anthony wrote: ↑Wed Apr 16, 2025 5:12 am
This was always mostly a language problem. If Sword of Berserk and Shinobi came out today western audiences would call them soulsbornevanialikes with reduced rolling mechanics. Because they are retarded.
That's if they're being charitable. A lot of Soulsfags demean the DMC & Ninja Gaiden games as the action game equivalent of Call of Duty. They literally believe that it's just a brainless button masher when the original Itagaki Ninja Gaiden was basically a Super Metroid game in 3d but as a Ninja fighting alongside a hot tall blonde chick, instead of actually playing as the chick.
What cracks me up about Ninja Gaiden's combat is how it basically functions like a metaphor for life.
You spend all of this time just learning how to get good in the easier levels, then you work your way up to the highest levels by utilizing the knowledge that you learned.
When you get to the 2nd highest difficulty level, you eventually weed out the moves that aren't as effective but stick with the moves & combos that work within most combat situations.
Then when you finally get to Master Ninja mode, you learn that none of that shit matters because the game will just kick your ass by using your game knowledge against you.
Now you have to relearn the game at the highest possible difficulty setting.
What is the most important lesson that you learn in Ninja Gaiden 1 & 2?
LOL just press & charge the heavy attack button to spam Ultimate Techniques, and do it over & over until you win.
This sounds easy, but it's actually hard because Ninja Gaiden ai doesn't wait for you to charge your UT, they just want to kill you as fast as possible so charging up for a UT leaves you wide open within a difficulty setting that's designed to kill you within 1-3 direct hits.
A Master Ninja understands that there's a special method that you must master to trigger a UT within a half second, and that's to charge for a ut immediately after a jump. Which again sounds easy but is hard to commit to.
Another thing that's hilarious about Ninja Gaiden is how easy it is to identify the fakes who pretend to play Ninja Gaiden at a high level from those who have. The pretenders like to cite a youtube video (that they believe proves how brainless NG is.) where a guy does an Izuna drop over & over on master ninja mode. He makes it look easy, but again it's not easy at all.
It's also not even the most effective way to play Master Ninja mode. That's more of a Way of the Mentor strategy rather than a Master Ninja strategy.
The Izuna drop sorta functions like a Dark Souls roll due to invincibility frames, but in Master Ninja you don't even want to
leave an opening for an invincibility frame. You just want to obliterate everything as fast as possible through UT.
How is this similar to real life? In real life once you get to the top skill level of nearly every hobby or profession, you eventually learn that nearly everything that you've been taught, everything that you've absorbed, is either irrelevant or useless and there's really only 1 - 3 techniques that you should focus on & master, but everyone else who is at the top of their game are also aware of this knowledge. (This is why MMA is so fucking boring & gay. Everyone defaults to wrestling, bjj & kickboxing because those 3 disciplines have weeded out every other martial art within that specific ruleset.)
The irrelevant or useless knowledge can't be discarded on the way to mastery though, because those little techniques or knowledge that you've acquired were all needed to teach you how to think, move & behave a certain way.
You can't discard everything until you've achieved enough master to let go of everything you learned.
The knowledge of what you learned is important, because it's the knowledge of the operation of these specific techniques & systems that rewires your brain to look for specific set ups of the moves & formations that you''ve learned for the sole purpose of knowing how to shut it down before the opponent can even set up their moves.
That's what separates the master from a padawan. A padawan is still learning how to detect traps & set ups.
The master sees the trap before it's ever been set up because they already learned & mastered how to initiate the set up
during their road to mastery.
This is what made Ninja Gaiden such a deep game. It had a similar learning curve as a fighting game but the AI are designed in a way to where the difficulty levels adapt to your level of mastery. The AI will start trying to entrap you with advance strategies, and since it's not an rpg. You need to learn how to counter it, by knowing how to avoid or shut down the set up.
This used to be common place in action games (I know it was for Halo Combat Evolved, the enemies just weren't as unfair as NG's Master Ninja are), but now it's like a forgotten relic of its era when it wasn't even that long ago. Gaming years seem to function like Dog years.
Whatever happened to just hard core action games like Ninja Gaiden, DMC, Sword of the Berserk Guts Rage or Shinobi?
They're harder to develop since real action games actually function more like a sport, where you have to train yourself to git gud. You can be trained to git gud at Soulslikes without relying on a cheesy build but the skill ceiling is much smaller and it really feels more like a NES style action platformer but in 3d where the entire game is based around memorization (instead of jumping, you're rolling.) rather than the comprehension of the combat system. Nioh is really the only one that truly understands the essence of an action game, but they're the same motherfuckers who make Ninja Gaiden & Dead or Alive, so they have far more experience with that than any of their competition.
Makes me wonder why Scamco hasn't bothered to make a Nioh-like with Soul Calibur. Ninja Gaiden is just Dead or Alive as an Action game and Nioh is just a much slower, less complex Ninja Gaiden. (Similar to how Street Fighter is the slower, less complex version of DarkStalkers and in both cases the slower game is much more popular than the cooler game.)
Really the only two modern fighters worth a damn are Dead or Alive & Soul Calibur. (Notice how it's the two least autistic, least robotic fighting games that seems to be hated by modern audiences. I don't mean modern audience as in woke, I mean modern audience as in the current young generation.)
scamco has made Soul Cab action games before, but they didn't play like Soul Calibur. Ninja Gaiden actually does play like Dead or Alive, minus the reversal & counter mechanics. That's actually a weakness of NG. I don't really understand why the DOA style counters are absent from the NG games. NG Boss fights wouldn't be so shitty if it had proper counter attacks & reversals.
What's funny is that most Soulsfags and even souls-developers themselves (not Fromsoft. It's just youtube comments I've seen from Western Soulslike indie devs.) seem to believe that Souls games are deeper than traditional action games because supposedly, Souls weapons have more than one use, like what I was saying about the Dragon Punch in a Street Fighter game. How some people use Dp as transportation, others use it as an attack, others use Dp as a trap that they set up. Soulsfags seem to think that Ninja Gaiden & Devil May Cry are devoid of that. (These 2 plus God of War are the only ones that I can talk about since I play those 3, although I only ever played GOW & NG seriously. GOW is dumb, but it's dumb fun. The OG GOW, 2 & Ghosts of Sparta are my faves and are the most badass. 2 was badass & sexy. I never played Cuck of War, still haven't and never will.)
They think Ninja Gaiden & Devil may Cry plays like a Musou/Dynasty Warriors game when in reality Ninja Gaiden itself has movesets that's as large as a moveset for a single Tekken character, but in NG every single weapon functions as a Tekken character.
Each move also has multi-uses. A Flying swallow can be used as an attack, transportation or decoy but it can also be used to cause an opening. Every move has multi uses, I really don't get what Soulsfags mean when they claim that their small movesets are much more complex & deeper than DMC or NG's.
In reality, in nearly every Souls game, you're just spamming the same 1 or 2 action buttons over & over.
Nioh is the only one that I know of where you use the entire controller, which makes its combat far more complex than any souls game. Even the simple act of breathing is an actual gameplay mechanic in Ni-Oh.
For all the hype and obsession that game gets in Souls game discourse, it was just "okay." Sony fanboys hype that shit up to the stratosphere, and they are easy to spot. They call everything Souls"borne" instead of Souls or Soulslike.
Bloodborne is actually good, and is one of the only Souls games I like outside of Demon's Souls.
I thought I just misjudged Dark Souls, but every time I get tricked in to coming back to Dark Souls 1, I'm reminded by how much I just don't like playing that game.
I like Bloodborne because it revolves around raw aggression, making it somewhat similar to DMC & Ninja Gaiden which are also raw aggression games. Normal Dark Souls is insanely boring to me due to its focus on defense.
Not that you need to defend. I remember acing through that game using some kind of action hybrid pyro build. Everytime I got invaded, I just nuked them with the pyro. There's really no challenge curve or skillgap to that though.
I merely gamed the system by using a broke ass build.
In Bloodborne, I don't need to have a broke build to have fun with it. The fun for me is from the actual combat and how differently the game plays depending on the weapons that you use.
I don't think it's one of the best action games ever. Lol not even close. Bloodborne is just one of the best Souls games, but I already have never really like Souls much to begin with.
I'm only neutral or slightly in favor of Souls games now, because they're simple action games that actually have a solid ruleset. A ruleset that they repeat over & over and really only changed it once with Bloodborne but even then that change was only slight. It's not as big a difference as the combat from Ninja Gaiden 1 to Ninja Gaiden 2 or NG1 & 2 when compared to Razor's Edge. All Souls games generally play the same.
None of the NG games play anything alike at all, although NG4 mechanically, looks like a repeat of Razor's Edge to me. So I'm kinda meh on that game from what I've seen.
NG4 is basically Razor's Edge but with a standardized Dark Souls style behind the camera perspective.
With From Soft & Team Ninja games, I can actually get excited for them the same way I used to get excited for a NES or Genesis action game back when I was a kid, but instead of Shinobi & Ninja Gaiden, it's Sekiro and (LOL!) Ninja Gaiden.
Though, I suppose if they weren't cloning souls games, they'd be cloning Mosou or Monster Hunter games again. Most modern devs really have no talent or imagination.
I don't think I ever played a good Monster Hunter clone. Or at least not one that's at the level of what Nioh 2
is when compared to Souls games. I played and beat God Eater 3, it was ok. Kinda fun, but it just felt like a low budget action rpg. It didn't really feel like a Monster Hunter. In Monster Hunter, the actual monsters feel like fully fledge characters with their own strategies.
I don't even like MH anyway, but it's due to how fucking boring they are during the Post game. Even in multiplayer I thought the post game was boring as fuck. That genre is just shit.
I do like Musou, but for the same reason that I liked OG God of War, it's just dumb fun until it isn't, which for musou it really depends on how quickly they get boring. I don't know why but I still really only get addicted to Dw3, 4 & Samurai Warriors 2. Every other game just feels so boring to me and even DW Origins was basically a Souls Like lol and it was an actual success. To my surprise. Damn, a lot of faggots out there really can't get enough of that Souls shit.
They were struggling to get the game to run the PS4 hardware and had to keep cutting shit back, rewriting or scrapping content entirely.
Bloodborne plays even worse on the PS5, but the overall gameplay is good. I sure had way more fun playing that again than I did with Dragon Age Cisquistion, Witcher 3 & Deus Ex Mankind Divided.
Bloodborne actually plays like a proper action game, instead of some shitass action rpg like those other 3 shit games I mentioned.
I also had a lot of fun with Nioh, but it's a different type of fun. Overall I prefer Bloodborne because the level design feels like a NES action game. Nioh is fun for the combat, but it's only fun for the combat. Bloodborne feels like an actual odyssey.
Rather than just some Bushido Blade style combat arena.
