The Confusing, Quick Timey World of Ninja Gaiden 3

Looks like a game Dethklok would make :\ If its a chore staying awake during a few min demo can't imagine seveal hours, it was like a grueling sequence from Clockwork orange played out in repetition. Being driven by flying quick time events simply concluding or somewhat rewarding the player with a couple more anime blood geysers. Cuts right to the core of my confusion of who this game will be adored by, mind you Assassins Creed has been a series based on the core concept of "stabbing dudes, yeah thats pretty awsome". Think theirs a benchmark for at least me in trying to justify playing this on a family tv, wife and kids on the sofa smiling in a Wii U add, I can see it now. But seriously, and thats what the game producer indeed was, serious enough to talk about the act of cutting a man in so much depth. Just seems like a miss-matched game that will (hopefully) be lost in the either, as it certainly has at this years E3. 
Furthermore, what the fuck happend to any asian 'Anything', Those elements at least added a slight of gusto to a persistant world and culture, but las no we get good old "Cutting dudes in parking lots".  

Also it's really rare for games journalists to be perceptive and humble enough to 'get' the appeal of games they don't necessarily like. You rock Patrick.

You can make Ninja Gaiden more accessible without compromising the fundamental gameplay system. Introduce easier levels of difficulty; give the player more health, give enemies less, that sort of thing.

Quick-time events have never been anything other than cutscenes pretending to be gameplay.

Wow, really? This perplexes me.

It sounds like it's just gonna go downhill from here.  I actually loved the way combat worked in the last two games.  It was a pretty nice in-between from Devil May Cry's stylish precise combat and Bayonetta's insane moveset that worked with nearly every single button.  

This sounds bad...

Looks faster than previous NG games but with all the QTE fest there it looks like a revamped version of Ninja Blade and that game sucks big time

Don't remember exactly where, but in some interview with Hayashi he basically said that a lot of the QTEs shown at E3 is actually just sort of a tutorial thing and disappears once you get further into the game (which can also be seen in their longer stage demos).
 
Edit: found the video 6:00 for question, 7:25 for translated answer.

Watching the gameplay video was seriously soul-crushing for a fan of the previous games. I never even beat NG2 on even mentor but I blame myself entirely as the ninja dog I am.
 
When he used a launcher and it didn't launch the enemy a single tear rolled down my cheek.

Looks fast as hell!

Oh god, I really hope this game doesn't suck (see my favourites list for Ninja Gaiden Black in top 5). Becoming skillful at 1 and 2 (even with 2's sub-par camera) was rewarding in that mastering it became an art, and decimating enemies became incredibly satisfying.

So this one will be playable for us normies? Good to hear.

Nice of them to get rid of the main thing the series had going for it. Makes the decision not a buy much easier.

QTE always make games better! Right?....Right?

I liked it better when this game was called Ninja Blade.... Well, not really actually.

I'm sorry to see Ninja Gaiden slip down this path.

That's...weird. I still remember being really bummed out because I broke my wrist the day Ninja Gaiden 2 came out.

After the first game kicked my ass, I skipped the second one. Not sure if this one is going to do anything for me even with the changes they are making

Before I tell you what I think of Ninja Gaiden 3, let me say something up front: exploding shurikens suck. Their introduction was when I stopped playing Tomonobu Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden, as it was clear this was not my thing. With Itagaki having left Tecmo to work on Devils' Third, the Ninja Gaiden series is under new design management, lead by Metroid: Other M's Yosuke Hayashi.

Ninja Gaiden 3 was at E3 in its first playable incarnation, even making a splash at Nintendo's press conference, confirming that, yes, Wii U owners will also be able to join the bloodbath. But it was running on Xbox 360s and PlayStation 3s in Los Angeles, wherein Hayashi was making his pitch for the series' new direction. At a glance, not much has changed; you're still smashing buttons, dudes are falling apart alongside blood geysers and everything's moving really fast.

It's when you start actually hitting those buttons, however, it's clear Ryu Hayabusa's changed.

There are button prompts everywhere now, with quick time events now regularly incorporated into combat. It's not entirely clear how the button prompts are triggered, as it didn't happen in every encounter. Moreover, the prompts don't appear early enough for you to actively process them. In every instance, I engaged the button prompt by accident--I was hitting square anyway. When the prompts do appear, you can rest assured the enemy's about to meet a quick death.

The prompts extend to traditional quick time events, too, like ducking underneath a truck or tapping shoulder buttons to scale a wall. But as this demo is Ninja Gaiden 3's coming out party, it's hard to not have one's takeaway be plastered top to bottom with memories of button icons.

The other major mechanic introduced in the demo involved Hayabusa's mutated arm. Nothing in the demo made it clear how the arm's introduced narratively, but as story was never the stand out feature in previous Ninja Gaiden games, who cares? You're only given the ability to quickly execute a handful of guys at once in the demo, the assumption being there will be more options in the final game. The power itself is a stringing together of the automated button prompt kills without all the button prompts. It only takes moments to charge up the arm's use, however, which means it can be spammed over and over again. Eventually, I was just slashing dudes in order to waste time in-between using the arm.

The reason I backed away from the original Ninja Gaiden was the realization Itagaki had designed something more akin to a fighting game than a traditional action romp. You can (and I do) happily button mash through the God of War series. That wasn't the case in Ninja Gaiden at all, which is why the players who it clicked for found the experience so rewarding. Itagaki had made an action game where pressing each button had an important consequence and maintaing flow was crucial.

It's difficult to say whether Ninja Gaiden 3 is completely moving away from that, but the constant interruption of combat in favor of elaborate, scripted kills makes the case. Maybe if there was a way to make such kills optional, letting people indulge their own preference for how to play. By the end of the demo, though, I was definitely using these gameplay constructs as a go-to crutch to finish sequences faster and move onto the next one. The whole experience felt a bit automatic--quick time kill, charge up arm, kill room of dudes with charged attack. Rinse, repeat.

This is not how I remember Ninja Gaiden.