With Keiji Inafune, the creator of Mega Man and more recently, last year’s superlative Soul Sacrifice at the helm of Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, you can’t help but have good expectations for how this hack and slash adventure would turn out.
All the ingredients for a solid game are here: a reckless, loudmouth protagonist, hordes of zombie fodder and a surprisingly good amount of comedy.
But it all falls flat.
What should have been a fun undead decapitating romp ends up being a tiresome crawl through uninspired levels, no, corridors peppered with abysmally boring boss encounters and seemingly infinite zombies to plough through. The game follows a pattern of defeating waves of enemies, solving puzzles and platforming with QTE elements. It feels very repetitive very fast. Throw in cheap deaths, a reliance on button mashing and predictable design and you have a recipe for utter boredom.
Sure the cel shaded graphics look good and even more so in motion giving it a charming comic book feel similar to Suda51’s efforts such as Killer is Dead and No More Heroes but it’s only one of the two things good about the game. The other is the zombies themselves. Portrayed as clowns, angsty brides, and soldiers, their presence is felt thanks to some laugh out loud cut scenes exhibiting their moronic behaviour.
Beyond this however, lies gameplay that’s rather unbalanced. As you play through Yaiba you’ll notice that you’ll be able to slash through a colossal number of zombies with remarkable ease. When the game puts you up against mid-bosses or the bosses themselves, it suddenly becomes a lot tougher than it generally should be. They can end you in two or three hits and your weapons don’t do as much damage. You’ll find yourself playing through certain encounters over and over again until you finally manage to beat them with a sliver of health to spare.
Furthermore, the combat feels underdeveloped. Unlike earlier Ninja Gaiden games there is an absence of magic, potions and ranged weapons. You’re limited to using your sword, robot arm and flail. These represent your light, heavy and area of effect attacks respectively. There’s a rudimentary levelling up system as well but it does very little to even the odds.
Oh and there’s some form of story. You’re Yaiba Kamikaze, seeking to end the hero of the Ninja Gaiden series, Ryu Hayabusa. Except that you lose an arm and an eye in combat, are left for dead and brought back to life as a cyborg by a shadowy group to end the zombie apocalypse. It’s all delivered in a unwieldy manner and just serves as an excuse to get on with impaling the undead.
So if you’re looking for getting your hack and slash or zombie killing fix or simply a Ninja Gaiden fan, look elsewhere. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z suffers from fundamental design issues that no amount of spit and polish can fix.
