‘Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z’ Just Doesn’t Cut It

But it’s important to me that you know why this game fails, and why it led me to give up on it.

The colorful and utterly awful hack and slash Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z had two very important things to accomplish: the first, to revitalize the long-in-the-tooth Ninja Gaiden franchise, which has been looking like less and less of a sure bet since Team Ninja lead Tomonobu Itagaki dropped the mic on the franchise and Tecmo back in 2008.

It was also the multi-platform coming out party for Comcept, the new team formed by Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune after he called it quits with Capcom back in 2010. It was to be a brash reinvention of a series known for its punishing difficulty and – I’d argue – an increasingly stale aesthetic.

And it’s the ripped-from-the-comics, cel-shaded reinvention that makes the experience of actually playing Yaiba so shitty. The look of the game is constantly in direct competition with your ability to parse crucial visual information like parry prompts and enemy attacks which is kind of, you know, a problem in a fast-paced character action game.

“Fast-paced character action game” might be a bit of a stretch given that it’s not quite what Yaiba is going for. Its titular lead – a ninja who ended up on the wrong side of Ninja Gaiden hero Ryu Hyabusa’s sword – wasn’t designed to be as fleet-footed as his archenemy. Armed with his own trusty sword and a cyborg arm-with-flail-attack, Yaiba is ready to take on the teeming masses of the living dead spilling out into the streets of a burning Russia in his search for Hyabusa.

Now initially, this deliberate shift in the Ninja Gaiden formula feels fresh and dynamic while honoring some of the past mechanics. For instance, racking up massive combos feeds into temporary invincibility, and enemies in critical states can be executed in chains to regain health. But instead of jumping, Yaiba has an all-purpose dash to quickly get around enemies and set up combos with the three-button combat system, allowing him to wade into Dynasty Warriors-style hordes of enemies.

But Yaiba also makes parrying and countering an essential part of the game which is a major problem when – from the end of the first level onward, the cramped, fixed-camera encounters with enemies offer a mess of competing color, noise, and UI prompts, in later levels making the game nearly unplayable.

I want to be very deliberate here so you don’t think this is just a case of the game being annoying or too hard: there are sections that are literally unplayable because of this confusion of elements. Somewhere around the fifth level, trying to battle my way through another wave of enemies while Yaiba – and therefore me, the player – is blinded by toxic, yellow sludge, I suffered yet another death because visual cleverness (or really, “cleverness”) inspired some designer to carry over the Call of Duty-style bleed-out when the game’s hero is either on fire or covered in toxic goo. It’s even worse when he’s at low health, and the color desaturation means that it’s almost impossible to single out Yaiba among the enemies much less the exclamation point prompts which will allow him to execute a weakened enemy for health.

And don’t get me started on the bizarre, barely interactive, timing-based platforming sequences which – with their prominent arrow prompts and slow-mo – feel like the remnants of some touch or tablet-based design.

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z feels in a lot of ways like a lost Grasshopper game, all brashness, sex and violence in a visually-arresting wrapper while playing like an untested early pass on potentially exciting mechanics.

The beauty of 2004’s Ninja Gaiden was that its almost sadistic-level of difficulty was balanced by your ability as a player to master its systems. It was coherent, its elements working together to at least foster mastery, even if the enemies would do everything to thwart that.

By contrast, Yaiba is a collection of interesting pieces. I love that executing mid-bosses allows you to grab them as temporary ranged weapons and the visuals are some of the most arresting of the previous console generation. But I hated losing track of the main character when multiple mid-bosses were onscreen or, for that matter UI that was intrusive (I was once trapped in a section where my progress bar obscured a handful of enemies lobbing projectiles at me), and can someone explain why the prompts for the chain executions are so tiny?

It’s possible that beyond the point where I called it quits with Yaiba, the game becomes some kind of mechanical, technical revelation. But I really doubt it.