Yeah, Pretty Damn Much

Today’s miserable piece of garbage that I’m going to warn you against ever playing is Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. I don’t even know how many times I swore while I played this. And that was like, as I got to the title screen, every time I died, and when I’d shut it down to go take a break. It was a lot, I know that. I do know that I lost a few hours of my life that I’ll never get back from playing through this and like Jacob Marley warning Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas Eve, I’m here in my tattered rags and chains to tell you not to play this as well. If you still want to after this then that doesn’t mean you’re getting visited by 3 spirits or that a crippled kid will die or anything, so don’t take my warnings that seriously.

Anyways – For a little background on the game, it was shat into existence by Comcept, a company founded by Capcom legend Keiji Inafune, one of the guys responsible for the original NES Mega Man games and also produced some of the Mega Max X and Onimusha games. After releasing a few titles like Soul Sacrifice on the Playstation Vita and Mighty No. 9, which turned into a pretty big disaster, they were acquired by “good game developer” Level-5 and produced a failed mobile game, and have one other title called Red Ash that failed its kickstarter and is currently in development purgatory. So yeah. Comcept doesn’t have a great track record.

I want to point out that this game has almost nothing to do with any of the mainline Ninja Gaiden games, so your JJ Abrams-sized disappointment in it will not ruin the other games. In fact it may actually help if you’re like me and didn’t care for Ninja Gaiden 2 or 3, but now would play those any day over this. Ninja Gaiden Z tells the story of a ninja named Yaiba – big surprise, a guy who’s not very likable, who’s a rival that we’ve never heard of until now to Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive hero Ryu Hyabusa. He’s a rockin’ sort of ninja who likes death metal and says the f word a lot because again, he’s too rock n’ roll for the rules. If there was ever a ninja that should slick his hair back and wear a leather jacket with cigarettes stuffed into his white t shirt sleeve, it’s this guy. Being a bad boy doesn’t mean you can fight, though, because in the opening cinematic he’s split in two from one of Ryu’s attacks. He’s brought back to life by Forge Industries as a cyborg, with a big robotic arm and a power core for a heart that looks like the Arc Reactor, if it were made by someone who lives in a trailer park around the corner from Wal-Mart.

What starts as a quest for vengeance becomes a story of redemption as Yaiba battles his own bloodlust, falls in love with his handler and sidekick Monday, a stereotypical buxom computer-programmer-girl-who-probably-has-a-Twitch-and-onlyfans, and joins forces with Ryu to help save the world.

That sounds great, right? Did you believe all that? Because I just made all that up. No, what starts as a quest for vengeance *stays* a quest for vengeance, actually. Yaiba’s only motivation through the whole game is his bloodlust and his obsession with killing Ryu. He does work with Monday, but only because he wants that booty and she and her boss, billionaire bad guy and Forge Industries leader Alrico Del Gonzo, have a kill switch to keep him under their control.

Their interest in this is to get him to stop a zombie infection that’s rapidly spreading and also lead him to Ryu and his also-hot-and-buxom-sidekick Momiji, who’s trying to find the source of the plague. What you find out later is that Forge, unsurprisingly, is the source of the infection, and Del Gonzo plans to use the kill switch to kill both Yaiba and Ryu so that they have no opposition to what his real plan is. That plan is to become the Aztec god of the underworld. Why he chose Aztecs is beyond me. So after Yaiba defeats him, he and Monday decide to sell the zombification cure, but only by waiting it out a few months to drive the price up. I feel like there’s a lesson about capitalism and big pharma in there but I just don’t care enough to find it. Also pretty sure Youtube will remove my video because it’ll be considered “misinformation” and that’s the world we live in now.

So to summarize, you’re getting swarmed by enemies that interrupt any meaningful way to damage them, you’re dodging projectiles that seem to know where you’re going at all times, and you’re also using gimmicks to kill elemental enemies.

So if you haven’t already guessed, it’s really hard to want to play a game where the main character is totally unlikable. I did like Monday and Del Gonzo, and Ryu does the stoic thing like usual and that’s fine, but that’s basically it. According to story pieces you pick up in the game, Yaiba just likes killing people and he’s pissy that he can’t use Ninpo, the ninja magic that you use in Ninja Gaiden. To know the whole story I’d have to play the game again and find the remaining hidden story pieces, and honestly I’d rather someone slowly drive toothpicks under my fingernails.

The graphics in this felt like my eyes were bleeding after a little while. The colors are so bright and oversaturated that it felt like something was wrong with my tv. The graphics have this cel-shaded look that gives it almost a comic-book feel to it and while I can get into that, I actually preferred the game in monochrome, which happens when Yaiba’s low on health. The blood still spurts in a bright red, so it reminded me a bit of Mad World on the Wii. The music is just forgettable electronic music, nothing notable to report there.

The gameplay is really where this whole thing falls apart. The moment you start on the first level you think it’s going to be this arcade-like action game, but there’s so many breaks in that type of action to do other, more tedious things, that it stopped being fun to me by the 2nd level. Basically each level has 3 types of phases.

First you’ve got your combat where you’re usually running into an arena-like area and you fight tons of zombies. You’ll usually get swarmed by these things and they do not let up. Hitting them does not interrupt their attacks, but they can interrupt your combos whenever they hit you. I noticed that even the most basic enemies take at least a dozen hits to kill, depending on the combos you’re using. Actually finishing a combo will be difficult because of the interrupts I just mentioned, so you’re better off running to the opposite end of the area, starting a combo before anything can get to you because I promise they’re all chasing you by now, then you’re able to usually finish it off with the most powerful hits.

Now this is all assuming you’re not hit by projectiles from zombies that have pinpoint accuracy, otherwise you’re just dodging tons of stuff and sneaking in lucky hits. You only get health back by executing enemies, which has a pretty small window so if you miss it, you’ll get nothing for killing them normally. So unlike the actual Ninja Gaiden games where combat could look almost like a bloody dance when you’re watching skilled players, combat in this has no flow to it.

Also during combat, you’ll fight enemies that use different elements like fire, bile, and electricity. They all take various gimmicks to kill and your normal attacks aren’t very damaging to them unless you use an element they’re vulnerable to. So to summarize, you’re getting swarmed by enemies that interrupt any meaningful way to damage them, you’re dodging projectiles that seem to know where you’re going at all times, and you’re also using gimmicks to kill elemental enemies.

Next, you’ll have these awful platforming segments that are almost like quicktime events, but your cues come from flashing parts of the environment, giving you a split second to decide what you have to do. A lot of this is trial and error and while it’s not that difficult, it sucks to get to the end of one of these things, miss a jump, then die and have to start that whole sequence over or go back to a checkpoint, if there is one. No rules are established for this but once you get a feel for how these parts work, the developers included a new type of action to do and don’t warn you of it, so you just die repeatedly until you either look it up online, or start hitting differeing buttons to experiment and see what works. But even then, you might have the correct button but miss the timing. So yeah, the platforming sucks.

Lastly, you’ll have these zombie themed puzzles. You’ll have an obstacle in your way like a locked door that needs opening or a truck that needs to be moved, and you have to find a zombie that’ll get you through. You’ll have to pick up a zombie and throw it or use it as a weapon to activate whatever needs to be done. Usually this has to do with elements, like throwing an electric zombie at something spewing bile to cause some reaction. If you get lost you can hit L1 to use your “cyber-vision” for help. Most of these events seem to be for comic relief and have some sort of funny outcome, but I was so infuriated by the combat and platforming that I never felt like laughing and actually resented the break in action. How dare they try to make me enjoy this?

At your disposal is your broken katana, your cyber-arm, and a flail. None of these can be upgraded or changed and the only new weapons you get are pickups off enemies you successfully execute. Usually zombie arms you can use as nunchucks or an organ that shoots bile, things like that. You’ll level up throughout the game which awards you a perk point that you can use to upgrade abilities, but none of these were really that helpful and because of that, I wasn’t excited at all when I’d level.

You can’t jump in this, but you can dash and counter. Both of these are terrible and borderline useless, as dashing doesn’t usually send you far enough out of the way of an attack or have enough invincibility frames that you’ll still take damage. Countering is broken and only consistently works when a projectile is being shot at you. If you’re trying to counter an other enemy attack, it’s not worth the risk of doing it because missing and eating the attack will drop your health, and you already don’t have much of that to spare. And this is coming from someone who LOVES countering in games that offer it.

Speaking of eating damage, there’s a lot of times where the camera is so tight on Yaiba that you won’t be able to see what’s going on off screen, so you’re left guessing at where attacks are coming from, or even where your’e supposed to be going after you’ve cleared the area.

I probably died around 100 or more times during my Normal difficulty playthrough and I feared it everytime my health got low. Dying could send you back to a checkpoint where you’re fighting mobs of enemies all over again, or dying could send you to a checkpoint that you just reached a second earlier. You never knew where it’d be. I fought one boss and killed it, then got murdered by a couple basic enemies right after and I had to start the boss fight all over.

There aren’t a lot of bugs in this, but the ones that are present are pretty severe. Sometimes I’d start at a checkpoint after dying and the enemies wouldn’t spawn for me to fight them, leaving me to just walk around by myself in an empty room. Other times I’d restart, and none of my controls would work. Like nothing except select and start. And if backing out to the main menu didn’t work, I’d have to start the entire level over. So by the end of this game, I would get anxiety over having to possibly restart anything.

The game was at its most difficult when I fought Ryu as a boss. I probably died around 50 or 60 times fighting this guy, and I had really conflicted feelings about it. On one hand I wanted to win because I wanted to beat this miserable piece of dog shit and do my review, but then on the other hand, Yaiba’s such a giant wipe that every time I lost I’m like, “you know, they should just end the game here. The good guy won.”

But you play to win, and it was a 3 phase fight with platforming separating each phase. And everything I tried could not kill this guy or even really damage him. Combos, counters, I even tried cheesing him with one attack and it didn’t work, because Ryu is so fast, and he does not let up, that you’ll get killed in just a few hits. But then I tried one thing – one basic, stupid thing, and it worked almost flawlessly. I held the block button down, and then just spammed the basic sword attack. He was almost never able to land a hit on me. That was it! It’s like when Bill Burr told a story about pouring water on the head of that kid who wouldn’t shut up about Jupiter, I finally won!

So after that, the game actually got easier despite throwing more bosses at you as regular enemies, and fighting Del Gonzo at the end was a bit of a joke fight and was actually kind of funny, and I didn’t die once. So in a way you can count Ryu as the final boss.

So in summary, Yaiba is a piece of shit that you shouldn’t play, and you shouldn’t buy. Not as a collector’s item because it is without value, and not as a game because it’s not fun. The combat, story, eye-melting graphics, everything in it is awful. Stay away from it, and if you see it in a bargain bin, leave it there to rot so that it can eventually be dumped in the same part of New Mexico that all the Atari E.T cartridges are at. Go play Lollipop Chainsaw instead. It was released the same year, it’s hilarious and if you need proof then I’ve got the link to the review I did at the end of this video.