Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z: Review (PS3)
This game starts with our protagonist, Yaiba, facing off against Hayabusa and shortly after getting sliced in half. This is an excellent foreshadowing of what you can expect to be doing for the majority of time spent with this game: dying. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is not a traditional Ninja Gaiden game, on the contrary it has very little in common with the series.
You play as Yaiba Kamikaze more of a villain than an actual anti-hero. Yaiba’s sliced off hand is now replaced with a cold metallic cyborg arm. The genius engineer who put you together, Miss Monday and employer, Del Gonzo, tell you that it’s your goal to take down Ryu which Yaiba is more than happy to do. The search for Ryu takes place in zombie infested areas, so it’s expected that you will come across a variety of the undead. As usual for Ninja Gaiden games the story is nothing to write home about. The majority of the plot is told through story pieces you collect along the way and these can be read in the pause menu at your leisure.
Yaiba tries its own thing, steering away from the darker more serious tone seen in Ninja Gaiden 3. The game features a style you’d more expect of Suda 51, as it tries to add a lot of black humor in every place conceivable. Unfortunately most of the jokes miss the mark and end up feeling more awkward than funny. There are a ton of sexual jokes here, the majority of which are quite distasteful. The slew of profanities also don’t really do much for the game, making it feel more juvenile than it already is.
I love games that put your skills to the test. Being challenged and learning from your mistakes is one of my favorite things in video games. The original Ninja Gaiden was a game I had adored for this. Playing the first time the game posed an inconceivable obstacle, but once I had overcome it I finally felt like a true Ninja, blasting through the game in the next playthrough. It’s unfortunately this form of mastery that Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z lacks. You never get better as it’s less about perfect timing and more about sheer luck. Yaiba lacks depth as the best strategy usually ends up being mashing the attack button.
Blocking enemy attacks is useless. Previous Ninja Gaiden games had a handful of enemies on screen, so perfect blocking and counters were an imperative if you wanted to survive. Yaiba’s enemies come in the dozens, for this very reason blocking and counter attacks are useless. And even when there is just a single enemy on screen the timing of counter attacks is so rigorous that it’s all the more safe to dodge the incoming attack altogether. Yaiba also lacks the jump button which is especially jarring for a ninja game. The only time Yaiba can jump is in scripted QTE-like events, but even these aren’t particularly memorable.
All additional weapons are gained by executing the enemies. This is done by lowering their HP enough and then pressing the execute command. This plays a cinematic where Yaiba rips off a part from the decaying zombie’s flesh to use as a weapon. While powerful, they have limited durability, forcing you to conserve them for tougher battles. The weapons you gain range from nun-chuckles (zombie clowns severed arms) to more disgusting ones such as Hag Pipe (venom spitting organ from the Blister Sister).
Executions also give you a health bonus similarly seen in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. In order to get the HP you must damage the enemy enough, but too much damage and you will lose your only chance to heal. This is a big problem considering that a heal can be the difference between life and death and you will frequently miss the opportunity to heal because you were in the middle of a combo. What makes things worse is that using special attacks, sub-weapons, bloodlust mode, or even counter attacks doesn’t give you the chance of executing an opponent. This means you will beat the enemies up with all you got and then start attacking them carefully with the normal attack in order to not hurt them too much.
Save points are not spaced too far apart, but usually have wave upon wave of enemies in-between. So even sections which would generally take just a couple of minutes can turn into half an hour of game over after game over. The game is extremely difficult and not because of the tight timing and intelligent enemies, but because of the unresponsive controls, damage-sponge mini bosses and wave after wave of enemies all of which have ranged area of effect spells.
This brings me to the hands down biggest issue I had with Yaiba, the uneven difficulty. I literally had to restart the game and lower the difficulty to normal, as I couldn’t pass a section in level four. And somehow even on normal I ended up dying on exactly every part of the game I died on hard. It doesn’t seem like I am the only one with these problems. On the score board the amount of players that completed levels on hard takes an extreme nosedive from level four.
Yaiba even misses the opportunity to feature a varied amount of interesting enemies that the Ninja Gaiden series is known for. This focus on zombies really hurt the game, as it would have been wonderful to see the more diversity especially with this new visual style. While there is a variety of zombies, by the end of level three you will have seen almost all the enemies in the game. Bosses realistically don’t even exist. Stronger enemies will drive you insane. Once you finally manage to finally beat them you will encounter them again in just a few minutes this time in bigger numbers. Later levels just bunch up five or more same boss type enemies at once. What’s worse is that every level has the same wave after wave of massive amounts of these ridiculously overpowered enemies, which gets repetitive very quickly. It was a nightmare fighting them on their own but fighting them in groups is hell. These fights always feel like a drag and it never feels like you can learn how to counter them correctly. Even during the final level, facing off against a boss you met in the introduction sequence of the game can spell disaster in a matter of seconds.
If there was one thing I liked in Yaiba it was the way the game allows you to utilize enemies on environments to find secrets or do extra damage. Zombies come in a couple of types. There are electric zombies, fire zombies and toxic zombies. Mixing electric zombies with toxic zombies crystallizes them, while mixing fire zombies with electric ones causes massive static storms. These elemental combinations make for an interesting concept and spruce up the otherwise repetitive gameplay. Unfortunately this is extremely hard to do during battles, especially when multiple boss type enemies come charging at you at the same time.
As you progress through the game you will uncover collectable shards that boost your health, resistance to specific types or give you more info about the plot. Yaiba also levels up as you defeat wave after wave of enemies. Level ups grant you points which in turn you allow you to purchase perks. Perks are basically new combos, faster movement after counter attacks, additional durability for sub weapons and quicker recovery from elemental attacks. Yaiba’s level up caps at 25, but you will most likely get to this well before the end giving you enough points to unlock all the perks, so it’s just a matter of which you will chose earlier.
THE VERDICT
Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z feels really dated. It features many of the beat em up elements from the 90s, but lacks a lot of things that made those games genuinely enjoyable. The most glaring omission is the lack of a co-op mode. Cooperating to take down larger numbers of tougher foes using elemental combination would have been infinitely more enjoyable and easier with a friend. The juvenile humor and focus on zombies which have already oversaturated the market do very little to make Yaiba stand out. There are far better hack and slash games out there. This is one ninja that should have just stayed dead.
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