Ninja Gaiden Review

I’ve seen some ill-equipped PC ports in my time, but Koei Tecmo’s efforts on the Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection are something else.

While we’ve learned over the years not to expect too much from certain Japanese publishers bringing console games to the PC—from Nier to Nioh they’ve had their issues and omissions—Ninja Gaiden: Master Collection’s complete lack of PC-centric options is astounding.

It doesn’t have resolution options in the game’s menu. Nor does it have a pre-game launcher. If you’d like to change the resolution—and only three are available: 1280 x 720, 1920 x 1080 and 3840 x 2160—then you need to get into the game’s properties then launch options in Steam and...pick it from a drop-down menu there?

And if you want to toggle between windowed mode and fullscreen, you can definitely do that! Here’s Koei Tecmo’s helpful advice:

This game can be played in Fullscreen mode. To do so, launch the game, and then click the maximize icon in the upper-right of the title bar. To return to Windowed mode, press the Esc key while in Fullscreen mode.

Throw in the fact that a warning on the store page says it, “Requires a controller in order to play. Playing with a keyboard and mouse isn’t supported,” (you can’t even navigate the main menu with your keyboard) and you’re looking at one of the most useless PC ports of all time, maybe ever from a major publisher.

I don’t want to sound like some kind of entitled shitty PC gamer here! But there are some bare minimums we should be expecting of ports. History has shown the bar is very low, and this...still somehow doesn’t get anywhere near that.