The beauty of the Ninja Gaiden series has always been a punishing, memorization-based, highly rewarding system of combat. Players often pulled their hair out, smashed a few controllers and cursed the gods that be, only to get back in and teach that boss a thing or two. This risk and reward system may have excluded some from sticking with the series, but also battle-hardened its fan base and made them even bigger fans of the series. Fast-forward to today, and the series released a spin-off featuring Yaiba, the cyborg-ninja. While this spin-off maintains the hack-and-slash action you’ve grown accustom to, there are a lot of changes, and even a departure from what made the series great in the first place, which some fans may find difficult to accept.
The plot revolves around the cyborg ninja Yaiba. Yaiba was once part of a ninja clan that used to test its members by squaring them off against the strongest member in the group, who just happened to be Yaiba. He quickly got bored of facing off against unworthy foe after unworthy foe and decided to murder his entire clan and start looking for the next true challenge. After a short search, he found Ryu Hayabusa and challenges him to a duel. Ryu makes short work of Yaiba, cutting off half his face and his left arm. A mysterious organization finds what’s left of Yaiba, patches him up and makes him half man, half machine. Oddly enough, a zombie apocalypse breaks out and Yaiba knows that Ryu is trying to find out why this started. Yaiba then works with this mysterious organization to get to Ryu and exact his revenge.
As you can tell, the story is a little convoluted and it doesn’t do a great job at tying into the Ninja Gaiden storyline. This loose story, and frankly an excuse to get straight into the action, feels like a missed opportunity since the characters and setting felt like it had potential.The game throws the player into the middle of the game with a very weak help system trying to coach the player through the game. This system felt inadequate since the Ninja Gaiden games are known for their crushing difficulty and elaborate button patterns. While this game is not necessarily that hard, but it does rely on an extensive combo system. It would have been great to get a stronger primer into the combo system and learn how to properly deal the most damage.
Visually, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z utilizes a cell-shaded effect that delivers a hit-or-miss performance. Sometimes the game looks great and highly stylized. Some areas are displayed prominently with bright colors and great contrast. However, there are plenty of times where the textures get muddy, and especially when the camera zooms in, the graphics don’t look very good. The game also suffers a fair amount of slowdown when there are a lot of zombies on the screen. Yaiba was designed to throw large mobs of enemies at you at once, but the PlayStation 3 struggled to keep up when there were more than 30 or so enemies. The game did slow down at random moments during the game, especially when you were pulling off larger combos. Yaiba moves at lightning speed and keeping up with that pace seemed to be a problem for the last generation of consoles. These technical issues were prominent and prevented us getting the fully immersive experience.
The biggest problem with the game was the sound design and voice acting. Every character was paired with a voice actor that failed to really convey the true personality behind the characters. Whether the levels were too high resulting in sound clipping, poorly executed accents, or just an over acted delivery, listening to Yaiba just felt awkward. None of the characters were developed, which only contributed to the overall awkward feel of the voice acting. This game desperately needed more story to develop the character more and give them a chance to connect with the audience and the voice actors themselves. Unfortunately, the characters in the game seemed like afterthoughts and nothing is really explored past a very superficial level. This felt like a huge missed opportunity especially since Yaiba wasn’t a terrible game, but it managed to undermine itself at every turn.
The gameplay itself is perhaps Yaiba’s most redeeming quality, though even there the game has some issues. The game is laid out in a fairly linear fashion with one battle arena connected to another battle arena. Once in a battle arena, the game is very much a hack-and-slash type action game where the goal is almost always to kill all the enemies. The combat itself is fairly competent with a large selection of combos and power-ups to choose from. There is also a traversal mechanic that works very well. Scaling the environment is relatively easy with a simplistic button scheme that keeps you engaged and looks great. The problem here are the camera angles. The camera is in a fixed position so you can’t really change the point of view. This gets particularly frustrating when the camera zooms way out or gets in super close. Games that don’t give you control of the camera always have these types of issues and Yaiba is unfortunately no exception.
Overall, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is a mixed bag trending towards the bottom of the scale. This is a real shame because we felt that the game had a fair amount of potential. The story is weak, but the Ninja Gaiden universe is interesting and draws nostalgia. The visuals can look great, but when the game zooms in, you lose a lot of visual fidelity. The score for the game sounds pretty good, but the voice acting is particularly poor. The game is full of these up and down moments and it creates a turbulent atmosphere surrounding the game. This makes it difficult to love the game as a whole. However, there is something about this game which leaves some hope that some Ninja Gaiden fans may appreciate. So for that, we give a very cautious recommendation only to those that insist on playing anything Ninja Gaiden. However, if you are just a gamer looking for your next game, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is not for you.
This review is based on a review copy of the PlayStation 3 version of Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z developed by published by Tecmo Koei
- The Visuals at Times
- Good, Upbeat Score
- Fixed Camera Angles
- Poor Connection to Plot