Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z

Historically, Ninja Gaiden games have always demanded a lot from their players. Mastering the fast-paced action and overcoming the powerful, relentless enemies requires patience, practice, and no small degree of skill. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z – while more of a loose, arcadey spin-off than a true sequel – maintains this tradition, but unlike its predecessors, it’s difficult for all the wrong reasons. While its tongue-in-cheek humor and flashy, cel-shaded animations save Yaiba from complete disaster, the combat is so deeply unbalanced that the overall experience mainly just gave me a rage-induced headache rather than a satisfying challenge.
03:44Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z - Battle Trailer
Yaiba turns the tables by challenging you to find and kill Ryu Hayabusa, traditionally the series’ star, during a full-on zombie outbreak in modern day Russia. Franchise fans might be wondering why our hastily introduced protagonist (the titular cyborg ninja Yaiba) hates Ryu so much...or why we’re suddenly fighting zombies...or why we’re in Russia, of all places, but the plot basically just glosses over all this. The justification seems to be, “There are zombies, and you’re a ninja. Just go with it!” To be fair, many of these questions are eventually addressed in some way before the seven-mission campaign ends, but the awkwardly abrupt opening feels more like a failure to adequately set the stage than a deliberate attempt to create an air of mystery.
Still, once you swallow the clunky exposition, it’s much easier to accept the mindless action game approach – a format Yaiba wears well. It earnestly embraces the silliness of slicing
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z
MARCH 18, 2014
In Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, players will battle fierce zombies as Yaiba, a cyborg ninja who will do anything to get revenge and stay alive.
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SCOTT BUTTERWORTH SAYS
Better cyborg action:
Far Cry 3: Blood DragonMetal Gear Rising: RevengeanceDeus Ex: Human Revolution comic book-y zombies into bloody bits, providing plenty of colorful character banter, weird enemies like zombie clowns, and even some borderline adorable cutscenes starring the zombies themselves. It’s cheeky and charming, which helps make the repetitive “clear area, walk through door, clear next area” structure a little easier to tolerate. The classic combo counter (complete with booming voice-over guy) doesn’t hurt either.
Beneath this jokey exterior, however, there’s trouble brewing. It’s not obvious at first. Initially, Yaiba’s button-mashy melee combat – though not as nuanced or precise as you would expect for a Ninja Gaiden game – is entertaining in that flashy, superficial way all button-mashy action games are. Who doesn’t like swinging a sword at stuff and watching it go splat, right? All too quickly, however, the lack of depth actually creates some serious gameplay problems. I could routinely rip through 30 to 40 smaller enemies at once without breaking a sweat, but as soon as I reached a higher-level opponent, Yaiba’s puny little sword suddenly chipped away only tiny slivers of health. Meanwhile, some of the more obnoxious mini-bosses could wipe me out in as few as two hits.
04:44Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z - Bringing Out the Dead Developer Diary
In other Gaiden games, you’re given ways to save yourself in these situations. You can cycle through weapons to find the ideal match for the enemy type you’re facing, use ranged weapons to manage spacing between you and your opponent, heal at any time using potions, and even throw in some magic when things really get out of hand. You have none of those options in Yaiba. There are no ranged weapons, no potions, and no magic. Yaiba’s limited arsenal – a sword, robot arm, and flail – correlate to light, heavy, and area attacks, but don’t offer enough strategic variety to save you from the inexhaustible supply of attacks higher-level enemies possess.
The crude melee weapons you can rip off of opponents (which quickly break) and barebones upgrade system provide a few helpful boosts, but ultimately, neither ever truly tipped the odds back in my favor. In theory, enemies who use different elemental attacks can be pitted against one another to create destructive reactions, but in practice, this rarely worked either. At one point I actually starting digging through the in-game index hoping to find some technique or ability I’d forgotten about, to no avail. Feeling unfairly disadvantaged is aggravating on its own, but the fact that I was skipping merrily through carnage town just moments earlier magnified the frustration every time I hit a wall – which, starting at around the fourth level, was all the time. It turned what might’ve been a short game into an agonizingly long one, with certain fights taking upward of an hour to get through. Again, this is from a guy who appreciates the fair challenge of previous Ninja Gaiden games.
02:02Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z - Miss Monday Trailer
The essence of the problem is that no matter your skill level, you’re at the mercy of Yaiba’s design. For example, most lower-level enemies can be “executed” at the end of a combo, causing them to spit out some health. So if during a boss fight there are no grunts around to harvest for health or you lack the energy to initiate Yaiba’s rage mode, your only option is to restart over and over until you can eventually grind through the encounter. Of course, that’s assuming you can even tell what’s going on with the pulled-back camera and constant enemy area attacks obscuring the view. More than once, I actually lost track of Yaiba in all the chaos. That’s really not supposed to happen. Oh, and don’t even get me started on enemies who can literally teleport out of a combo and start firing lightning at you from across the arena.

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