Omega Force and Koei Tecmo revealed a new trailer for the upcoming Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate, which is set to arrive on the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PS4 in 2020. The trailer reveals that after a five year hiatus, ninja-supreme Ryu Hayabusa will be playable in the upcoming game.
The reveal trailer isn’t anything special, and unfortunately there’s no proper setup to Ryu’s reveal other than that the trailer just starts and we see the black-clad ninja maestro wielding his sword like a conductor’s baton and orchestrating a symphony of sword slashes and the deaths of thousands.
From a technical perspective, Ryu looks good and his sword strikes look like brush strokes painted onto the screen with deadly precision, but there’s also an emptiness there as if the moment is a capriciously fleeting exercise in futility. You can check out the trailer below to see Ryu in action.
The setup for the trailer is quite horrible, as the legendary protagonist from the Ninja Gaiden series is thrust into an ancient castle where he mows down countless enemies using a variety of basic hack-and-slash attacks and some of the typical musou abilities most people have come to expect from the Warriors Orochi franchise and the thousand-army gimmick.
As noted in the video’s description, it’s been five years since we’ve seen Ryu in a Warriors Orochi game, and it’s been seven years since Ryu has starred in his own Ninja Gaiden game, the last of which was released back in 2012 for the Xbox 360 and PS3.
Koei Tecmo’s last entry in the series didn’t even star Ryu and was Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, where players assumed the role of one of Ryu’s arch villains.
Ryu, however, has popped up in other games since then, including recently having a minor role in the story mode of Dead or Alive 6, but it’s pretty obvious his stock has dropped significantly over the years. Like a past-his-prime wrestler doing house shows on the outskirts of Ohio in half-empty high school gymnasiums just to pay the bills.
It would be nice if Koei could show a little more respect to a legend like Ryu – perhaps revive him in a noteworthy Ninja Gaiden reboot trilogy with a co-op mode where you play as a dominatrix-clad Rachel, but that would probably be asking for too much in [current year].
Anyway, if you were interested in playing as Ryu Hayabusa in any recent games outside of the disappointing and DLC-laden Dead or Alive 6, you can look to do so when he arrives with 169 other playable characters in Warriors Orochi 4 Ultimate, which is due for release in 2020 for home consoles and PC.
