Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection Review for Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox One

There are two important things you need to know about the Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection:

What’s disappointing is that none of these performance issues are new. If you look back at our review of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus on the Vita from eight years ago, you’ll notice that my colleague Dustin spent a large amount of time talking about framerate dips. These issues persist here, despite the fact that the Switch is a more powerful machine.

It’s super fun, for the most part.
Its performance, at least on the Switch, is good in the first game of the trilogy, before it falls off a cliff for games two and three.
Those two sentiments aren’t unrelated. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I wouldn’t have to add “for the most part to that first statement if it weren’t for the fact that the game generally performs so abysmally.

How bad is it? I’ll put it this way: as someone who really likes handheld ports of games and who’s willing to put up with very sub-optimal performance, even I was a little put off by how bad Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 and Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge look here. What’s worse, the performance had serious gameplay repercussions, as it wasn’t uncommon for enemies to pop in and out of existence while I was battling them. Given we’re talking about a game that’s built around hacking, slashing, and blocking, you can see why that may be an issue.

Even as I say that, however, I’ve still got to go back to the game’s performance to add a caveat. The third game is fun…but it’s also borderline unplayable at times when you combine the gore with the lousy performance. It’s hard enough to see what’s happening at the best of times; add in blood splashing across the screen, and you’ve got a recipe for zero visibility during some action sequences.

All that said, even with these flaws, this collection of games is still pretty enjoyable — though I’ll note that if you’ve never played any of these games before, be aware that Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 are enjoyable in very different ways from Ninja Gaiden 3. While the first two games are obviously very violent, there’s something almost balletic about the way protagonist Ryu Hayabusa slices and dices his way through his many, many enemies. Even on the lowest difficulty levels, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on getting your timing just right. Both games give you ample opportunity to learn and to improve, so they never feel impossible, but they’re both demanding in their own ways.

Personally, though, that was a trade-off I was willing to make. As rough as Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection is in places — and it’s very, very rough — it makes up for that by also being a whole lot of fun. I leave it up to you to decide exactly how much poor performance you’re willing to put up with to play a very enjoyable trilogy — because in this case, you’ve got to be wiilling to put up with quite a bit.

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