Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z (PS3)

Usually when a game features a villain as the main playable character, the setup will swing one of two ways. Either the villain is portrayed as so cartoonishly evil that the player is meant to enjoy the ridiculousness of being such a gleefully over the top villain, or the villain has some sort of sense of right and wrong that compels them to either fight a greater evil or reform at some point in the plot. In Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z though, Yaiba is just kind of an unrepentant unlikable jerk throughout the entire adventure.

Yaiba is a pretty misanthropic and overly violent individual who doesn’t seem to have much motivation beyond murder. If he doesn’t like someone, he wants to end them, and the specific individual who happens to have earned Yaiba’s ire in his self-titled game is the protagonist of most of the Ninja Gaiden games: Ryu Hayabusa. The two ninjas face off in a one-sided battle where Yaiba is killed almost instantly, but he is resurrected with new cybernetic parts and thrown into a zombie-filled warzone. The corporation responsible for the revival is lead by the eccentric Alarico del Gonzo, and while Yaiba only cares about getting revenge on Hayabusa, Ryu is trying to stop the outbreak himself, so del Gonzo uses a rematch as leverage to get Yaiba to investigate what instigated the zombie invasion. Yaiba has no love for del Gonzo, but the scientist who brought Yaiba back, Miss Monday, seems to be the only person he gets along with as she repeatedly radios him throughout the adventure to explain what to do and where to go.

This kind of story could easily lead to Yaiba at some point realizing there is something more important than his personal vendetta to deal with. After all, there’s a deadly zombie plague attacking cities in Ukraine, but he remains a mostly static character who never answers for his awful attitude. He does have a shift of focus, but he remains a self-centered brute throughout the adventure. I don’t think a game necessarily needs a likeable protagonist if it uses the perspective for something interesting, but Yaiba feels a bit like they took some generic video game boss and made a whole game around him, the motivations too simple to get invested in and his journey stagnant. Miss Monday and del Gonzo have pronounced personalities that at least give you something to pay attention to besides the growling meathead you’ll be playing as, and the story notes you find on your adventure can sometimes be enjoyably silly. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z’s plot is definitely not its strong suit, but it’s mostly just there to hold together a short game that extends itself by being incredibly difficult.

It would be false to say the game really has any strong suit though. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is a hack and slash game that starts off feeling like it’s going to revel in the simple slaughter of hordes of zombies but quickly puts the kibosh on that as it rolls out new enemy types. While the regular undead are easy enough to handle with your mix of blade attacks, cyborg arm heavy strikes, and a flail good for crowd control, once special enemy types enter the picture battles become so much more tedious. Almost all of them are incredibly defensive or flighty, making fighting them about trying to identify openings and suffering if you mess up. You have a counter move, but if you’re in the middle of a combo and the enemy has started blocking you won’t be able to react when they begin their attacks. Using more interesting attacks or trying to land multiple hits is frequently hampered by the fact enemies can so easily turn the tables and hit you while you’re still moving through the motions of your attack string. Even if you did react and counter in what seems like a decent window, the counter seems overly strict on when it will trigger which means you often will have to eat the heavy amount of damage you couldn’t deflect. You can build a Bloodlust meter that will give you brief invincibility that can allow you to really tear into bothersome baddies, but it’s slow to fill and often best saved for the most annoying of foes.

And boy does this game have a big batch of annoying enemies. On their own many foes are already a pain. There’s a giant metallic dog boss that has to be whittled down slowly as you hope you don’t flub your dodges, and with health mostly refilled if you’re lucky by executing foes when the opportunity arises, certain fights can leave you high and dry. Even when a boss has little minions around them like the excruciatingly long checkpoint-free final boss though, they can end up being a bigger bother than the main foe. Some like the jock zombies have charge grabs, others like the electrical zombie brides teleport about, and the fat fiery priests spew flames too often to let you whittle down their oddly large health pools. So many fights are tedious because the special zombie types are slow to kill but pack many annoying attacks to punish you for not focusing on their every motion, and while these might work if they were one on one battles, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z aims to achieve difficulty by just tossing all its enemy types together over and over. The player is worn down as they repeatedly fight different mixtures of the same awful enemies, the attack styles and defensive options that are annoying when facing a foe alone mixing terribly with having other enemies on screen who all have similar strategies. The game will even mix its large boss enemies into these groups for even more tedious battles, and with camera angles that don’t always play along, unseen attacks become a common problem as well.

Combat isn’t always about trying to manage crowds of awfully paired enemies though. Sometimes you will have to engage with a weird elemental triangle to gain an edge against an enemy or overcome environmental hazards and puzzles. Bile will mess up your screen and drain your health like poison but can be used to coat things. Paired with fire it can have explosive results, and with electricity it will crystalize into a breakable form. This can be used to your advantage when a group is manageable and it gives the game a few moments focused less on combat and more on problem solving, but sometimes it can just add to the chaos as enemies activate it on their own and further throw off your ability to respond to everything. Sometimes though you need to execute certain enemies to get special weapons used for these elemental puzzles. There are many different weapons you can get from villains by way of bloody execution such as the hefty arms of a jock zombie, the bile bladder of a spitter, or the rainbow nunchucks the clawed clowns somehow have but never use, and these can deal plenty of free damage for the short times they last. There is an upgrade tree that can help you unlock new moves, uses for the weapons, and other boons like longer Bloodlusts, but nothing can really get around the fact that most of your battles are going to be bothersome bouts with improperly balanced enemies.

Thankfully, the game doesn’t mess up the parkour segments that are used to connect areas. With proper button pressing and timing you will navigate certain areas with deft leaps, dodging dangers in moments that aren’t too exciting but can have their moments, especially as a break from the game’s combat. Oddly enough though, there is a special mode unlocked after beating the game called Ninja Gaiden Z. Here, things are much more lighthearted, Yaiba just wanting to find his sake bottle and killing all the zombies in his path to get it. Scenes are done with deliberately bad writing to match the old mistranslations of early video games and the action is severely simplified to be more like a beat ’em up. This means that the enemies are all dispatched much more quickly, and since the game treats its stronger enemies as proper threats instead of throwing them all together into mishmashes, this mode actually feels like it turns out the better experience. The main game tries to mix the need for precise reactions with a game design focused on wanton carnage, but Ninja Gaiden Z is a bit more reserved and focuses on its identity. It’s still not quite up to snuff because of it being built off borrowed assets from the hack and slash side of the game, and the need to slog through the poor design of the main game to unlock this small mode means it really doesn’t have the chance to endear itself to you since you’ve just spent so much time struggling with what was meant to be the main appeal.

THE VERDICT: Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z has some mildly enjoyable parkour and puzzles, but that’s not what the game is actually about. Most of the game is spent fighting off a variety of zombie types, and unfortunately, pretty much every one that isn’t fodder brings some new annoyance to the battles. Battles end up slow since you can’t commit to interesting combos without risking heavy damage, even mildly strong enemies being fairly adept at defending while also packing devastatingly strong attacks. By constantly slamming together the stronger enemies into larger and more varied groups, your ability to deal with them constantly diminishes, the game growing more tedious and frustrating as your basic attacks can barely cut it and your options to get around these slogs are far too limited. While you might be able to revel in the carnage early on, Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is all about wearing down the player with obnoxious difficulty rather than interesting skill challenges.

And so, I give Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z for PlayStation 3…

A TERRIBLE rating. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z is a game that really grinds you down as you get deeper and deeper into it. A foe that might seem like a mildly interesting challenge at first like the clawed clowns soon appears with such frequency that you come to dread it, and it’s only one of many foes you’ll come to dread who are now constantly being tossed into the same unimaginative arrangements again and again. Glimmers of something decent appear in the parkour and puzzles, but when it’s battle time, which is most the time, enemies swing from the laughably easy Stiffs to the all too durable and flighty special undead. Even when the game throws you a bone like a strong weapon or Bloodlust, the thrill of clearing out a group of zombies with ease is weakened when you know that there will be more battles with those same foes up ahead. Even the few absolutely unique boss fights and battle situations that could have provided a proper break from the mismatched hordes only end up showing how unappealing the combat is when you are meant to use it skillfully. There are enough breaks from it that the whole game isn’t an endless sequence of miserable fights and not all of them will grate on your nerves, but too many are part of that awful bunch that make Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z fail to satisfy both people looking for something full of mindless action and those hoping to play something where skill is properly rewarded and tested.

Perhaps Yaiba is a perfect fit for this game. Unrepentant, unappealing, and focused on the wrong things accurately describes both him and the game he stars in. Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z feels like it wants its action to be awesome but has designed so much of it to actively antagonize you, and without anything else substantial enough to invest yourself in, it’s hard to justify taking a look at this Ninja Gaiden side-story that adds nothing to the series while also straying from the principles that make its best entries so great.