this is the first time I’m inclined to agree. The Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection is about as bare-bones as a port can get. It lacks keyboard support, controller customization (aside from predetermined control schemes), and graphical options to adjust. This is particularly disappointing since Nioh 2 featured great PC customization options, as well as extensive, albeit complex, keyboard and mouse controls.
The games launch in windowed mode, and there’s no way to change this via an in-game menu. In fact, you must click the maximize button to play full screen. The collection lacks tweakable graphical options outside of Brightness, Contrast, and Gamma.
Can Your PC Run Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection?
To run Master Collection, you need a PC that houses an Intel i3-4130 CPU, 4GB of RAM, an Nvidia GTX 970 graphics card, and the Windows 10 operating system. If your PC matches these minimum specs, you can play all three games at 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second. The frame rate remained steady in my testing.
To play at 4K resolution, your PC needs at least an AMD Ryzen 5 1400 or Intel i5-4460CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GTX 1060 or AMD RX 580 graphics card. The frame rate will still be capped at 60fps, but at least you can enjoy the game at 2160p resolution. As a Steam game, the Master Collection supports Steam Achievements and Steam Cloud.
Missing Features
From a core gameplay perspective, the only notable change is the removal of the Sigma games’ motion control Ninpo enhancements. Ninpo is always powered up, so you no longer have to perform silly waggling motions. The motion-controlled jiggle physics are gone, too, but that’s no great loss.
The greatest change outside of the core campaign is the removal of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2’s online co-op modes, as well as Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge’s co-op and PvP modes. These multiplayer modes were great fun, and would have been a superb way for you to enjoy the brutal Ninja Gaiden challenge with others. It is genuinely disappointing that these modes were not preserved, and Koei Tecmo has no plans to reintroduce them.
Some retro video game collections, such as the Samurai Shodown Neo Geo Collection and Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, include concept art and design docs for each release. Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection offers a seventy page digital art book and 180+ list soundtrack, but it’s not included in the base game. You can only experience it if you shell out an additional $10 for the Deluxe Edition.
A Measured Recommendation
Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it’s the first time the franchise has officially appeared on PC. The series is woefully underrated, so it’s pleasing to see it reach a new audience. On the other hand, Koei Tecmo should have given these games more care. The Master Collection was a prime opportunity to rebalance the games, improve the visual fidelity and models, and tweak the performance to take advantage of modern PC hardware. At the very least, preserving the online multiplayers would have gone a long way towards fostering a Ninja Gaiden PC community.
If you’ve missed out on this series, the Master Collection’s definitely worth playing; it includes some of the best action games ever made. That said, series fanatics hoping for a definitive version of the trilogy will be left a bit disappointed.
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