Nice job attempting a Hell-level Purgatory, Bettel. Those are something of the hardest things in the game (they're actually not any harder on Master Ninja!) so it's fairly impressive you got as far as you did, while not knowing a lot of the techniques people use to make challenges like that easier. Speaking of- lemme try to explain a bit more about Ultimate Techniques, or UTs for short. You already know to charge a UT when there's a lot of blood essence around, to absorb it all and instantly reach max charge. But there's some nuances that are helpful to clarify. 1: It's specifically one essence per level of UT charge- in other words, you can fire off a max level UT as soon as you kill two enemies. The UT itself is likely to kill another two enemies, meaning a lot of times you can just fire off UT after UT until everything is dead. UTs have full invulnerability and also deal a ton of splash damage, so it can honestly be effective to fire off a level one UT as soon as you've got one enemy down in a fight. You'll take a lot of pressure off yourself, and hopefully get some dismemberments going to charge up a max level UT. 2: Blocking prevents you from picking up essence automatically. Ninja Gaiden is like a fighting game, in that you want to be blocking habitually if you're not doing anything else, and making sure you don't pick up essence until you wanna UT is part of that. 3: Landing Ultimate Technique. This is one of the important passives you haven't bought yet, and used to be a part of the base kit in previous games (though it was never explicitly taught). Basically, it causes you to skip the startup of a UT charge when you're landing from a jump. Unique to this game, the jump after Izuna Drops and perfect dodges trigger Landing UT. The timing for this is incredibly easy- just hold Y during the iframes from the Izuna Drop or Perfect Dodge- making them very good opportunities to get a UT off. There's also the traditional way to Landing UT, which is: while blocking, Dodge > Jump > Landing UT. The timing on landing is a little tricky, and some people shuriken during the jump to make it easier, though it's not necessary. The benefit of this sequence is that you don't need an enemy to do it, while you still have a lot of mobility and can reposition yourself in relative safely. Taking it all together, the gameplan for large enemy encounters gets a little clearer- snipe one or two enemies with an Izuna Drop or Obliteration, then look for opportunities to do one of your three landing UTs: Izuna Drop, Perfect Dodge, or Dodge-Jump. Every single Izuna Drop/Obliteration/UT is a huge bundle of iframes, and it honestly takes off so much pressure when you're invulnerable for this much of the fight. All that said, UT spam is just one way to approach fights in this game and some people think it's actually rather scrubby. It's certainly not necessary to complete the game- I, personally, beat my first Ninja Gaiden game without knowing how to do any of this. So no worries if you don't get it!

Nothing like a good gaming session of locking in to test your mettle against challenges from the depths of hell itself! This game's a whirlwind of action packed combat as ever, fun time watching! It's always so awkward when people ask you where you bought your clothes at, either you have to reply with it's some niche online shop or a location - in this instance Japan - that's not easily reachable unless you put all your efforts into visiting. So it makes sense to let people down easy, plus you're being honest about it. And there's definitely a disturbance in the force or something every few weeks where people change their mood as much as they change shoes. Almost eerie. Also wondering about what they're cooking over at the Game Awards with those pictures of the statue out in the wild... From the speculations I saw online, it has to be some sort of game though that begs the question of why it wasn't posted by the developing company. Suppose it has to be for building up the hype considering there will be new reveals during the awards show. We shall see! Even with the weird state the savefile was in, you downed the boss from the end of last stream easy! The Kurobo boss fight was all over the place and seemed hard to read, the staff for its defeat was worth it though! Doubly so because of the A Rank, that was insane! Then the scripted boss fight against Ryu straight to Ayane appearing followed by fish and sharks in the Drowned District. Surfed it up down there, the whole sequence reminded me of the squid races from your Mario playthrough! However, that Realm of Hell purgatory mode lived up to its name. Those dogs were slow and heavy but still agile in their movement from observation, and they came in a pack making it even harder to break out once surrounded. Realm of Hunger proved to be a challenge as well but you cleared it, that's our resident gamer! Never expected a Chaos from Sonic Adventure cameo, all that boss fight needed was for "Open Your Heart" to play and the whole thing would've taken a turn for the awesome. It evaporated like it stayed out too long in the sun! Wondering how the direction of the story will progress after meeting Ayane again and escaping the street shark by a narrow margin. Thank you for the fun stream, looking forward to you trying your hands at Metal Gear Solid as well as the Outer Wilds DLC! As well as GTA RP, I can't wait for that start I've been bouncing off the walls since I saw it coming back! Have a good one Betsy, potentially see you soon!

4:03:28 - There seems to be confusion in chat, but while Platinum Games helped with this Ninja Gaiden, Team Ninja are the creators and most of this game is how the other NG games are like with some Platinum QoL (DoA and NG are in the same universe and Nioh, the Soulslike series, has some connections.) DoA was a fighting game series and has an Extreme volleyball spinoff series (that’s now Venus Vacation, is the main focus/mobile game, and got a dating sim this year.) Ayane just hovers in both series/is like Ryu’s Robin to his Batman (this is one of her less risqué outfits, if you’d believe it.) NG took place before DoA, but 3 and 4 takes place after the later DoA games, which is why Ayane and Ryu are older now (might be the reason for a new face with Yakumo.) There’s also Yaiba who’s like proto-Yakumo, but we don’t talk about him. If you ever play the other NG games, they play similarly so the muscle memory would kick in/there are legacy mechanics.