Love/Hate: Yaiba – Ninja Gaiden Z (2012)

Welcome back to the Ninja Gaiden Love/Hate series on IC2S! In this entry, we’ll be looking at the most recent Ninja Gaiden game (excluding re-releases), Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, a strange spin-off featuring zombies and an asshole ninja protagonist trying to find and kill Ryu Hayabusa. Frankly, this game has a horrible reputation within the Ninja Gaiden fan community, and was blamed for killing the franchise (at least up until its recent revival). Given its noxious reputation, I had never played this game and did my best to avoid it until now. I don’t really know all that much about it, so it’ll be interesting to see how it actually plays. Is it as bad as people say? Read on to find out…

Refreshingly, we reach the end of this Love/Hate series with a game that had only the one release. No revisions of Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z for me to have to play, nice and simple!

Love

• Improvised Zombie Weapons – For what it’s worth, being able to grab a zombie and then use it to beat down other zombies is pretty hilarious the first time you do it, and it actually makes your flail hit harder, so there’s actually some incentive to do it. You can also throw them at distant enemies (including helicopters!). Some zombies will even explode when you throw them. In addition, most special zombies will give you a limited-time attack if you land an execution on them, which are all very strong and pretty funny (the clown zombie dropping “nunchuckles” is a pretty great pun).
• The Soundtrack – Okay, so Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z doesn’t have the most memorable, revolutionary or unique soundtrack, but I quite enjoyed when the electronica/dance music kicks in (especially on the main menu). As far as the core design elements go, the soundtrack is by far the best thing Yaiba has going for it.

Mixed

• Elemental Mechanics – The most original aspect of Yaiba‘s gameplay is that it gives special properties to fire, electricity, and poison damage. These status effects can be used by enemies against you, but you can also use them to attack enemies and interact with the environment. In addition, different elements can be combined to produce special effects (eg, fire + electricity = an huge electric tornado, fire + poison = a massive incineration, electricity + poison = crystallizes the target, etc). There are several puzzles and encounters that revolve around this system, to the point where it kind of feels like it takes over the game. It’s kind of an interesting concept, but in practice it feels like a chore that’s a bit too prescribed. It also doesn’t help that the effects of elemental combinations are unintuitive. I would often completely forget what would happen when two elements combined, but the game had given me two in one area, so clearly it wants me to combine them to advance. It would have been nice if this was more like Bioshock, where you get to decide what you want to use and combine them however you want to.
• Combat – Despite the title, Yaiba does not play like Ninja Gaiden at all. If anything, its combat feels more like God of War, as you perform free-form combos with your various weapons to kill hundreds of zombies however you want to, without the precision or intentionality you’d expect from Ninja Gaiden. It works, I guess, but it’s not particularly interesting. The only reason this doesn’t go into “Hate” is that I do legitimately like the cyber fist: its strikes have a really satisfying feedback and, when you get the charged attack upgrade, it’s really fun being able to land a fully-charged rocket punch to do devastating damage. It’s overkill for a lot of enemies, but at least it’s more enjoyable than the sword or the flail. I also really enjoyed the “pocket rocket” (a giant missile launcher) which annihilates half the screen on impact.

Hate

• Tone – Your opinion of Yaiba is going to be coloured heavily by how you respond to the game’s tone. Ninja Gaiden games have always been very serious affairs, even if their narratives have been pure B-movie cheese (hell, I’d argue that Ninja Gaiden II‘s campy tone works because of how seriously it’s taken). Yaiba goes in an entirely different direction though. The game’s tone is excessively crass, juvenile, and edgy. I’ve seen this described as stereotypical “gamer humour” and I think that’s a pretty apt description. Sure, the other Ninja Gaiden games aren’t exactly high art, but Yaiba just felt trashy. Maybe this will work for you, but I found myself cringing at Yaiba, rather than going with it.
  • So, first of all, let’s tackle the juvenile aside of things here. The game makes sex and dick jokes constantly in an effort to elicit a laugh, but you quickly find yourself wondering if they have any other material (spoiler: they do not). I love Seth Rogen movies for God’s sake, I’m not opposed to raunchy and juvenile humour, but it just did not work for me in Yaiba. Most of the jokes are just lazy and dumb, with very few managing to land (eg, a zombie failing its jump and splattering against a wall, and a zombie throwing up for about twenty seconds straight got chuckles out of me).
    • Look, I can’t really properly convey how lowbrow this game’s jokes are without describing some of the dumbest ones. Probably the stupidest one I encountered was a journal entry where some random guy decides that he’ll become a super hero named after his two favourite animals (the horse and the rooster), so he comes up with… “Pony Cock”… The journal entry just hammers you over the head with the joke over and over again.
    • The most elaborate joke though is when you come across a lingerie shop with a gigantic pair of lady’s legs jutting out of the roof. You need to destroy the building, so you crash a semi-truck into it, which careens out of control and flies in between her legs (sex, you get it?) and then explodes. This causes it to start raining panties, which makes Yaiba start getting giddy for the first (and only) time in the entire game, because… uh, I guess he’s a freak for the sight of lady’s underwear? And then he starts getting mad when a boss zombie shows up, because “they’re ruining my fucking panty party”…
    • Oh and in addition to these, you will also often encounter zombies who are pissing or fucking random objects in the game’s environments… because “haha, jokes” I guess? When this is the things the game’s doing to try to make you laugh, can you see why I was just exhausted and cringing before long?
  • The game also will often stop to do a short, slap-stick comedy sketch involving the zombies. You’ve got sequences where a zombie pulls the pin on a grenade, but is too stupid to know to throw it, so he blows himself up, another zombie who tries to get another zombie to move out of the way of a steamroller, before running him over, a zombie wedding, etc. Again, this could work, but it just feels like the game’s trying too hard to get you to laugh at its irreverent sense of humour, so it just didn’t land for me.
  • Then there’s the edginess, most of which revolves around the titular anti-hero, Yaiba Kamikaze. He’s a stereotypical gruff, macho, arrogant, selfish, irreverent asshole. I get that you’re supposed to kind of hate him, but man is he completely unlikeable and irredeemable. He’s also just such a fucking loser as a result, like he was written to be cool by a bunch of socially inept nerds. When he interrupts the zombie wedding, he complains that the organ music sucks and that “I prefer death metal”. As a metal fan myself, this line made me die of cringe, it was so fucking embarrassing. He also spends the entire game sexually harassing Miss Monday… until it turns out that she was actually into it and she fucked him while he was unconscious, Jesus fucking Christ, this fucking game.
  • In addition to all of the above, this game is kind of sacrilegious as an entry in the Ninja Gaiden franchise for how it treats established characters. Yaiba keeps making jokes at Ryu’s expense, saying in the very first cutscene that he looks like he’s missing the ball-gag from his gimp suit. The game also has several journal entries you can find that make it seem like Ryu is terrified of Yaiba and acting like a big baby, until we find out (much later) that Yaiba’s unconscious mind was making these up as a juvenile fantasy. Oh, and speaking of juvenile fantasy, this game has Momiji in it… and, for once, I wish it didn’t. One of those aforementioned journal entries is basically Yaiba’s fantasy of having her fuck him… In a series that dances around the fact that its women are sexy, this outright skeeving over her by such a piece of shit character legitimately pisses me off.
• Terrible Design – Yaiba is, straight-up, one of the jankiest games I’ve seen in ages, featuring the sorts of basic design issues that I thought we had ironed out by the PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era. The camera in particular is fucking garbage. I don’t know how many times it zoomed out so far that I could barely see what was going on, while other times being so zoomed in on Yaiba that I couldn’t see enemies right in front of him. Oh, and you’ll often find enemies will obscure the camera and make it impossible to be able to see what you’re doing, which got me killed on a couple occasions. And that’s just the camera! There’s also the crowded UI, unmemorable level design (seriously, it’s all just industrial sludge), the game goes into slow-motion every time you die (making every reset take significantly longer than it needs to), long downtime as you wait for enemies to load in, and some very stiff and awkward animations. Worst of all though is the poisoned status condition, which causes the entire screen to be covered in a green filter to obscure your vision. WHY would you design a game where you can get a status condition that stops you from being able to play the game!?!!!?!!!! Absolute fucking idiocy.
  • On a related note, the game is also blatantly chasing trends. You can tell that some dipshit at Comcept wrote down a list of things that gamers like and then made Spark Unlimited cram them all into the game: leveling up, upgrade trees, collectable journal entries, a rage meter that you fill up to go into rage mode (for like five seconds, LOL), executions, a God of War-style whip, QTEs… the game is sorely lacking its own identity, and this sort of shit just makes it feel like Video Game: The Video Game at times.
• “Platforming” Sequences – Yaiba brings back more frequent platforming sections than we’ve seen from this franchise in ages, but the way that they’ve been implemented just sucks. Instead of giving you full control as you pull off some cool moves, Yaiba turns platforming into a glorified QTE event. You end up automatically moving forward and just pressing the correct button for the next obstacle (eg, jump to jump to the next platform, flail to grab onto a distant hook, etc). This is pretty dull on its own, but there are two annoying issues: 1) the window to press the correct button can be very short, resulting in cheap deaths and, 2) the game introduces an entirely new button prompt halfway through the game without telling you, which will result in several deaths as you sit there wondering what you did wrong (pro-tip: you need to press the cyber fist button to rocket yourself towards an enemy). Suffice to say, this sucks, but at least the game’s pretty generous with checkpoints during these sequences.
• The Final Boss – Look, I was having such an awful time with Yaiba on normal mode that I decided to lose an entire hour of progress to restart the game on easy, because fuck the idea of playing this game as a challenge. So, with that in mind: I gave up on the final boss, the giant alien god. The bullshit and sheer disrespect to the player was just not worth it. I’m not raging here, the final boss is the cherry on a shit design sundae. First of all, they do a terrible job communicating how the fight should play out. The boss has a bunch of glowing spots on his body, but I apparently was the idiot for thinking that his glowing arms could be attacked as a punish for when the boss did his arm slams, when it was actually an identical glowing spot on his chest that was the target. Then the second phase has him doing more attacks, one of which sees him start spawning in elemental special zombies. This is where the fight becomes utter shite, because nothing else matters except for the fight with these special zombies. The boss has a couple other attacks that it will occasionally do, but they literally do not matter and are nothing more than a waste of your time, patience, and health. When the special zombies spawn in, you have one single chance to land an execution on one of the zombies so you can get their special weapon pickup and then use it on the boss. This is easier said than done too, because these zombies will often interrupt your combos, stopping you from landing the final blow you need to trigger an execution. I kept getting hit on the last attack before the execution, or having the special zombies keel over one-by-one to my fury. Worst of all though, if you fail to get the execution off, you will be stuck waiting at least a minute for the boss to randomly spawn in more enemies. The boss also takes an eternity to go from one attack animation to the next (seriously, there’s a point where you sit there with nothing going on on-screen for nearly twenty seconds). This, combined with the fact that most of the attacks the boss throws at you do nothing but prolong the fight, and that there are no checkpoints makes this an infuriating finale. I gave up, the game was so badly designed that it wasn’t even worth my energy.
• Graphics – Look, I don’t tend to get too caught up on a game’s graphics if it’s fun, but at a certain point it really needs to get called out. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z looks terrible for a late PS3/Xbox 360-era game (hell, this game came out after the PS4/Xbox One had launched, so it would have looked even worse at the time). These graphics wouldn’t look impressive on a 3DS, let alone on a seventh generation console, they’re so blocky and low-res. I mean, just look at the textures this game has going for it. “But it’s part of the comic-book art style!”, I can hear some defenders crying. If this was an intentional stylistic choice, then it looks extremely unpleasant. I think it was more likely a matter of time and budget, with the cel shaded style being applied to paper over just how bad everything looked.
• Fucking Zombies – Zombies were already a tired trend in games before 2014, so seeing Yaiba ditch the series’ normal gameplay for a zombie slash ’em up is just exhausting. You can just tell that some dumbass executive said “everyone loves zombies, how can we force zombies into one of our franchises?” Basic zombies are faced by the dozen and put up zero resistance as you eviscerate them… which is pretty antithetical to Ninja Gaiden‘s traditional gameplay model, where even the most basic enemy can kill you if you get complacent. That said, I don’t mind the basic zombies too much: cutting them down in droves is enjoyable enough on its own. However, it’s the special zombies that are a headache. The various types of special zombies are extremely spongy, taking several combos to defeat, and often require specific attacks or elements to damage. They feel like mini-bosses, except that that you face them constantly, and in multiples. As I’ve said throughout this series, I hate spongy enemies, so this was aggravating for me.
• It’s Not Ninja Gaiden – At the end of the day, making Yaiba a Ninja Gaiden game brings with it certain expectations that it can’t even come close to measuring up to. You can argue that this isn’t fair to Yaiba and that it should be judged on its own merits, but the game sucks on its own merits too, so that’s fine (not to mention that it came out while fans were still sore from Ninja Gaiden 3, so they were in no position to be charitable to a spin-off).

I already had my expectations lowered by Ninja Gaiden 3, so I was going into Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z at my most charitable. Unfortunately, the game ended up being worse than I could have possibly imagined. Once again I find my list of the 25 worst games I’ve ever played becoming outdated, because Yaiba is easily near the top of that list. I am absolutely shocked at the ineptitude on display here. I desperately would like to find more information about how this game ended up this way, because games do not end up this bad by design.

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Barloq

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Writer, blogger, father. Blogging since 2012, writing my whole life. Was blessed by the chupacabra and the guardian shepherd.

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