At one point, a character mentions offhandedly, "You'd better watch it; the ends don't justify the means." I think that was meant to be the moral of the story, but Ninja Gaiden 3 is afraid to give itself wholly to the moral or to the story. In the end, for all its talk of consequence and self-important posturing about what it means to be a killer, it refuses to examine the questions it raises either through the story or through player control.

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It's not hard, and it's not challenging. It's tedious and dull. This is a game that doesn't know what it's saying, and it doesn't know to whom it's saying it. Long-time fans of the franchise will be driven away by the drastic change in mechanics and tone, and newcomers to the series have nothing here on which to anchor themselves, nothing special to pull them in. Without a message, without meaning, without engaging combat, and without a target audience, Ninja Gaiden 3 has nothing to give and no one to give it to.

Update: The Multiplayer Experience

Ninja Gaiden 3 has two multiplayer modes: one, Ninja Trials, is a co-op experience; the other, Clan Battle, is a 4-on-4 competitive mode. Both are actually kind of entertaining.

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Ninja Trials can be played solo or with a partner. The play echoes the game's story mode, starting the player out in London, but rather than providing an incoherent narrative, it provides clear goal prompts and pop-up hit/score counters that provide a sense of accomplishment.

Unfortunately, due to a lack of partners, I found myself fairly quickly overwhelmed in all my attempts. I tried at four different points, all between 3:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. Eastern time on both Saturday and Sunday, to join quick matches. Three times, the game's matching system couldn't find any lobbies or partners for me at all and, after spinning on the idea for several minutes, pushed me in solo. The fourth, the partner found for me either quit the game or lost connection within three minutes, and I was again a solo ninja.

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I had better luck with the Clan Battle mode; only one out of four attempts came up with zero lobbies to join. The other three times, however, I only ever saw two or three battles available. Still, I joined them and had a fairly good time, even when my team lost horribly. Perhaps due to insufficient players, there was no level matching to speak of so each bout I was in had a range of players from level 2 to level 39. Still, in an eight player melee bloodbath nearly anyone can make some kills so the level disparity isn't that big an issue.

Having human opponents, rather than wave after wave of AI enemies, makes what skills Ninja Gaiden 3 has to offer more dynamic and more exciting. Each round is just about the right length — neither so long it wears out its welcome nor so short there's no time to get into it — and the sense of teamwork and of competition keeps it interesting.

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But that a multiplayer environment would be a complete ghost town not even two weeks after the game's release, during prime time on a weekend, speaks poorly of its long-term viability. A couple of hours of single-player, story-mode play are required to unlock the multiplayer modes, and it seems many aren't making it that far. It's possible that the scene is more robust for players on the Xbox 360 than my PlayStation 3 experience was, but ultimately the mildly entertaining melees aren't enough to save this game.