Ninja Gaiden 4 - Ch. 13 (Master Ninja) New Game

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season so far! New Years is right around the corner, and I can barely believe it. It's been busy, but I had some time today to knock out this next Chapter in my Master Ninja playthrough.

Chapter 13 brings us to the epic showdown with Kagachi followed by Achilles the Fiend. This chapter was short and sweet, but I had to spend quite a bit of time figuring out how to beat Kagachi. I worked out a pretty good strategy of parrying his teleporting slash attacks and then using the Kage-Hiruto on his 2nd phase to maintain a safe distance. His first phase is really fun, but his 2nd phase is scary, in a bad way. Those giant AOE sword swings he does are really hard to read and dodge properly. Then, once I beat him, I had totally forgotten about Achilles and never even tried facing him in trials. He wound up taking me out on my first attempt, but once I realized you could basically stun-lock him with the ranged attacks, he was super easy, and far from my favorite boss fight. I'm sure there's a more entertaining way of beating him, but he takes a ton of damage regardless. Kagachi though... easily my favorite boss of the game so far. He was a lot of fun to learn and battle against. One mistimed dodge, one poorly judged attack string, and you're done. He hits extremely hard. I was happy that my practice in Trials mode paid off here.

The Purgatory Gate in this chapter is pretty challenging too. If you're smart about when and how you use your berserk meter, you can make very quick work of the 2nd wave after the extremely dense 1st wave is finally finished off. Overall, a really fun battle. There really isn't much else in this chapter in the way of collectibles or secrets, and aside from the Purgatory Gate, no enemies to fight besides the two bosses.

Up next, we get our first crack at Ryu in the Master Ninja difficulty, and I'm kind of unsure how it's gonna go, honestly. I remember during my hard playthrough thinking that I was disappointed in his move set, especially compared to Razor's Edge, but I really haven't spent much time messing around and learning how to properly play as him in this game yet. Fingers crossed I'm pleasantly surprised! I think his chapters are fairly short if I remember correctly, so I may even be able to get a couple more chapters completed this weekend.

Thanks for watching!