Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z Review

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z Review

    Heads up, men aged 18 to 34 – it’s been observed that you find ninjas exciting, love playing ninja based games and also enjoy bathing in the gore of the living dead. Not only that, but minds immeasurably more powerful than our own understand that you like your women to be peppy (just as long as they’re dressed saucily), appreciate dick jokes of any puerile quality and secretly desire to escape the tediously PC shackles of modern society, in order to act out your fantasy of being the most seemingly obnoxious chap imaginable.

          You’ve been targeted. You should feel special. Tecmo Koei has a game aimed precisely at your needs. And by needs we mean penises. The first time we saw this curious departure from the comparatively sober Ninja Gaiden series was when its first trailer was released for E3 2013. “Honor and death go together like hot sauce and my balls”, explained its antihero Yaiba Kamikaze during the exact moment we imagine one YouTube user found the inspiration to add the comment, “When did Duke Nukem become a ninja?”
 

  Then came the second game trailer, released back in October. It featured more actual in-game action to explain the cut-and-thrust, and slash and slash and slash of the game play. Our unlovable antihero suggested that his female handler should “Take a suck” and there was a cut-scene in which a zombie drove a truck up a ramp, only for that truck to eventually land between the giant upturned model legs of a stripper, before exploding. Hey, that’s what men aged between 18 and 34 like.

          Back then, of course, all we knew of the game was what we had been shown, and what we had been shown were short adverts that seemed to have been smacked through a wormhole from the Nineties by someone using rolled-up copies of FHM and Loaded chained together as nunchaku. Was this really how Ninja Gaiden fans with their love of precise control and expert timing had come to be regarded? Could this really be how Tecmo Koei plans to win fresh sales and gain more fans in 2014?

   

      The action came across as a swirling cacophony of blood and dismemberment bereft of any need for genuine skill. It became apparent that Yaiba’s dialogue had been sloppily crafted with no wit or irony, specifically to entrance fat-fingered pubescent boys – and that we were being patronized. First impressions weren’t great, then. And second impressions were even worse. Well now our appreciation of this bizarrely repellent character has been markedly altered thanks to two key facts: firstly, we’ve actually had a fair amount of hands-on time with the code and were suitably punished by it. Secondly, when we ventured to London to play it under the auspices of Tecmo’s public relations people, we did so in a room full of upright Xbox 360 demo pods, the kind you can find in shops – and thanks to the volume of these units being set so low, we couldn’t make out much of what Yaiba was saying anyway. Instead we mostly had to read his lines from the comic book styling of the cut-scenes.

          We were still privy to the crucial information that he would rather be playing with a different kind of organ (he’d spotted a musical organ – see? Funny!) and we did eventually get to hurl a zombie into that truck we mentioned earlier – because that’s how you open an area’s exit. For the most part, however, his hatred, crassness and outright awfulness were dampened and no one was heard to ask anyone to shut the F up or suck anything. He was just your average cybernetic ninja carving his way through a variety of enemy zombie types, so the only real outward issue was one of cliche.

          A quick refresher: the story goes that Yaiba Kamikaze was slain by Ninja Gaiden’s usual protagonist, Ryu Hayabusa, during a duel that culminated with his torso being vertically bisected. If he was angry with Ryu before that fateful encounter then, when he gets brought back to life by a mysterious organisation that provides him with a robot arm and eye to battle a zombie outbreak, he’s absolutely furious. So Yaiba’s core goal is one of revenge, but to achieve it he’ll first have to decimate an epic army of comical dead people.

          Surprisingly that background story is explained with remarkable speed and a fair amount of animé flourish, so there’s little time wasted by giving any deeper details as to what’s about to kick off. Indeed, because the source of the outbreak is unknown, as are Yaiba’s employers (and Ryu is meant to be out in the city somewhere also killing zombies himself) there’s even a slight mystery to it all. What’s going on? Violence, mostly.

          As expected, we began by killing a lot of walking corpses; pressing buttons and watching the resultant explosions of red splurges and severed limbs. It didn't matter that we were so outnumbered we could barely see where we were – during such hectic crowd control, blocking was barely required; the dead were annihilated and progression could be permitted. What did matter, however, was that we were met by combat that felt inconsequential as, surprisingly, a cybernetic ninja is more than a match for a bunch of corpses. We were ready for banality and at first that’s what we received.

          Executions are clearly key to surviving deeper into Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z. To perform one you first need to warm up your victim (or victims) with some basic attacks, especially the kind that involve the swirling of a flail, then press the left trigger during the brief period in which you’re advised to do so by an on-screen hint. Although initially such an exhibition is unnecessary since you can easily avoid damage by moving around, keeping out of harm’s way and mowing down enemies.

       

  Eventually, performing a showy manoeuvre (which occurs so quickly it’s hard to see what actually happened) becomes precisely what you want to be doing as often as possible – because that’s how you get awarded health points. And as you slaughter with speed, so you build up your Blood lust – a pool of power that can be unleashed by clicking both sticks down to perform vastly more devastating attacks for a limited time. So devastating, in fact, that you can kill a major foe in just a few blows. And so we meet specialized “stiffs” (geddit?) who come in a variety of element-based guises when the game begins proper. They’re more eager to block, have a number of different attack styles and only a few are needed to turn what was a cakewalk into a nightmare. The Punch Drunk, for example, can perform a devastating grapple, Fire Stiffs can belch flames and Zombrides and other electricity based units need to have their energy fields broken by Yaiba’s non conducting flail before they can be hurt, while being able to zap from afar. And the Blister Sisters and Bile Stiffs vomit toxic waste.

          Once increasing numbers of these more effective enemies come into play, the game begins to show some form of Devil May Cry-like promise. You’ll need to level your abilities and unlock combos to deal with them and increase your resistance to whatever element they use, and should you perform an execution on one you can rip off part of its body to use as a special, yet silly, weapon. As far as the preview code demonstrated, you’ll also have to deal with more and more issues concerning a fixed camera system, as it was often near impossible to make out what was going on, or what could actually be done about a situation.

          Unlike Ninja Gaiden, the right stick isn’t used to dodge at all. Instead you need to press A to get in and out of the way while pushing in a direction. When we interviewed the developer (turn the page) we asked why such a scheme had been chosen. The answer: to differentiate the game from normal Ninja Gaiden. Fair enough, but it also meant that Yaiba can’t use A to jump during combat – only when he’s moving between combat areas, running on walls and bounding up platforms. Consequently we couldn't even hop up just to make sure where we were, or move the camera to gain a better view.



 Should such confusing irks get resolved, and Yaiba’s personality either be enjoyed or just ignored, then Ninja Gaiden Z might actually have something more to offer than willful offence and crassness. So far, thanks to perplexing camera work and numerous bugs it’s hard to tell, though we have been assured that there’s more to the game’s central character than him just being a nasty and poorly scripted prick. Who knows? He could just be misunderstood, and not just a nimble, nasty sex organ with an insatiable need to slosh other people’s bodily fluids everywhere.