Game:

Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z (2014)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 36:57

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What a gorgeous animal.


Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z was produced by Keiji Inafune (creator of Megaman/Rockman and, as of recently, Beck). His studio, Comcept, provided character designs, Yaiba being designed by Inafune himself. The actual development was managed by Spark Unlimited, a western studio with not a very good portfolio. Team Ninja was also somehow involved.

The game came out in March of 2014. And it flopped. Hard. It got very bad reviews AND extremely bad word of mouth. It crashed. It fell. Remember how Boris Yeltsin fell from those plane stairs? Well, kind of like that, only the game's plane was still in the air. Jim Sterling wrote in his review that this game makes him not to want to play games anymore. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't the harshest review out there. It currently has 43-50 on metacritic, but I think it was something like 2.2 right after the release.

So, is this game actually that terrible? Weeeeeeeeeellllll.......... No. It probably shouldn't be compared to NG Black or Revengeance, but it is rather competently made and actually fun to play. If you know what you're doing, that is. So, why all the bad press then? I can think of several reasons:

First: this game is nail bitingly hard. I had to replay a lot of normal fights over and over again and it took me around a hundred tries to beat a certain boss, and I beat The Senator on revengeance without being hit! (Once. I spent a week trying to do that.) The game looks like a fun hack n' slash, but you have to learn enemy patterns, their attack animations to counter them properly, the range of their unblockables, what enemies must be finished with punches only, etc... And gaming journalists are notorious for their inability to play character action games.

Second: hardcore ninja gaiden fans didn't accept the game because, well, it's not a ninja gaiden game. If anything, it plays much closer to God of War (though it's not even nearly a clone). The tone of the game, its story, its characters are all very different. It has Ryu and Momiji in it (Yaiba also mentions Kureha at one point) and that's that. Even for a spin off the connection to the main series is minimal. And have I mentioned that this game is hard?

Third: the tone of the game. NG games always were pretty serious about themselves. 8-bit versions had those long, cinematic cutscenes and dun-dun-dun moments. Modern games ranged from cool, always collected (except for one short scene) Ryu, absolutely determined to exterminate all archfiends, in NG1 to NG3's feeble attempt at drama. Y:NGZ, on the other hand, is a black comedy. Pretty low brow too. And while I personally adore the genre, I understand it's just not everybody's cup of tea. And it's a hard game too.

Fourth: it's not a secret that when we play games we often associate ourselves with the characters we play as to a point. When somebody plays, let's say, MGS — they ARE Snake. And Yaiba is evil, unrepentantly so. He's also a giant infantile jerk, and everything bad that goes his way he completely deserves. Saying that, he is a very good fighter and not without a certain charm. And, unlike Kratos or Aiden Pierce, Yaiba knows he's evil and revels in it. Still, not everybody can just watch the character they're involved with. Also, this game is very hard.

But overall, it's a fun little game. Literally. It has 7 levels, but one is just a tutorial (see the previous video), and another two are just long boss battles. This leaves us with only four levels, each of them can be beaten under an hour. So here is that too. But seriously, despite its several shortcomings I really like this game. So, if you are into character action games and don't mind Yaiba complementing Ryu Hayabusa on his gimp suit too much, than maybe you should also give this game a try. Or watch this lp. Who knows, maybe I'll finish this one.

P. S. The guy who did soundtrack for this game also composed Banjo-Kazooie music. Go figure.

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