Yuke, the Japanese developer behind the popular WWE 2K franchise, the older WWF games, Full Metal Schoolgirl and more, has been revealed in the development of the recent Ninja Gaiden 4, the newest entry in the iconic hack-n-slash series of games. While Ninja Gaiden 4 has been co-developed by Team Ninja and Platinum Games, Yuke was responsible for the game’s platform compatibility along with optimizations.
And judging by the fact that Ninja Gaiden 4 runs silky smooth on a wide range of hardware and has had absolutely no complaints regarding it’s performance on any platform since release, it’s obvious that Yuke has done a phenomenal job at optimizing the game for both PC and consoles.
Of course performance on different platforms is a crucial aspect of all videogames and can actually make or break a game in more ways than one, even great titles in both past and the present era have suffered from subpar performance especially on the PC platform which has impacted the overall sales and critical reception of those titles. So even though Yuke was only involved on the optimization side for Ninja Gaiden 4, the developer has nonetheless played an essential part in the overall development of the game.
Ninja Gaiden 4 has received glowing praise for it’s mechanically deep and extremely satisfying combat system and moment-to-moment gameplay across the board, however critics have found the story and characters to be quite underwhelming especially the new protagonist Yakumo. Also another aspect of the game that many players and critics have found as really disappointing is that series’ staple Ryu Hayabusa has been reduced to a much more smaller role than many players had expected, with only a small fraction of levels (just 4) that you can get to play as him compared to Yakumo (a whopping 15).
But overall, Ninja Gaiden 4 has more than succeeded in bringing back the glory and the pedigree of the series in the way it matters most–in it’s fast, flashy and deep combat experience that’ll be pretty much unrivaled in this year and beyond. So if you love pure action titles with an extremely high degree of replayability, you can’t go wrong with Ninja Gaiden 4.
