"Realistic" and "Ninja Gaiden" can never go together. The game is just about fun, combo-based combat mechanics, to which dismemberment added a lot. Their whole "seen before" argument when it comes to dismemberment is inane. Why not go the extra mile and ditch the whole game? They want to make the player feel as if he's cutting through bone and we even see Ryu's sword cutting through metal, and yet it can't remove the enemy's limbs?
That is not even the main problem, seeing as the first game didn't have dismemberment and was truly great. To me they're doing a couple of things that are just alien to the core gameplay found in previous Ninja Gaiden games. One of them is QTEs and their focus on slow motion finishers. They just break the combat tempo and the player's ability to chain long combos. The other is the focus on the sword. I don't think they've announced any other weapons, which is really disappointing. The falcon claws, the tonfas and the scythe were part of what made NG2's combat great and hugely varied. Removing them is a clear mistake.
I get Hayashi wants to set himself apart from Itagaki, but that's not the way of doing it. He had a chance to improve on the areas which were lacking in Ninja Gaiden 2, mostly level design, environments and enemy encounters, but he's apparently decided to fix what wasn't broken, which was the combat itself. Also, the focus on story in a Ninja Gaiden game is ridiculous. NG games have always been over-the-top and as cheesy as they get, and people love them just the same. Nobody's is suddenly going to care about the story in a NG game.
