Ninja Blade (Xbox 360)

I do not think there is anything inherently wrong with quick time events. These timed button prompts that appear during cutscenes have gotten a bad reputation for the cases where failing to press the right button quickly enough leads to an instant death, but there are games that use these as a better way to inject interactivity into a scene devoted to spectacle that couldn’t be pulled off with the normal controls. These time sensitive button presses are still best used sparingly though and tend to shine most when they can pull you out of a bad situation as a last lifeline or they might help you gain an edge without any punishment for failure. FromSoftware’s Ninja Blade ends up in a very unusual space though with its embrace of quick time events, the game both not too demanding with them but also making them seem practically unnecessary because of its forgiving nature.

 

Ninja Blade’s story didn’t quite demand the inclusions of constant quick time events, but once you see some of the forms they take it would also be a shame to not have the bombastic absurdity the game sometimes indulges in. This is a game where a giant zombie worm can spit vehicles at you while you fall from the sky and you hop aboard a motorcycle to drive down across buses and other vehicles before force-feeding the bike back to the giant beast. At another point, you’ll need to prevent a plane from crashing down into Tokyo not by piloting it, but by using your ninja weapons to break off pieces or physically pull it to fight its momentum. Even in a normal battle against a small monster you can expect your character to go the extra mile in doing flashy aerial gymnastics or dismembering his foe in an interesting way, and were this all contained within a 3D animated film then it would certainly serve to be an impressive ninja movie with some stellar action choreography. That is why it’s hard to either condemn or support the inclusion of quick time events as part of these wonderfully over the top scenes, since sitting back to witness them would raise the question of why you aren’t participating in the action on screen but the game’s hack and slash combat can’t really pull off the absurd scenarios depicted.

And so, Ninja Blade relies on timed button presses for these scenes, the player needing to hit the right button or press the right direction to make sure Ken Ogawa continues his incredible attacks. Strangely enough though, if you fail to hit a button in time, the game immediately greys things out and rewinds a bit, asking you to try again. Besides a few mid-combat moments where the button press determines if you or the enemy get hit, almost all of the quick time events featured utilize this forgiving mechanic that oddly enough simultaneously undermines the challenge of hitting the buttons in time while making its presence tolerable since the safety net is always present. You can better enjoy those wild cutscenes without worrying about dying if you hit the button too slowly, but also the rewinds can be a pace breaker and your input feels even less meaningful because it’s shown to be practically unimportant. Making this a little worse is that while the game does try to usually map your actions to the same buttons you’d use for regular combat, it doesn’t do so all of the time. Button prompts are usually introduced with a small bit of text exclaiming something like “Jump!” or “Attack!” but sometimes the jump button from the regular action is used and other times it isn’t, and you have both an X and Y attack during combat so it could be either one for the “Attack!” prompt.

 

Despite the oddities of the quick time event system at play, the story actually works pretty well within its intended genres. A story with one foot in ninja tropes and another in a zombie plot, the game begins with a parasitic infection that takes over its hosts and turns them feral spreading throughout Tokyo. Ken Ogawa is one of the most skilled members of a special forces team that tries to take the first infected out before their parasite can spread, but considering this parasite can manage to turn people into giant spiders and other monstrous forms, containing it doesn’t quite go as planned. Things get especially worse when Ken’s fellow ninja are infected, his friendly rival Kuroh and his own father Kanbe turning against him and leaving him for dead. Ken survives to fight on, but he learns the parasites can keep their hosts intelligent, allowing him to confront Kuroh and Kanbe as well as other figures who have taken on new forms as he tries to save Tokyo from the infection before more drastic measures must be taken. The nature of the infection and the personal stakes do root things pretty well so it’s not pure spectacle when a cutscene starts, the conflict with Kanbe especially adding some emotional intensity to even some of the more absurd action scenes.

 

For the normal action when you’re fighting the kind of infected people who aren’t giant vehicle-spitting worms you actually have three main ways to fight. Ken’s default katana is a reliable weapon, striking quickly enough and dealing solid damage without restricting his movement options so you can sufficiently dodge as necessary. The Twin Falcon Blades are the speedy option, attacking incredibly quickly and good for sneaking in a lot of damage if a foe has been briefly stunned while also packing a ranged option that helps to knock around flying enemies. The Stonerender Sword is a large two-handed blade that is slow to swing but can smash through defenses and packs some good options for knocking away groups of foes if you can charge its attack, but every weapon has combos to gain from upgrades that can start giving you abilities like knocking the foe up into the air for continued damage or otherwise expanding your normal capabilities. You won’t need to get too spicy with how you attack often, the right weapon usually doing the job without any fancy footwork on your part, but foes do put up a decent fight and come in a wide enough variety to take different approaches. Some fire projectiles you can deflect, your ninja vision can briefly slow things down if you need the time to line up a strike or hit the projectiles, and your dash is a decent way of flitting away from danger, although the finishing moves that are often slow little quick time events in themselves can interrupt the flow of combat while still granting temporary invincibility to occasionally justify using them despite the break in the fight rhythm they cause.

Ninja Blade also throws in moments of area navigation that are sometimes tied to fights or different kinds of danger. Ken Ogawa will have moments he needs to wall run both above long open gaps and to climb to higher places, and ninja vision can reveal these so if you do feel stuck you can sometimes find the way onward with a brief activation of that simple ability. Ninjutsu abilities are used more for navigation trials, like needing to throw a wind covered ninja star to put out fires or switch to its fire version to blow up vines. These have some use in regular fights, the fire one able to trigger explosives and an electric ninjutsu letting you stun foes, but aiming these can be difficult if you don’t have the time to stand in place so throwing them out during a fight can have small issues where the element-infused star does not head where you want it to.

 

Ninja Blade does concoct some interesting missions to tackle while trying to save Tokyo, one involving you on top of an airplane and trying to prevent infected creatures from damaging it too much while another takes place underground and a group of explosive bugs will destroy the city from below if you can’t find and beat them quickly enough. Regular action throws in enough little skirmishes and navigation challenges to keep you occupied, but then the game occasionally throws in turret sections. Turret sections are another feature of video games often dismissed by players, sitting on a gun and firing at anything coming having the potential to get dull and samey as it wears on. Ninja Blade doesn’t completely avoid this. The player is able to fire both machine gun bullets and rockets during these surprisingly plentiful segments and there’s a need to make sure to reload when there’s nothing coming towards you, so there is at least a little thought to how you fire. Different enemies can demand different degrees of attention too, but these do allow for things like an exciting highway chase where a giant dogman runs across the highway and you need to avoid traffic and monsters or blow them up along the way. However, the turret segments do prove repetitive as they make too many appearances without anything but the spectacle to really make them feel differnet.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly then the bosses are also a mixed bag. Some fights can go swimmingly as you’re switching weapons and utilizing ninjutsu to keep up only for the boss to jump on a ledge and slowly throw out an attack that maybe you can deflect but even if you do sometimes they will dodge it. Other fights though like fighting the giant worm on the side of an fallen skyscraper definitely give you a pretty close approximation to the wild battles usually saved for cutscenes, but then an antlion-like creature has a battle that unfolds slowly as you need to hit explosives he creates down towards him and he can deflect those explosives to make things wear on longer. While the weaker ones usually aren’t too bad once you figure them out, you do have a few strong fights, usually with characters rather than giant monsters, to balance things out, but like most things in Ninja Blade it feels like any praise must always have a few conditions attached to it since the game doesn’t quite nail any idea while also not failing extravagantly enough to distract from those small wins.

THE VERDICT: When you’re fighting the regular infected creatures with your three distinct weapons and ninjutsu styles, Ninja Blade is a solid action game. It’s when you look at the other ideas embraced you start to get a more uneven experience. Turret sections are repeated despite not bringing any new ideas to keep them fresh, the decent story has some extravagant cutscenes that are fun to watch but the quick time event interactivity is strange and disruptive despite not really punishing the player for failure, and bosses can range from thrilling duels to slow slogs. Ninja Blade tends to dip into tedium only to jolt you back to adrenaline-filled action. While you can push through the weaker ideas to reach the excitement, they do take their toll. Ninja Blade is a mixed bag where you never know if you’ll get thrilling spectacle or stumbling blandness when the next segment starts.

 

And so, I give Ninja Blade for Xbox 360…

An OKAY rating. A lot of Ninja Blade’s worse ideas tend to have a bit of a parachute built into their design. You can’t be too harsh on the timed button presses because the punishment is a minor rewind, but their presence still ends up mostly a detriment because it’s rendered less important through that choice and the spectacle would be better left to play out uninterrupted. The turret sections would be fine in small doses and they try to throw in a new albeit minor consideration each time you end up behind a mounted gun, but the segments drag on and reappear a bit too often still. Minor quibbles like the ninjutsu aiming are easy to brush aside at least, and when the game is letting you engage with the combat’s pretty sound ideas that emerge from its three weapon options you do get some strong battles. It has some creativity, both in mission design and in how those wild cutscenes unfold, but Ninja Blade is hampered when it keeps trotting out ideas that didn’t really shine when first seen but will keep cropping up as the game goes on. The bosses that hide on ledges out of reach, the quick time event failures, and the turret sections sap the game of some of the electric energy it can hit on pretty well elsewhere, and with a bit of unfortunate fight recycling too near the end of the game you can’t help but start to try and weigh up the success and failures and find it hard to lean too strongly either way.

 

There are some other little touches like a rating system for how well you fought that could have added replayability but other elements make doing so seem too repetitive, and the costume rewards are rather odd designs that feel at odds with the game’s aesthetics. Looking at some of the development details like From Software working alongside Microsoft, getting the extravagant cutscene animation done by another company, and even having a Capcom designer create Ken Ogawa’s look, it starts to seem like the game was cobbled together by plenty of people with their own ideas for some awesome ninja action and perhaps that’s why the game feels so imbalanced. It will come in swinging with a huge success and then putter around with some weaker concepts before it throws you into something enjoyable again. Most importantly though it’s never so bad it becomes impossible to push through to the better moments while never hitting such highs that you can overlook the flaws. It’s truly an inseparable mix of highs and lows and as such there is unfortunately no place to put it besides right in the middle, a game you can play if you want the extravagant scenes and fun fights but one you could just as easily turn away from for its quick time events and repetitive elements.